Have blogged over on O’Conall Street about the latest local Facebook hate group. This one has been created by what looks like a very cross community group of apparently middle class students from Belfast and targets the Romanian community.
Colin Neill’s first novel Turas peeks into a world in which many Ulster Protestants feel uncomfortable. It’s 2020 and the Irish unification that unionists and loyalists confidently predicted would never happen has become a reality. President Adams is ensconced in Phoenix Park. The newsreader reported that … a short ceremony at Stormont had confirmed the [...] read our review »
More as a trailer than a review – as it’s out on Thursday– I draw attention to Fintan O’Toole’s latest polemic “Enough is Enough – how to build a new Republic“. Fintan has been promoting the book vigorously on this side of the water, on Radio 4’s Start the Week and here at greater length [...] read our review »
More important than some distant students union office is the fact that daddy Colton is a member of the Directors Circle at QUB which means he has donated at least £2k and as much as £10k to the university.
jone
Reading this it looks like they are no longer at Queens:
http://tinyurl.com/ykaprav
Daddy’s boy
“if convicted, now have to be let off with a caution as well.”
Not necessarily automatic. Middle class kids getting off while working class kids go down wouldn’t be a new phenomenon.
Twitter just now: on of a QC only gets a caution for roma race attack in Belfast…
Son of
which twitter? link?
what is twitter?
please don’t tell me it is there some yoke worse than facebook.
Found it – that was a sharpish deletion!
Shocked but not surprised by this. The students can do whatever they want, the fact that this didn’t result in prosecution is an utter disgrace. And they admitted their guilt and haven’t been expelled from QUB? How disgusting. The Holy Lands has been surrendered to spoilt middle class brats who are apparently immune from the sort of judicial response anyone else would rightly face if they tortured their neighbours. Smashing up a church and no court case?
A blank cheque has been written, this St Patrick’s Day will be the worst yet. For shame.
And these are the leaders of tomorrow – God help us.
I don’t understand why everyone claims that all these students are “middle class”. The two involved in attacking the church may well be, but from my experience the vast majority of Holyland students are far from middle class, unless the meaning of the phrase has changed recently that is.
largeaction,
I think the intimation is that the majority of the troublemakers in the Holyland’s parents would be seen as middle class, not that the same boyos spend their time having afternoon tiffin and listening to Radio 4…
Suilven
I take your point, but I still maintain that the definition of what constitutes “middle class” seems to have changed somewhat, principally to allow Citizen Smith types to use the phrase as a slur.
This is doubly ironic, when a sizeable proportion of people who now live in what where once classed as “working class” areas haven’t done a days work in their lives.
The class system in the British Isles is a socio-economic one – these brats and their parents have a bit more cash than they did in previous generations, but as someone once said, money can’t buy you class.
Perhaps the old designations need to be thrown out anyway, as they no longer have the meaning they previously did.
As a matter of interest, what social categories would you replace them with, largeaction?
Dave
Social categories seem to serve limited purpose. There are those people who know how to conduct themselves in public, and contribute to a vibrant, functioning society, and those who don’t. The amount of money a person is in possession of is of limited relevance to whether or not they are a “contributor”.
Socio-economic groupings, are really more economic groupings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class#US_models), really only of real use to marketeers and sales people in my opinion.
Throwing “middle class” at people like the “City Church 2″ as some kind of pejorative really says more about the labeller’s inability to extricate themselves from some dated class struggle that it does about the labellees. Perhaps more appropriate descriptors would be “little scrotes”, “scumbags”, and “mindless tosspots”.
Are they standing for election, that’s what our other hate groups have done and well actually succeeded you might say?
I don’t think anyone can dispute that the son of a QC is middle class / upper middle class and has had a very financially privileged upbringing. The likes of him have less excuse than some idiot spide from Turf Lodge or Highfield, they’ve had it all on a plate.
And the criminal justice system continues to dish it up on the same platter, apparently.
ex HL resident: “I don’t think anyone can dispute that the son of a QC is middle class / upper middle class and has had a very financially privileged upbringing. The likes of him have less excuse than some idiot spide from Turf Lodge or Highfield, they’ve had it all on a plate.
And the criminal justice system continues to dish it up on the same platter, apparently.”
Equality in the eyes of the law is the hallmark of a good judicial system…
…too bad it would seem that sometimes justice is dumb as well as blind.
“…too bad it would seem that sometimes justice is dumb as well as blind.”
Much the same way as lawyers can be ‘smart’ and clever.
ex holy lands resident
“I don’t think anyone can dispute that the son of a QC is middle class / upper middle class and has had a very financially privileged upbringing”
I fail to see what this has to do with anyone’s opinion of the crime he and his pal committed – it is simply irrelevant.
Of course, his background unfortunately probably has a lot to do with how the case was handled by the authorities, but what goes around tends to come around.