Profile for Brian Walker
Latest posts from Brian Walker (see all)
Brian Walker has posted 1,347 times (6 in the last month).
The McGeough case raises worrying questions about the peace process. The SDLP are right to raise them
I cheer at the story of Sammy Brush’s self defence at the time and am of course very glad he survived. Gerry McGeough is very lucky to be alive. But the McGeough case appears to create a new doctrine of the peace process as it applies to terrorist crimes. Does it not greatly diminish the amnesty effect of [...] more »
Grammar schools and social mobility: a Northern Ireland contribution to the debate
Here’s something that won’t make relations between the Education and Finance ministers any easier.. An approving poll for a UK wide campaign to revive grammar schools has received a gushing review from Independent columnist Mary Anne Sieghart. It’s pegged to the general angst about stalled – even reversed – social mobility which all UK political [...] more »
Scottish independence: Can Alistair Darling at the head of the pro-Union campaign match Alex Salmond?
Alistair Darling is to spearhead a Save the Union campaign of all the pro-union parties in Scotland, according to a Mail on Sunday scoop. The former Chancellor has just confirmed the story on the Marr show, although the BBC website has still to catch up with it.The report says the plan was hatched in true Edinburgh [...] more »
The Hain contempt case: a warning to England from Northern Ireland
It’s worth taking a closer look at the Peter Hain contempt case before it’s written off as a straightforward free speech victory for the metropolitan Mr Punch over the paddywhackery of Northern Ireland’s appointed and politically independent Attorney General. John Larkin QC brought the case against the former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain on the admittedly [...] more »
Brady departure in sight
So this is how they’ll ease him out. According to the Irish Times, a coadjutor bishop may be appointed to administer the archdiocese of Armagh with the expectation of succession. Fr Brady himself was similarly appointed coadjutor to Cahal Daly in 1995 and succeeded him automatically the following year. The questions crowd in. Can they [...] more »
Cardinal Brady should go – in charity
I’ve never been keen on a feeding frenzy and there will always be something deeply ironic about Martin McGuinness, despite his peacetime record, calling for anyone to resign, not least a cardinal who despite the facts which the BBC augmented only slightly this week, is still respected and warmly liked by many. It must be acknowledged [...] more »
More soft politics over Easter – but what’s the beef?
The response to Gerry Adam’s “seven goals” in Slugger shows that the union/ unification theme can still assert its old pull. This will no doubt be reinforced over the holiday by Martin McGuinness’s appeal to republicans to engage in “practical ways of giving expression to the unionist sense of Britishness within a united Ireland” and his [...] more »
Cross border education: lay out all the facts please
Is this form of cross border cooperation actually divisive? Contrast two stories about the SF led Education department’s plan for a survey of 50,000 “border families “ (i.e. families on both sides of the border) on the takeup of school places by children from the other side. Liam Clarke’s story records the objections of DUP’s Mervyn [...] more »
After Peter Robinson, are we seeing the start of softer, more seductive politics?
From where he came from, Peter Robinson has made big strides. At the point Northern Ireland society has reached, he comes across as a cautious consolidator, making a distinct if so far unimaginative success of power sharing. In unionist terms, Peter is David Trimble’s heir in quieter times. After decades of often painful self discipline [...] more »
Big News. Innovation from the Executive
Good to see Northern Ireland featuring on the UK national news agenda with a report on the “Tesco tax.,” (Today programme 7.25, Sammy and retail consortium rep interview). Despite the national coverage, inexplicably I can’t find news of the 1st April vesting date for the business charge on the local BBC News website. Old news locally [...] more »
Latest comments from Brian Walker (see all)
Brian Walker has commented 755 times (2 in the last month).
Advertise
-
Books
-
Total Politics: Top 20 NI Blogs…
Fair play to Iain, he managed to get over 2,200 people voting in his poll for the top Northern Irish blogs this year… We (just, I imagine) retained our top spot, with Splintered coming straight in at number 2, no doubt his pet subject du jour will have garnered him a lot of fans… I’ve [...] read our review »
-
Debating the Churches’ Role in the Peace in Northern Ireland
This morning’s Sunday Sequence featured a substantial debate (about 35 minutes into the recorded programme) on a new book,Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press 2011), written by sociologists John Brewer, Gareth Higgins and Francis Teeney. The debate was framed in an opening vignette by presenter William Crawley in uncompromising terms, [...] read our review » -
“It was a trivial problem that… occurs every year”
Just your average family gathering at Christmas, with a bit of an argument about the seating cleaning arrangements… Scuffles have broken out between rival groups of Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics over a turf war in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Bemused tourists looked on as about 100 priests fought with brooms while cleaning the [...] read our review »
-
Comment on Cardinal Brady should go – in charity
on 4 May 2012 at 8:11 pm
alias, This is a gloriously tridentine view but just a shade too dogmatic I feel. Poltiics with a small p atill applies. The resignation of Cardinal Law applies mutatis mutandis.
Go to comment
Comment on Cardinal Brady should go – in charity
on 4 May 2012 at 7:08 pm
The idea that the Pope should finally refuse to accept a resignation is surely doubtful. If the cardinal conscientiously felt unable to go on in his own mind it would be outrageous to decline to accept it. In 2010, one could see an argument for soldiering on for a while to test public reaction and maybe because he genuinely felt he was not sufficently at fault. Catholic opinion was divided but tilted in his favour ( though perhaps the abp of Dublin was on the other side?). Fr Brady was still a good man.
If we take the cardinal’s latest statement at face value he still believes he has enough moral authority to continue
What changed this week? To be honest, factually not a lot.But many people seem to be having second thoughts and these won’t go away. The balance of opinion may have tilted against him once the immediate reaction to the documentary has faded..
The cardinal must believe he has the support of most of the hierarchy and the Vatican and may even be under pressure to remain. To be sure, the Church does not behave like a lay government under pressure, where such assurances often presage departure.
We will soon learn if either the Pope or the cardinal finally rate public opinion or will try to rely on their own authority. I would guess many conscentious Catholics woudl resent being put in such a position. We are told repeatedy that the Church is not a democracy. Is it still an autocracy after all?
Perhaps only when the abp of Dublin and others close to the top utter a few gnomic words will events start to move.. Indeed I’m no expert but I cannot see how the Irish Catholic community as a whole could continue to tolerate such a situation. The cost of his retirement jwould be high but the cost of keeping him,is higher still.
Go to comment
Comment on How will the long slow secularisation of Ireland affect NI’s future politics?
on 16 April 2012 at 10:34 pm
As you know I’ve been thinking along similar lines. A fundamental question:, are we fated to be governed by our past or can we break out of its constraints? Do we actually want to or are our pasts our real comfort zone?
The theme struck me as I was listening to a rather unsatisfactory discussion on Radio 4’s Start The Week on China this morning, which reflected a fundamental dichotomy of outlook in analysing societies. Marxist revisionist Martin Jacques believed the Chinese industrial revolution showed a dramatic ability to break out of the past; the more cautious Jonathan Fenby thought China had still to confront many of the past’s legacies, like fear of breakup if the centre releases its grip. Both of them were partly right and yet neither was able to offer clear pointers to the future. Who can blame them?
What happens when change lacks clear definition and eludes familiar ideology? Institutions of all kinds are under great pressure – call it the age old hunger for personal freedom, greater absolute prosperity, better education, the internet, whatever. These phenomena present huge challenges to what passes for our own public intellectuals, even in our little parishes, where our people are still corralled in badged identities which are defining them less completely than before.
Today, many would agree that it’s futile for the Church to keep going through the motions of exercising an authority which has seriously eroded. It’s entirely fair for beleaguered churchmen to ask, what then would you put in authority’s place, though such a retort is hardly a complete answer. The same question applies to the critics of the “managed sectarianism” of enforced powersharing. We know your critique. But what would you put in its place?
Public intellectuals surely need to ask themselves more open, less loaded questions. For instance: can we use history to avoid becoming its prisoners? The reappraisals of 1912 etc are interesting as they prompt the counterfactual, what might have happened if the recourse to physical force or the threat of it had not finally triumphed in that generation, leaving it to later generations to fight it all over again with a not dissimilar outcome? Are we really going to be different this time?Do not historicist analyses of the past ( i.e.analyses holding that events were inevitable and were not amenable to a different outcome) reinforce the past’s charactertistics?
Do we really the idea of a past put to rights before we can achieve a reconciling future? Is such an idea doomed to failure before direct experience of the Troubles finally recedes into history like the 3rd Cork brigade of the 1920s?
Other more contemporary questions occur to encourage breakout. Is the vision of a non-sectarian future robust enough to bring it about, however gradually?
Might it be better to work with the grain of sectarian division rather than oppose it head-on?
Do human rights laws require an agreed moral basis before they command general consent?
Up to now, the academy has had it easy in a way; the reactionaries were so bloody awful. But what happens now that the reactionaries are not quite so bad and are apparently securely in charge, sort of?
This is taking some getting used to and is presenting big challenges to think afresh.
Go to comment
Comment on To Benedict, we Irish liberals are not going away you know…
on 10 April 2012 at 7:12 pm
This sort of stuff should have gone out with the Galileo. The whole authority of Nihil obstat and imprimatur from old boys in the Vatican looks increasingly embarrassing. Like Chinese communists they fear that if they let go an inch the whole kit and caboodle will come crashing down. Maybe it would. How many would miss it? Is there anybody left who takes them seriously? The answer I fear is yes. Recall the great Open Letter from Hans Kung a couple of years ago?
http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=15996
(Extracts below)
Even the supposedly right-on Catholic Herald took a tilt at him in an abusive piece of character assassination that failed to engage with the arguments and held that “traditio,” did not need a seriious defence. Just the kind of complacent response that Fr Hegarty has identified
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2011/05/12/hans-kung-an-ageing-enfant-terrible-going-nowhere/
It’s surely time this whole centralised machinery of a dead orthodoxy was scrapped, rather than diplomatically skirted around Catholic-style by the faithful with brains of their own. We are all Protestants now!
From Hans Kung’s open letter
“I deeply appreciated that the pope invited me, his outspoken critic, to meet for a friendly, four-hour-long conversation shortly after he took office. This awakened in me the hope that my former colleague at Tubingen University might find his way to promote an ongoing renewal of the church and an ecumenical rapprochement in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.
Unfortunately, my hopes and those of so many engaged Catholic men and women have not been fulfilled. And in my subsequent correspondence with the pope, I have pointed this out to him many times. Without a doubt, he conscientiously performs his everyday duties as pope, and he has given us three helpful encyclicals on faith, hope and charity. But when it comes to facing the major challenges of our times, his pontificate has increasingly passed up more opportunities than it has taken:
Missed is the opportunity for rapprochement with the Protestant churches:
Missed is the opportunity for the long-term reconciliation with the Jews:
Missed is the opportunity for a dialogue with Muslims in an atmosphere of mutual trust: Instead, in his ill-advised but symptomatic 2006 Regensburg lecture, Benedict caricatured Islam as a religion of violence and inhumanity and thus evoked enduring Muslim mistrust.
Missed is the opportunity for reconciliation with the colonised indigenous peoples of Latin America:
Missed is the opportunity to help the people of Africa by allowing the use of birth control to fight overpopulation and condoms to fight the spread of HIV.
Missed is the opportunity to make peace with modern science by clearly affirming the theory of evolution and accepting stem-cell research.
Missed is the opportunity to make the spirit of the Second Vatican Council the compass for the whole Catholic Church, including the Vatican itself, and thus to promote the needed reforms in the church.
This last point, respected bishops, is the most serious of all. Time and again, this pope has added qualifications to the conciliar texts and interpreted them against the spirit of the council fathers. Time and again, he has taken an express stand against the Ecumenical Council, which according to canon law represents the highest authority in the Catholic Church”
.He refuses to put into effect the rapprochement with the Anglican Church, which was laid out in official ecumenical documents by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and has attempted instead to lure married Anglican clergy into the Roman Catholic Church by freeing them from the very rule of celibacy that has forced tens of thousands of Roman Catholic priests out of office.
He has actively reinforced the anti-conciliar forces in the church by appointing reactionary officials to key offices in the Curia (including the secretariat of state, and positions in the liturgical commission) while appointing reactionary bishops around the world.
Pope Benedict XVI seems to be increasingly cut off from the vast majority of church members who pay less and less heed to Rome and, at best, identify themselves only with their local parish and bishop.
I know that many of you are pained by this situation. In his anti-conciliar policy, the pope receives the full support of the Roman Curia.
Go to comment
Comment on Talking about Reconciliation …
on 10 April 2012 at 11:09 am
Gladys, I hope my post wasn’t too hard to interpret. Remote from the action, I’ve simply been noting a reduction in the energy of sectarian point scoring in political rhetoric and a swing towards the rhetoric of reconciliation. What that amounts to remains to be seen. Nor am I quite sure what a policy of reconciliation amounts to. It seems to me so far to be a benign ideology in search of a political programme.Good luck in the search, What I’m quite sure of is that communal politics can’t easily be replaced.
What do people want? Peace and personal security? Blunting the impact of austerity? Consumerism? All of the above. VIgorous social scientific investigations beyond the Life and Times surveys might tell us more. Political discourse based on analysis of the factual information buried within the organs of government would help. But for the most part I haven’t noticed that politics has matured to that point.
Go to comment
Comment on After Peter Robinson, are we seeing the start of softer, more seductive politics?
on 5 April 2012 at 2:44 pm
Very thoughtful nevin. You’re right about the scrutiny role of legislators. I haven’t “moved” if you recall the context and I accept the fact of DUP and SF internal party discipline. I’m surprised it has survived the new order so well : I would have expected more competition for office inside each party (maybe it goes on more below the surface than I know).
You deserve congratulations for working in more contemporary references than I could even think of.
Go to comment
Comment on After Peter Robinson, are we seeing the start of softer, more seductive politics?
on 4 April 2012 at 5:14 pm
nevin and others., I wasn’t actually suggesting that the nirvana of delivery had actually arrived, just hoping for progress!
While MLAs and councillors may do a god job here, there’s a touch of phoniness about a role in which local reps claim to deliver what are actually entitlments to constituents.Now I’m not naive, I know the constiuency role has been an expanding universal trend for decades but – just to put it on the record – it is not what legislataors are supposed to be mainly about.
Some of it is displacement activity – what else would they do? Some of it may have benign politcal effects, like Paisley’s famous boasting about delIvering for Catholics. That’s one good thing that can be said about it.
But beware the clientelist trap that has so damaged the south’s political system.
Go to comment
Comment on After Peter Robinson, are we seeing the start of softer, more seductive politics?
on 4 April 2012 at 9:49 am
Mick,
While I can see the attractions of comparing the leaders to the Craigavon and Brookeborough eras there are big differences too, the scrutiny that comes with comparative delivery performance and the battery of bureaucratic and HR oversight, to name but two.
I’m not close to it of course and I would not dissent from the strategic points made. But I’m beginning to ask the question – is anybody in charge of the longer term outcomes of the peace process” or is it bigger than all of them? If the old tunes are beginning to lack some resonance with the voters – or the wider public- what takes their place? Might the political class be starting to fall behind the curve? And at around 65 years of age, how long have the top leaders got?
Go to comment
Comment on Is a reformed and elected Lords a serious ‘come back’ opportunity for the SDLP?
on 28 March 2012 at 2:05 pm
In my own quiet way I’ve pointed out the advantages of an (80%?) elected Lords to the SDLP. But don’t let’s hold our breath on it actually happening or any swift change in the persistent attractions of abstention for SF after contesting seats. The problem of en elected Lords coming to rival the Commons seems a near insurmountable obstacle. Good to see they’re keeping the bishops though albeit in reduced numbers.Whatever you might say against them they’re not corrupt.. The Lords is a good place for traditions, even for inventing new ones.
Go to comment
Comment on ‘Dropping Bertie’ also denudes Fianna Fail of the very best of its recent history…
on 26 March 2012 at 6:40 pm
All the same, Bertie’s passionate denials deserve further attention. Either “the most skilful, the most cunning” of the era of Haughey dominance has disappeared up his own moral fundament in spectacular denial or there is an explanation lurking somewhere. Could the full truth be even more embarrassing than his disgrace? Have I missed it, or why is so little discussed about how these guys avoided tax on their dig-outs and hand-outs – the crime of fraud?.
Go to comment