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Books
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Learning from 1798?: Northern Ireland’s Upcoming Decade of Commemorations
Last year, the Lilliput Press released a new extended edition of Tom Dunne’s Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize winning book, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798. First published in 2004, Dunne’s book provoked considerable controversy with its critique of the ‘commemorationist’ history that Dunne believed dominated the 1998 commemorations of the 1798 Rebellion. The book blasted the involvement [...] read our review » -
Turas, by Colin Neill – a story of strangers in a strange land
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 »
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Books: Listening to Van Morrison…
Great little review of Listening to Van Morrison by Griel Marcus… It’s a short book, not a biography or a career survey, but an attempt to follow those moments in Morrison’s music, as he’s made it from his first records with Them, from Belfast in 1965 to the present day, when something happens that breaks [...] read our review »
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Comment on Belated admissions from both of Northern Ireland’s top politicians…
on 1 May 2012 at 5:33 am
My theory is that SF wanted rid of Trimble because his vision “To build up a new Northern Ireland” was an explicitly unionist (small ‘u’) vision. It was UK oriented. Paisley’s Ulster nationalism was much more to SF’s taste and indeed quite genuinely (if bizarrely) offered a long term prospect of common ground between the two traditions. At the time I was appalled by this. Now, given Scotland’s trajectory away from if not out of the UK, I come to suspect that the right outcome was achieved, albeit by doubtful means. The pity would be if this obscured Trimble’s extraordinary courage. There is one politician who staked, and ultimately lost, all, in order to do the right thing. I confess there is none I admire more.
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Comment on The End of the Northern Ireland Model of Peace Processing?
on 30 April 2012 at 7:55 am
A settlement that lasts 14 years is clearly robust. However, the following needs to be asserted. Republican violence at this stage has the objective effect of cementing the current arrangements in place. Such violence inhibits further political change in direct proportion to its scale. There’s enough PUL left in me to cause me to wonder whether there is not among the ultras a terrible fear of further change, because a new negotiated Ireland would be a genuinely secular and non-sectarian state. RIRA and CIRA objectively support partition, because their actions reinforce it..
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Comment on Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore calls for delivery on Northern Ireland Bill of Rights
on 21 April 2012 at 5:18 pm
Can anyone explain why something above and beyond the ECHR is required? I see no need for it.
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Comment on Sinn Fein’s idea of rapprochement “is a brick-cold exercise in reinvention, re-positioning and re-writing of the past”
on 20 April 2012 at 10:49 am
Connaught, I think there will be very high agreement on the following – repartition is a Godawful idea and nobody, absolutely nobody, contemplates it. Partition – perhaps – solved problems to the extent that it gave us time to sort out our differences to the point where we are now, a secularising Dublin government and a decentralising UK. Even that was at the cost of partition of historic Ulster, something that could, subject to the wishes of the people in the other 3 counties, be put right in devolved assembly within a a new Ireland. The only change I want to see in the Ulster boundary is a reversion to the old one. Indeed, the very possibility of putting that on the table might be a tremendous carrot to Unionists in the negotiations that are quietly, surreptitiously, discretely beginning to happen.
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Comment on Sinn Fein’s idea of rapprochement “is a brick-cold exercise in reinvention, re-positioning and re-writing of the past”
on 19 April 2012 at 11:11 pm
The capital has to be Armagh.
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Comment on For Unionists Only: What would you relish in a United Ireland?
on 18 April 2012 at 9:19 am
We could be the drivers of a partnership between Ireland and Scotland, which is where our true loyalties have always lain. We could be a sort of bracket, or hinge, round which Edinburgh and Dublin would turn – a sociopolitical Giant’s Causeway, the old myth come true again.
We would heal the rift with our neighbours, and – not a little thing – have a say in putting right the things about the south that at present we can only complain about impotently.
We could take charge of our history and not forever be dragged protesting in its wake. We might well have pride rather than self-pity, especially if we had been successful in the negotiations that led to unity in terms of the scale of constitutional change achieved.
We might or might not succeed in rebuilding a manufacturing base in Ulster but at least it would be up to us to try, in partnership hopefully with our Scottish cousines who would be engaged in a similar struggle.
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Comment on How will the long slow secularisation of Ireland affect NI’s future politics?
on 17 April 2012 at 7:32 pm
I agree with all of that Mr. Fealty and in particular the last para. and would add only two things:
First, the changing situation of Scotland is the game changer. Whatever becomes of the Union, Scotland will be more autonomous in the future: she wants,and will increasingly want, the closest and friendliest possible relationship with the whole of Ireland, which in many ways is her sister nation in history. Insofar as partition works against that national interest of Scotland’s, which I think it clearly does, then to that extent Scottish autonomy becomes a driver for change.
And second – here I take issue with Clanky – no section of the community is an object to be worked upon, whether the working be “physical force” or indeed “persuasion.” The epoch-changing breakthrough of the GFA is that we work from now on by consensus. I think that holds the door far more widely open to “previously unimaginable outcomes” than any other methodology.
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Comment on How will the long slow secularisation of Ireland affect NI’s future politics?
on 17 April 2012 at 7:55 am
I can only speak for myself, and I have not lived in NI for a long time, but to me the effect of the secularisation of politics is that a united – or at least, a new – Ireland, no longer holds any terrors for me, and even seems potentially attractive in certain circumstances. I thought at the time that Enda Kenny’s assault on the church was a decisive break with the past, and in some ways the most significant speech ever heard from any Irish politician, north or south, since partition.
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Comment on 100 Years ago today: The third Home Rule Bill…
on 13 April 2012 at 10:31 pm
Harry Flashman’s is a plausible counterfactual.
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Comment on 100 Years ago today: The third Home Rule Bill…
on 11 April 2012 at 8:02 pm
Harry Flashman is exactly right. We all took a terrible wrong turning.
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