Profile for Mainland Ulsterman
Born in Belfast, 1969.
Worked in qualitative market and social research for 12 years and was until recently a research director at a leading UK research agency. Now working freelance.
Formerly qualified and worked as a lawyer for several years in the 90s, having done a degree in Jurisprudence at Oxford University.
Married and living in the UK, with two children.
Latest posts from Mainland Ulsterman (see all)
Mainland Ulsterman has posted 1 times (0 in the last month).
Understanding Bloody Sunday: Is it time to teach CAIN?
Tweet The debates around the forthcoming publication of the Saville findings raise an old complaint: that focusing on individual incidents in the Troubles distorts our overall understanding of what happened. Is it time we all got a bit more statistically literate – what about making the study of the CAIN stats compulsory in schools? Debates [...] more »
Latest comments from Mainland Ulsterman (see all)
Mainland Ulsterman has commented 547 times (2 in the last month).
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Books
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A flexible library service for the 21st century?
Tweet Following Alan’s piece on libraries, I picked this ‘advertorial’ from Google plus this evening… about how a US county library system is cutting costs and improving flexibility in their free at the point of delivery services by enabling the whole library service act as a functioning unit as opposed to the one discrete library… read our review » -
A Political History of the Two Irelands competition…
Tweet It’s not often we get free things to give away to our readers, but courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan we have a nice paperback copy of Brian M Walker’s excellent history of partition of the island and how identities shifted in both the north east and the south and west: as most of the territory [...] read our review »
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Johnston McMaster’s Overcoming Violence – Book Review
Tweet In his latest book, Overcoming Violence: Dismantling an Irish History and Theology – An Alternative Vision (Columba, 2012), Rev Dr Johnston McMaster offers a challenge to everyone living on this island: Entering into the increasingly talked about ‘decade of commemorations,’ how might we remember our painful past together, in order that we might walk [...] read our review »
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Comment on Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process?
on 19 May 2013 at 11:56 am
Alan astutely refers to “loyalism viewing its working class issues through the lens of republicanism victory”. There are enough challenges to face without loyalists creating phantom ones – they are not helping themselves. They mistake Republican triumphalism for Republican victory.
If they only asked themselves what Republicans really got in the Peace Process – and what the limits are on what Republicans ever can get without unionist consent in the future. The answer might surprise and cheer them – and enable to them to engage much more self-confidently in politics.
Economically it’s tough and those of us broadly on the left ought to be focussed on how to stimulate a recovery that doesn’t place a burden on the least well off – this is what loyalism should be talking about right now. But in terms of identity and constitutional politics, the truth is loyalist don’t need to be as concerned as they seem to be. Loyalism (or rather Unionism, but Loyalism benefited) actually won decisively in 1998 with the acceptance by nationalism in the GFA of the equal legitimacy of our British identity to their Irish identity on the island. Game over for Irish nationalism, as this was accepting that Irish identity should not be applied to everyone on the island, ergo no single Irish nation of all people on the island, ergo the 32-county project’s raison d’etre no longer exists. Loyalism should be breathing a sigh of relief and revelling in the post-nationalist space.
But as ever, its greatest enemy is its own lack of self-belief. They make the classic mistake of over-estimating the power of their adversaries and under-estimating their own potential, which is huge. It’s like when United in the 90s used to lose all those big crunch Champion’s League games to Juventus, until they started to realise Juventus had feet of clay. All it takes is some imaginative, self-confident leadership to show everyone the Republican emperor has no clothes. Where’s David Ervine when you need him?!
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Comment on Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process?
on 19 May 2013 at 11:22 am
Was this a male-only affair? Not seeing many women, looking around the table.
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Comment on Ex- Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland: Book Review
on 8 March 2013 at 2:55 pm
Just on the qualitative research methodology aspect, talking as a qual researcher: the sample is plenty for a qual study. You have the law of diminishing returns in qual samples – you are generating insights not measuring or trying to directly represent. That qual samples have to be small and the analysis using associative reasoning and other forms of thinking does not make them therefore weak methodologically – it’s not subjective so much as dependent on the quality of the analysis.
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Comment on Friday Thread: Wealth distribution in the United States
on 8 March 2013 at 2:46 pm
Would love to see someone do this for the UK …
As Matt Johnson of The The “sang”, “Anyone can be a millionnaire, so everyone’s got to try.” The basic problem with unfettered capitalism.
But fat chance of doing much about it in the States, they are fed from birth on the illusion that individual freedom is an absolute good that defines what it is to be American. There are countervailing narratives (e.g. through Christian teaching) alive, but they seem to thrive in civic and family life only. Even Obama has to be careful how far he can push his re-imagining of American values, lest it be identified with an attack on the soul of the nation.
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Comment on Well meaning though it may be, I’m against teaching history to promote a shared identity
on 8 March 2013 at 1:26 pm
I was at a state grammar (mainly Prod) in the 80s and we were taught about Home Rule, 1912, Easter Rising, Independence and Irish Civil War for O Level, like Otto – we got plenty. The materials seemed to many of us written from a nationalist perspective, so we did exposed quite early to all that – and most of our history teachers were nationalists.
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Comment on Time to Reach Out a Southern Hand to Unionists
on 5 March 2013 at 11:40 pm
Reader,
Indeed – the important stuff is staring us in the face – it’s about getting along with each other in NI stupid – the north-south and east-west angles are there but are way, way, way down the scale of importance when it comes to improving life in NI. The mainland UK realises it, the Republic of Ireland realises it but sometimes people in NI itself are the last to grasp it – there is no answer anywhere else. Both tribes are part of wider cultures but neither can look to those for answers to our politics – it has to be sorted out locally.
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Comment on Time to Reach Out a Southern Hand to Unionists
on 4 March 2013 at 10:22 pm
Andy,
I agree with the need for friendly relations between NI and the ROI of course – however, I’m not sure the lack of involvement from Southerners in NI is such a bad thing. If NI Protestants have a disengaged British mainland standing quietly behind them giving little or no support, it creates an imbalance when NI Catholics have an active Irish Republic pushing their interests.
Stand-offish attitudes in the Republic to mirror mainland British attitudes is I’d think rather a good thing for inter-communal relations in NI, which is what really matters. The last thing NI needs is outside partisan input even if the partisanship is more muted these days. However softened, the Republic can’t pretend to be a truly neutral outsider and its influence on NI has big potential to destabilise.
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Comment on 70% of parents want some form of integrated education> what’s the problem John?
on 4 March 2013 at 10:00 pm
Seamuscamp,
Some great points on survey interpretation, all valid I think, though I am a supporter of integrated education personally. I work in the other side of the research industry as a qualitative researcher, but I also have to interpret survey data a lot in my job and look out for potentially soft figures. (Btw the opinion polling on Britain’s membership of Europe is rife with examples, hence the ‘fluctuating’ figures).
I’d agree the question “Would you agree that one single education system would be the best way to
deliver education in the future?” is really very leading.
Not so sure though about the one that asks for a view on the statement “Integrated schools, which educate
children from all sections of the community,
should be the main model for our education
system”. It’s not a completely loaded statement but I think there is an issue with the clause “which educate children from all sections of the community” – it is putting forward a benefit for integrated schools without a countervailing benefit being put forward for the opposite view. So not optimal wording – but I think not awful either. Maybe not a 70 per center question in reality but could still with adjusted wording easily get 50 per cent (pure guess there).
However, I can see why they struggled to think of a benefit for single religion schools – they don’t make an awful of sense to me. People have agreed for decades we have to start with schooling if we want people to have more of a sense of having a shared society.
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Comment on Reconciliation: “Not every question will be answered”
on 4 March 2013 at 9:15 pm
Mick,
I can see the point of the experiment and why it didn’t work. You’re quite right to say, I think, that with a tutor you already knew as facilitator, there was too much baggage for it to work.
It reminded me of a technique for group discussions the French office of my old agency developed and I wonder if it could be adapted somehow to the kind of conversations that need to happen in NI. Here’s how it worked (it could be used on any topic really – this was consumer research I was doing):
- rather than ‘being themselves’, everyone in the group uses a name and a persona created for them by the rest of the group rather than their real name. The first 20 minutes is spent creating these personas.
- the participants then play that person during the bulk of the group discussion – until the last 30 minutes, when everyone reveals their real name and real views.
- in the meantime, they discuss the topic fully.
- there are two moderators rather than one and rather than being objective in the traditional way, the moderators take positions, provoke people and sit amongst the participants rather than facing them.
It sounds a bit odd, but the technique was used for those topics where traditional discussion groups, even creative ones, were not shedding new light on the topic and where people tended to get stuck on fixed beliefs. The theory was that it allowed people to express and explore thoughts and views that they would not usually entertain and gave them freedom to say things that might stay hidden usually. My study was about laundry (!) and we wanted to understand why a particular brand seemed to be unable to win anyone over. For us this technique worked because it freed people up to say things about the brand and about laundry that they would not have come out with as themselves. And they had the chance at the end to correct the record, as it were, and disassociate from their earlier comments. But in the meantime we’d got some really insightful stuff from them all about what was going on with the brand.
I wonder if anyone’s tried techniques like this with getting to the ‘truths’ beneath Troubles discourses? Probably!
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Comment on Micheal Martin: NI’s ‘establishment parties’ are failing the Belfast Agreement
on 4 March 2013 at 10:48 am
Ruari,
“The priority should not be being anti-SF, it should be being pro-something.”
Well yes, but given the dominance of SF within the nationalist community and the poison that “success” spreads into wider society, it’s important to be anti-SF to start with, right? That’s a given. So I don’t see why someone should be criticised for laying into them. We wouldn’t criticise Labour for having a go at the BNP and wouldn’t suggest it meant they lacked a programme of their own – particularly if the BNP were picking up 20+ per cent of the vote. In fact, I think we’d see it as a continuing priority to take them on.
I’m not here to tell nationalists what to do but I am here to support nationalists who want something other than SF (and unionists who want nothing to do with loyalist paramilitary self-justification). Rejection of the terrorist past is the only basis on which Northern Ireland can move forward. Decent society cannot be anti-IRA or anti-UVF enough. Whatever else is going on with Michael Martin (and of course he’s scrabbling about for political advantage himself), having a pop at any party that justifies past terrorism ought to be uncontroversial and pass without much comment.
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