Profile for Gerry Lynch
Latest posts from Gerry Lynch (see all)
Gerry Lynch has posted 39 times (1 in the last month).
Presbyterian Church Punishes Ford for Marriage Equality Vote
Tweet The News Letter and the Antrim Guardian have both reported that Justice Minister David Ford has ‘agreed’ to step down from his duties as an elder at Second Donegore Presbyterian Church in County Antrim, as a result of his vote in favour of civil marriage equality. This seems to have been the result of [...] more »
UKIP’s voters – older, more male and more working class. But especially older.
Tweet YouGov have produced a wonderful composite of all their February 2013 polling to try and give a realistic picture of which bits of the electorate are behind UKIP’s polling surge into double figures , a trend which was clear well before the party pushed the Tories into third place in the Eastleigh by-election last [...] more »
Eastleigh: Bad for Tories, Better for LDs, Best for UKIP
Tweet So the LibDems held on to Eastleigh by a narrow majority of 1,771 or just 4.3%, with UKIP surging into second place. Alex Massie in the Speccie warns against overanalysing by-elections, while Martin Kettle argued last week in the Guardian that this was the most crucial by-election in decades. I’m inclined to agree with [...] more »
Basil and John need a name for their New Party: Can you help?
Tweet Renegade former Ulster Unionist MLAs Basil McCrea and John McCallister have now publicly announced that they intend to set up a new political party for those disaffected with the political direction of the UUP under Mike Nesbitt’s leadership. At this point, the new party still needs a name. As both Basil and John lived [...] more »
Italy’s Five Star Movement – is this what The End of History looks like?
Tweet In 1992, Francis Fukayama predicted in The End of History that the end of the Cold War would impend not only an era of triumphant liberal-democratic capitalism, but one where political evolution had reached its final form. Western democracy, he argued, was the best form of state organisation practically achievable by humans. The folly [...] more »
The Sad State of North Belfast’s Riverside
Tweet A bright, cold, day earlier this week saw me head out for a constitutional along what is now rather a pleasant route along the banks of the Lagan past the Odyssey and up to the Titanic Museum. With the hazy afternoon sun making the East Belfast bank of the river look particularly pretty, and [...] more »
Copernicus’ “Google Doodle” and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Tweet Sunday past was the 413th anniversary of the execution of Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake for heresies such as proposing that the Sun is a star and that the other stars in the sky are also Suns, probably accompanied by planets very much like ours). Today, more auspiciously, is the 460th anniversary of [...] more »
Home Rule, Rome Rule and Gay Marriage
Tweet Last September, Unionists paraded in their tens of thousands through Belfast to celebrate the centenary of the Ulster Covenant. From the days of Lilibullero in the 17th Century, Ulster Protestantism has always had a particular genius for summing up its political causes in easily remembered ditties and catchphrases. Perhaps the easiest slogan to remember [...] more »
The Silence of Lost Worlds and the Fate of the Middle East’s Christians
Tweet Monasteries are very quiet places indeed. Garrulous as I am beyond the normal Irish capacity for such things, I am not someone obviously identifiable as a great lover of silence. At the Community of the Resurrection, even here in the heart of West Yorkshire’s network of densely populated post-industrial valleys, the daytime silence between [...] more »
A Return to Force Majeure as a Criterion on Parading?
Tweet The current parades-related legislation is cumbersome and deeply irritating to many in Northern Ireland. Every procession with the sole exception of the Salvation Army must go through the process of filling out an 11/1 form and seeking an adjudication from the Parades Commission. That means not only Republican and Loyalist marches, but entirely non-contentious [...] more »
Latest comments from Gerry Lynch (see all)
Gerry Lynch has commented 160 times (0 in the last month).
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Books
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What Ireland did right (and what it needs to do)…
Tweet It is difficult to believe now that one country recently sent 19 delegations to Ireland to study how well our economy was managed. The revelation that our model of economic management featured positively in political and economic discussion in countries including Estonia, Greece and Scotland may also come as a surprise. As we survey [...] read our review »
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“Good Friday. The death of Irish Republicanism” by Anthony McIntyre: a review
Tweet This was a book that I first reviewed at the same time as “Unionism Decayed” back in 2008. Like Vance’s work, it is the author’s portrayal of a defeated political movement or ideal and as a Unionist it was instructional to read an interpretation of the immediate post-Agreement period from the other side of the [...] read our review » -
Ex- Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland: Book Review
Tweet It’s probably safe to assume that most people in Northern Ireland would not associate religion either with ‘peace’, or with ‘ex-combatants.’ But a new book by John Brewer, David Mitchell and Gerard Leavey, Ex-Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland: The Role of Religion in Transitional Justice (Palgrave, 2013) fruitfully brings the three together [...] read our review »
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Comment on Scotland – will the Orange Order save the Union?
on 23 April 2013 at 9:51 pm
1. It’s very unlikely the referendum will come all that close to passing.
2. The Better Together/No campaign will not exactly welcome the ‘support’ of the Orange Order.
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Comment on Sinn Fein steps in at the last minute to call an end to the Stopes farce…
on 13 March 2013 at 10:29 pm
The SDLP absentees were McDonell, Attwood, Eastwood, McKevitt and Dallat.
I have no doubt Alasdair and John Dallat would have supported the motion. The other three may have been conscientious absentees. Disappointed that Mark H Durkan voted for the motion.
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Comment on Sinn Fein steps in at the last minute to call an end to the Stopes farce…
on 13 March 2013 at 10:27 pm
Can someone explain to me how the Assembly was even competent to vote on this matter, as abortion is a reserved matter for the government at Westminster? Or has that changed?
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Comment on No surprises in Mid Ulster as Molloy wins; turnout dips down from 91.5% in 1969 by-election to just 55.7%
on 8 March 2013 at 7:49 am
Your headline is wrong – the 91% turnout was in 1970. The 86% turnout in 1997 was indeed remarkable for the modern era. All those figures were inflated by personation and postal vote fraud on an epic scale. The postal vote fraud only ended in the last few years.
As for the result, I wouldn’t overanalyse minor swings too much. Pasty McGlone is a well good candidate, well dug in locally, whose.main opponent ran away from a TV debate and, for the first time in 20 odd years, wasn’t called Martin McGuinness. Nigel Lutton kept Unionist turnout from falling too badly, in part because a surprising number of Unionists, wrongly, seem to have thought a joint Unionist candidate could win. Alliance get the prize for epically bad spinning by claiming a tiny increase in a tiny vote as some sort of major victory. SF is claiming a massive victory when their vote stayed at home more than others’.
In reality, there’s little to see here. The changes in share of the vote were minor and turnout was actually really very good for a mid-term by-election in a safe seat in a society that is no longer in a minor civil war and no longer turns a blind eye to postal vote fraud. Mid Ulster remains the constituency least likely to see a change in Assembly representation, and hadn’t since 1998. If anything, this by-election was remarkable for continuity, not change, after months of fleg wrangles.
But that won’t stop overblown claims of an SDLP revival and Unionist Unity from climbing to the top of the political agenda.
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Comment on UKIP’s voters – older, more male and more working class. But especially older.
on 7 March 2013 at 10:13 pm
Only 12%of UKIP’s current supporters voted for it in 2010? Is that not similar to suggesting that Man Utd supporters follow Liverpool?
Many people change how they vote between one election and another. Otherwise (think about it) every election would have the same result.
This happens in football too. What proportion of current Man City supporters supported them in 2005? What proportion of Chelsea supporters did in 1995?
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Comment on UKIP’s voters – older, more male and more working class. But especially older.
on 7 March 2013 at 1:44 pm
Barney – This how people who say they currently would vote UKIP actually voted in the last general election (only 12% of UKIP’s current supporters voted for it in 2010).
UKIP lean well to the right economically, as does a plurality of its voters (see the Spectator piece) and their best results have traditionally come in constituencies with heavy concentrations of C1 and C2s rather than DEs.
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Comment on Nordie OUTRAGE: Our speciality…
on 6 March 2013 at 9:29 am
Actually, Kia have had very little publicity outside a backwoods second-tier region with a population less than half of a typical Chinese provincial capital nobody has ever heard of.
I look forward to the same faux outrage being directed at the State of Utah for calling one of its largest cities Provo, and Dutch anarchists for calling their most significant political movements Provo.
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Comment on Anti-abortion farce takes over Assembly
on 6 March 2013 at 12:38 am
As, I believe, a former senior employee of the Alliance Party [only heard this today, don’t know if it’s true]
You heard wrong. That’s me and I post under my own name. But I basically agree with him.
As it stands, NI law (still governed by the 1938 English criminal case R v Bourne) only permits termination in very restrictive circumstances in which there is a clear risk to the health of the mother. Marie Stopes has made it clear that it operates within these guidelines. If it is not operating within these guidelines, a criminal prosecution under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 could be pursued. But noone, even the Catholic/Protestant Coalition to Stop Brazen Strumpets Murdering Their Babies, has suggested that Stopes is doing anything other than acting legally.
The only reason, in that context, for legislating their clinic out of existence is if the NHS is or could be persuaded to not give women access to abortions they are absolutely entitled to in law. In my own opinion, that’s the real agenda behind the Maginness/Givan amendment.
This sort of thing happens in real life, especially when there is a medical culture of anti-abortion extremism. The founding director of the maternity unit where Savita Halvanappar was left to die, for example, is on record as claiming he had never once seen a case where an abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother. That it is transparently false did not prevent Professor Eamon O’Dwyer saying so.
Now, I may be being paranoid here, but in that context I note, for example, the vastly lower level of terminations in what was the Western Board area compared with Belfast. Seems to me maybe women with serious health problems aren’t getting abortions they desperately need on the NHS in NI where, let’s face it, people with a worldview like Professor O’Dwyer are thick on the ground. We need the Stopes clinic in operation if women are to get abortions they need for the sake of their health. Remember this is under what is, after the Republic and Poland, the 3rd most restrictive abortion law in Europe.
As I said, if Stopes is breaking the law, prosecutions can be brought. If it isn’t breaking the law, why is there an attempt to legislate it out of existence, unless politicians want to stop women getting healthcare the law entitles them to?
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Comment on “nobody has the right to use lamp posts & telegraph poles like a dog marking out territory” #apc13
on 3 March 2013 at 8:12 pm
there were seemingly no former SDLP folks there
I was there with work and noted Councillor Andrew Muir prominently positioned in the foyer for much of the day. Cllr Patrick Clarke was also floating around.
I met a former SDLP, now Independent, councillor there as well.
Really must stop defending the Alliance Party when people attack it, but I have this funny thing about facts.
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Comment on Eastleigh: Bad for Tories, Better for LDs, Best for UKIP
on 2 March 2013 at 12:07 am
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere swings of 16% were extremely rare outside London in 1997. Only 11 seats saw such a swing and only 8 of those in the south.
That only includes constituencies where Labour actually took the seat. As a piece of opposing evidence I’ll thrown in another M27 suburban sprawl seat that’s demographically similar: Gosport. Here a 16% swing wasn’t nearly enough to take down a bigger Tory majority for Labour starting from an even more distant 3rd place, but it was still big enough for Labour to have – just – taken Eastleigh. The constituency then had a formidably good LibDem local election team that wouldn’t have spent all that much time in Winchester or Eastleigh given they had County Council elections on the same day.
Millbank wasn’t doing anything here. This was Blair.
It’s a counterfactual proposition, I know. But it’s not as ludicrous as you’re making out.
Can they disconnect genuine concern over an integrated Europe from bashing Johnny Foreigner.
I doubt they can, but they’d be serious contenders in a lot of places if they could sustain that perception.
I agree with you it helped UKIP a lot that their candidate was, at the very least as I judged her from a distance, very competent. You start to think there are numbers of places in the South of England where if UKIP had a candidate like that and built up a LibDem style local election machine they could win more than a taxi-cab of seats come the election after next. They’d need to learn how to do things like getting outside manpower from no hope seats in the General Election into the dozen or so seats that mattered. I wouldn’t rule them out in principle but they just don’t seem interested in the leg work. They’d rather give sermons about the evils of Europe.
Still, even if they remain willfully ignorant of the realities of First Past The Post they could be decisive. If they actually got 11% (we’re a long way from there) that would mean more like 20% in the South and they would really start costing the Tories seats in the South.
Throw a 20% UKIP vote into Mid Sussex for example and all of a sudden Nicholas Soames’ seat isn’t all that safe is it? I know that part of the world very well. It’s a weird mix of people down there; there’s a very dry old school Tory element – a lot of people who send their children to private schools on principle, for example; and then there’s a very public-sector element commuting into London, closest to work they can afford a family home, and then you have a surprising number of white working-class people including people who are working but brutally poor, crippled by massive housing costs.
I do agree with you though that it’s fairly poor for Ed Miliband, there’s little sign from that result that Labour can come anywhere close to replicating Blair’s 1997 performance in the south.
Blair took a *lot* of votes from the LibDems in the South East and East Anglia. Maybe that was the one thing he did that John Smith wouldn’t have done. Labour would still have won a landslide with Smith, probably on a par with Attlee’s. (Similar people with a similar appeal, in many ways.)
Milliband probably won’t either but there are still enough decent Labour prospects in the South with even a modest swing (and in the West Country: Wansdyke, NE Somerset, Sutton & Devonport). That’s without considering how UKIP might help. I have no idea whether he’s still too insubstantial to be a leader but Cameron and the Tories have problems.
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