Northern Ireland
Boomers’ memories of the Great
Ian Jack has a fine nostalgia piece in the Guardian – no, better than that, a piece about the collective memory of passing generations – linking the not altogether compatible elements of the Dickens bicentenary to the monarchy. The link he made was not with Empire or English images of national virtue so often disputed [...] more »
Outfoxed – as cunning as an iPhone game developed in Belfast and voiced by Jackie Fullerton
Something for the weekend … If the Executive is to be fully believed, it feels like the local creative industries are second only to Titanic tourists in being at the heart of Northern Ireland’s economic recovery! With seed corn funding from the Creative Industries Innovation Fund (administered by the Arts Council NI for DCAL), local [...] more »
raising an old issue like employment
At the moment, as Pete flagged a couple of days ago, Bill Clinton is doing some heavy lifting in the US for job creation on behalf of the Republic of Ireland’s government. Over at the Belfast media group, Jude Collins provides an interesting contrast, highlighting the uneven results of Invest NI’s work: During 2010/2011, Invest NI [...] more »
Red Squirrels of Prehen Woods: Under imminent threat from planners and developers?
During the 2005 Slugger live coverage of the Westminster elections, I overheard a fairly senior Sinn Fein representative being candid enough to admit that there were no votes in the Environment. That’s not to pick on that particular party any more than any of the others. It’s a fact of life in Northern Irish electoral [...] more »
Belfast peace walls: A paradox of leadership
Audio – UU Peace Walls 01 – Dr Jonny Byrne: http://mrulster.podomatic.com/player/web/2012-02-08T08_59_57-08_00 At a seminar hosted by the Institute for Research in Social Sciences and the Inter-Institute Peace and Conflict Cluster, Dr Jonny Byrne of the University of Ulster presented his findings of three years of research in regards to public policy on peace walls (interface [...] more »
DSD withdraw funding for Laganside Events
Since the closure of the Laganside Corporation on 31 March 2007, the Department for Social Development has given out grants for events and community activities in the Laganside area of Belfast. The area includes the Cathedral Quarter as well as stretching our towards York Street, Corporation Street, the Sydenham bypass (but not including Titanic Quarter), [...] more »
Stormtroopers on red alert for St Paddy’s Day riots in South Belfast
Last night, the PSNI riot squad took part in a dress rehearsal in advance of any trouble in the university/Holylands area over the St Patrick’s Day long weekend. One officer privately expressed concern that the new protective clothing “wouldn’t be taken seriously by tipsy students”. Another added that the pockets weren’t very accessible and there [...] more »
UUP and the SDLP: Two parties in search of a script?
Very good column from Fionnuala O’Connor on Tuesday re what what’s happening to two parties in continuing decline. She starts with the semi public spat between Margaret Ritchie and her chosen successor, the retired school head, Sean Rogers: Surely between them a keen new player and a former leader could have avoided such a petty [...] more »
Dead tree columnist prejudices public’s perception of bloggers?
Allison Morris made a number of contributions to this morning’s Irish News. As well as the front page article about the alleged security breach when a police officer’s personal mobile fell into the hands of dissident republicans (and its contents were subsequently passed to the Irish News), she also writes a curious opinion piece on [...] more »
What is Britishness anyway? – latest
Stephen Moss in the Guardian adopts the least analytical approach imaginable to the identity thing, a random journey. It’s like an intro to a report that that doesn’t actually appear. A bit like Britishness itself maybe? Quite unlike our own passions. Might uncertainty and toleration be its saving graces? As I stood in freezing temperatures [...] more »
“Failure to deal with the past is the Achilles’ Heel of the current arrangement”
Haunted is a good word for the core subject of Robin Wilson’s op ed in the Belfast Telegraph today. The past haunts all the players to one degree or another. He echoes DPP Barra McGrory’s concern that treating all matters via the judicial route is not the most desirable means of moving forward. As Tim [...] more »
So what’s the formula for a referendum, Owen?
Jamie Smyth the new (to me ) correspondent of the Financial Times has managed to win some space for an interview with Owen Paterson (£ sadly) who takes whatever wind there might have been out of Martin McGuinness’s kite for a united Ireland referendum. Part of the draught perhaps from the Scottish referendum campaign Graham Walker [...] more »
Contested Space Programme: “What’s strange is that we haven’t heard anything about this until now…”
On 22 January, after the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) announced their £2million Peace Walls Programme, I asked about the absence of OFMdFM’s £4million Contested Space Programme – announced in March last year. On 27 January the Northern Ireland Executive Junior Minister, Sinn Féin’s Martina Anderson, launched the Early Years Faces and Spaces – Children’s Shared [...] more »
Better journalism: “We have to learn directly from news consumers through experiments”
There’s an interesting confluence of work on journalism in the digital age today. This morning I’m at conference in Dublin on the importance of Diversity in the Media (organised by the Labour MEP Nessa Childers), and at the same time Blair Jenkins’s Better Journalism in the Digital Age, is published by the Carnegie Foundation across [...] more »
How ‘conservative’ Unionism lost its footing in Scotland?
Graham Walker’s been reading beyond the reported remarks of Reg Empey in the Lords recently: Indeed, the part of his comments given less attention concerned the need for Unionists to get the ‘tone’ of their contributions right, and to avoid appearing to ‘bully’ or ‘hector’ the Scots. Amen to that. And, yes, people in Northern [...] more »
Some secondary schools get better results than selective grammar schools
In days and weeks to come, there may be many ways to slice and dice the data that Kathryn Torney published in The Detail and the Sunday Times this morning. Chris has already alluded to the potential weakness in directly comparing the raw NI stats about numbers of pupils achieving 7 or more GCSEs at [...] more »
… to prosecute cases if the evidence emerges …
The Detail has an interesting piece to set alongside the DPP’s comments regarding confronting the past. It concerns the RUC and HET investigations into the killings such as the attack on Sean Grahams on the Ormeau Road which involved a Browning that was handed to the UFF/UDA by the RUC. The Detail outlines how: In 2010 the families [...] more »
Jim Nicholson: UUP, Tory or a bit of both?
An anonymous source suggests Slugger look more closely at the position of Jim Nicholson who despite the parting of the ways between the Conservatives and the UUP is still apparently taking the Tory whip in Brussels and Strasbourg [Are they still here? - Ed]. However, at home he has, from yesterday at least undergone a [...] more »
The sooner society finds a way to confront the past the better…
Northern Ireland’s DPP, Barra McGrory has made an interesting intervention. Gerry Moriarty in the Irish Times: “I think there is an imperative in the public interest that society finds a mechanism to deal with the past,” he said. “Whether that be simply giving more resources to the investigators to get on with the investigating, and [...] more »
Advocate General to take up case for NI students going to Scots Universities?
Interesting snippet from across the water regarding the £9k fees students from Northern Ireland now have to pay if they want to follow what’s become for many a traditional route to graduation at Glasgow, Edinburgh, or St Andrews. Dundee even runs a fairly successful degree course in Northern Irish law. The Rutherglen Reformer reports a [...] more »
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Books
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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 » -
Stay out of Libya: counterinsurgency doesn’t work
A moment of some significance in journalism perhaps, as the New York Times reviews the current talked about book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Bing West. The author is no bleeding heart but a former assistant Defense Secretary from the Reagan era who stomped his way round the Afghan [...] read our review »
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Spare us a phoney row about racism, we’ve got enough on
A silly media row about racism just had to figure in the riots’ post mortem. Was the Tudor history expert David Starkey racist on Newsnight when he said: The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in [...] read our review »
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