The idea for Open Sunday is to let you discuss what you like. Just two rules. Keep it civil and no man/woman playing. Comments will close at 12 pm on Monday. Brian O'NeillManaging Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not …
In addition to our normal open Sunday, we have a politics-free post to give you all a break. So discuss what you like here, but no politics. Comments will close at 12 pm on Monday. Brian O'NeillManaging Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any …
The song Before You Go, by Lewis Capaldi, is taken from his debut album, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent. It refers to the suicide of his aunt when he was a boy. Capaldi became synonymous with the Covid lockdown having dominated the music charts during that period. I was in the same state of mental health as his aunt at that time. In four decades of a department store management career, I had never endured such a challenging year. …
Dining in a restaurant in a town near Lough Neagh last weekend, I noticed a spelling mistake on the ‘Specials’ menu. (Too chicken to try the fish, I went for the chicken.) I couldn’t help horsing around with the spelling mistake. Lough Nag Lough Neigh. Ulster says nay to spelling mistake on menu display. Dollaghan; trout: in Lough were caught. Not highly sought after. Algal growth: putrid; rancid. I wouldn’t chance it. Fish in a pan: it’s doubtless madness. Stormont …
It’s about leadership stupid. Something strange that has yet to be explained in the defenestration of Paisley the late chuckle brother. It was ideological as well as personal over his loss of grip due to age. A leap too far with the Shinners? Peter Robinson although not the coup leader was the natural but uneasy beneficiary. If the DUP rank and file overthrew their creator what would they be prepared to do to his erstwhile junior sidekick, the man who …
Gavin Robinson’s call for unionist electoral co-operation looks back to a past that no longer exists. After the muted response to Drumcree, a growing pro-union constituency wants delivery, consensus and a working Good Friday Agreement rather than “circle the wagons” pacts. This piece asks why the UUP would tie itself to the DUP and TUV.
There have long been concerns about the power of BBC Northern Ireland in the local media landscape. They have more journalists than the rest of the media put together and they very often shape what is discussed and highlighted. Who chooses the stories?Who chooses the headlines?Who chooses the framing?Who chooses the guests?Who chooses the questions? Drumcree has been fuelled from start to finish by media framing. A major theme needing to be addressed by BBCNI because it tells us something. …
How best to describe the Upper Bann MP? I’m going to go with divisive. But it seems she may not be a member of the happy DUP family for long as she has quit as party officer. From the BelTel: DUP MP Carla Lockhart has quit her position as a party officer. She said she cannot continue to be part of a team that decides on the direction and strategy the party takes while “clearly having concerns about that”. The …
Without attracting much attention even from the local media, the Commons spent the best part of two days this week debating the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. This is the latest attempt at what’s claimed to be the very last chance to provide information on an agreed basis to victims and survivors about the multiple horrors and tragedies that befell them stretching back 57 years and counting. Passage of the Bill is now assured although a few stages remain. A recast …
A while ago I wrote a piece entitled “The End of Morality” in which I drew attention to a number of issues where morality had gone AWOL. Well where are we now? Let’s start with the UK. British politics has been in an unhealthy state for some time now.I believe that the rot set in with David Cameron. Brexit and austerity. Since then the UK has been on an inexorable slide politically and economically. There has been a succession of …
From the BBC: Jailed former Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Jeffrey Donaldson is being investigated by London police about an alleged rape of a woman inside the Houses of Parliament, the BBC can reveal. The disgraced former MP has been accused of raping the woman in Westminster in 2016, at the very heart of the political establishment. In July, the Belfast Telegraph first reported that a woman from Northern Ireland alleged she had been sexually assaulted by Donaldson in the …
From the BelTel: Sinn Féin’s Chris Hazzard is planning a high-stakes bid to move from Westminster to Stormont and become Strangford’s first nationalist MLA. The South Down MP will tonight launch his campaign for next year’s Assembly election in the neighbouring constituency. Speaking exclusively to the Belfast Telegraph, Mr Hazzard said boundary changes had created a “huge opportunity” for his party to win a seat in Strangford. It is one of the SDLP’s key target constituencies, but the entry of …
John Doyle’s Before the Vote: Planning for a united Ireland, published by DCU Press in September and available as a free download, compares Northern Ireland and the Republic on the economy, welfare, health, and education. It then sets out what the Irish state would need to plan before a border poll. Doyle, professor of politics at Dublin City University, says the book does not argue for or against unity. Its treatment of education deserves a closer reading than it has …
It was ‘Blue Lights,’ folks but not as we know it. But before we dissect Episode Four of the fourth series, let’s make our customary appeal. If you’ve watched the entire fourth series on the BBC iPlayer, please don’t give away any spoilers about the remaining episodes in the comments below. Please be aware this review also inevitably contains spoilers from previous series and recent episodes, so maybe you should pause reading this if you haven’t watched them. (SPOILERS ALERT) …
From an interrogation at the Russian border to an anti-war lecture in Moscow and a power cut in wartime Mykolaiv, Peter Emerson travels through Putin’s Russia and into Ukraine. Along the way he asks why binary referendums, the “matryoshka” votes of Crimea, Bosnia and the Donbas, so often end in bloodshed, and what that means for Northern Ireland’s border poll.
A Good Relations Week workshop at the Linen Hall Library offered an unusual angle on this year’s theme of ‘Include’: rather than framing inclusion as a goal to be worked toward, it asked how a library collection can embody it. Patsy Horton of the Linen Hall Library and Sam Manning, its outreach and engagement officer, drew on the breadth of the institution’s holdings to trace over two centuries of Belfast’s life and political history, and to explore how archives can …
At 105, partition is unlikely to end on a 50%-plus-one border poll. Nationalism’s vote has stalled at 40% while voters drift to “neither”. The path forward runs through governing Northern Ireland well, not waiting it out, and Micheál Martin’s Bodenstown speech shows what that looks like.
“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” What if three political parties that have spent years competing for parts of Northern Ireland’s political centre have more in common than their public disagreements might suggest? The Ulster Unionist Party, Alliance Party and SDLP have been knocking chunks out of each other at Stormont for as long as I can remember. Yet perhaps they share more politically, electorally and philosophically than any of them would care to admit. What do I …
A screening of Two Sides to Every Wall, a documentary about young people living alongside Belfast’s peace walls, brought young people, community practitioners, a social anthropologist, and a government official together at a Good Relations Week event hosted by Springboard. The gathering offered a forum for candid reflection on one of Northern Ireland’s most visible and enduring legacies — and on whether the communities that have grown up in its shadow should be the ones to decide its future. The …
Having written extensively about the prospects for the provinces and Irish rugby over the summer, I wasn’t planning to write about rugby again before the season got properly into its stride. The provinces had decidedly mixed fortunes over the first three rounds of the URC, and prospects for the first round of the European Cup didn’t seem to be overly rosy. All four Irish provinces are currently in the bottom half of the URC table although, admittedly, Leinster played two …
