Last week, there was a ‘Dallas’ joke. This week, a ‘Derry Girls’ joke. However ‘Blue Lights’ remained no laughing matter as the show reached the penultimate episode of its fourth series. Before we get into that.. well, you know the drill by now. Don’t give away any plot spoilers from the remainder of the fourth series in the comments section if you’ve seen it all on the iPlayer. Please also bear in mind that this review will inevitably contain plot …
In 1988, a Moscow paper called Nagorno-Karabakh “our Northern Ireland.” In Part III, Peter Emerson asks why “this or that?” questions divide us, from Belfast to the Balkans, and makes the case for multi-option, preferential voting instead.
Ahead of Netflix’s version of the Chroncles of Narnia to be shown early next year, Patrick Little in the Guardian has reclaimed the celebrated writer and visionary scholar Clive Staples ( always known as CS) Lewis for his specifically east Belfast roots. Some of us like to think that Narnia was inspired by Norn Irn – a nice thought anyway. Little has done a very precise piece of tracking to some particular local locations I hadn’t known had inspired …
John Doyle’s Before the Vote: Planning for a united Ireland devotes a chapter to the island’s two health systems, and its main finding is hard to dispute. On the figures he reports, a far larger share of Northern Ireland’s population is waiting for hospital appointments or treatment than in the Republic, and the gap is widest for those who have waited more than a year. The chapter is less convincing on why Northern Ireland performs so badly and on what …
