Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) 
12:00 The delegates finally get to wave their flags and give a stand ovation and a half to Peter Robinson who struggled to get them to sit down so he can start his speech. You don’t need to take my word for it: just ask yourselves, is Northern Ireland better off now than it was twenty years ago? Investment is coming back, new jobs are being created and there’s a real future for our young people and a reason for …
The Gransha Suite at La Mon Hotel had obviously been packed with DUP Conference delegates for the previous session on Challenges in Policing when I eventually arrived earlier this evening. PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott was still giving a few interviews to the press while a Lambeg Drum was being set up on the other side of the stage. Nelson McCausland was up next, addressing DUP delegates as a dedicated follower of culture and MLA, rather than as Minister for …
Since their last party conference, the DUP has had a roller-coaster of a year. In the first few months of 2010 it looked like they’d been turned upside down and had any loose change shaken out of their pockets as scandal-ridden Iris Robinson abruptly retired from public life, Peter Robinson temporarily stepped back from office, land deals lingered in the headlines, mud was thrown at high profile MPs, and the party suffered the loss of their East Belfast seat at …
If you listened to Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster yesterday, you’d have been aware that Tuesday was the Feast of Saint Columbanus. The speaker described him as “a bit of a stirrer”. Which set the tone for the lunchtime celebration of Columbanus organised by the Ullans Academy in an East Belfast hotel and featuring speeches from academy president Dr Ian Adamson, Lord Bannside and the Irish President. As far as I can tell, the Ullans Academy is very …
There was a good discussion this morning at PI Camp around the conjoined issues of FOI and open data. The room had practitioners from both sides of the FOI fence – civil servants, journalists and bloggers. The idea for the session came out of my belief that FOI is often a crude tool that can produce more heat than light, and tends to encourage institutional obfuscation rather than a spirit of openness and sharing. So how best to use FOI …
A bunch of hacks (programmers) and hackers (journalists – real and citizen!) attended ScraperWiki‘s workshop in the University of Ulster Belfast campus on Saturday. The idea was to unearth benefit and stories from the public data, if necessary using robotic data scraping techniques to lift facts and figures out of ill-formatted webpages into a more useful database format to explore the connections. Three teams formed, looking at NI Court decisions, comparing pay levels across public, private and voluntary vacancies advertised …
After last Wednesday night’s euphoric display of maturity and backslapping, time to look at what’s really going on – or not going on – up at OFMdFM. At East Belfast Speaks Out, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness made one of their rare joint appearances speaking as individual MLAs rather than as the double headed chiefs of the Northern Ireland Executive. But while they were publicly agreeing and supporting each other on the panel, that’s not the full story around the …
Over in Cookstown the TUV clan were meeting for their annual party conference. For those of us not there, I’ve extracted some of the pithy portions below from Jim Allister’s leader’s speech, but for those unwilling to read on, the statutory Wordle summarises what he said. We may not have had the year we would have liked, or that your hard work and that of all our candidates deserved, but TUV is here and here to stay, because the cause …
The TUV went remarkably quiet after the May 2010 Westminster elections. However, this weekend, party members will be converging in the Royal Hotel in Cookstown for their party conference. Outside the party, it wasn’t terribly well advertised. While I received a belated invitation last week, I’m not free to attend. Not sure if anyone from Slugger will be along? Printing out their conference programme used up more red and blue ink that I’d bargained for. There’s still the old-fashioned use …
There’s an intriguing one-day conference down in the John Hume Institute For Global Irish Studies at UCD on Wednesday 17 November. This conference will look at themes around the opportunity for change in Northern Irish and all Island politics. The peace process, the passage of time and generations with different frames of reference, have all provided space to reframe the political agendas and the various relationships between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In particular the conference will focus …
Someone said it was only the second time that Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness had appeared together as MLAs (rather than ministers) on the same panel since they formed their FM/dFM partnership. They were joined by Dawn Purvis, Hugo Swire and Liam Clarke. Security constraints prevented the disclosure of full panel in advance, and the small matter of the Manchester football derby, meant that organisers worried the numbers attending might be low. But the hall in Ashfield Boys School was …
Martin McGuinness was famously pictured with Muppets Potto and Hilda at the launch of the first series of Sesame Tree, the local co-production with Sesame Workshop. This morning he was accompanied by fellow eejit (his words, not mine) Peter Robinson at the launch of the second series which airs on BBC’s CBeebies from 22 November. In their speeches, the First and deputy First Ministers were both upbeat about the production and the local creative sector. Continuing the banter started by …
I caught up with SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie on this morning just after she had finished rehearsing her leaders speech in the empty hall. 1.30pm Having escaped from the conference to the side of a humid swimming pool, I reflect that the Ramada Hotel wasn’t anywhere near as well attended as their February conference in Newcastle. It does seem strange that with the election in May, the SDLP didn’t just postpone again until February and use the conference as a …
There was relatively little Twitter traffic from the SDLP conference on Friday night. This could just point to the party being gathered together and meeting face-to-face. But given the opportunity for putting out positive messages about their party’s thinking and plans, the low level of news might just point to a much smaller gathering than the masses who turned up for February’s leadership election conference weekend. In his Friday night speech, SDLP deputy leader and director of elections Patsy McGlone …
Three different polls are expected to be scheduled for 5 May 2011 and it might well lead to a record number of posters adorning local lampposts next spring. Northern Ireland Assembly elections Local government (council) elections National referendum on changes to the method of voting at General Elections The date of the council elections will be formally confirmed when the NIO lay a General Amendment Order before Parliament in November. (This order is also expected to make some changes to …
I’ve found my thick pack of papers from February’s SDLP conference in the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle and the memories are flooding back. Right in the heart of Margaret Ritchie’s rain-swept South Down constituency, she wrestled the leadership of the party from the clutches of Alasdair McDonnell. Lamp posts were adorned with water-damaged posters. Inside the hotel, there was the air of an Ideal Home Exhibition with badges and stickers being handed out everywhere you went. … the candidates’ …
One centre right door slammed shut, but another familiar middle of the road yellow door opened and Paula Bradshaw stepped from the remnant of UCUNF across to the Alliance. If you had an overactive imagination you might wonder whether having resigned from the UUP a couple of weeks ago, Paula was tidying around the house and stopped to read some of Ian Parsley’s old Alliance literature piled up in the corner of the room. But perhaps the reality is that …
Confidence in the results of election polls is fundamental to encouraging public participation and preventing the kind of legal challenges that led to the “hanging chad” fracas around the 2000 US Presidential count in Florida and NI’s own Fermanagh & South Tyrone court cases. Over the weekend, Slate published an interesting article that describes the continued use of electronic voting systems in the upcoming US mid-term polls and the “faith-based results” that will be relied on. Whoever the machines report …
If you like your politics face to face and within heckling distance and you’re living in East Belfast, last year’s popular political engagement event is returning to Ashfield Boys School on 10 November 2010. Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start. Mark Devenport is chairing this year’s East Belfast Speaks Out panel which is in the process of being publicly announced, but safe to say that there are some heavyweights on the list to attend and respond to questions …
Last night Haiti was the real winner with £1225.90 raised at the Great Big Politics Quiz to help re-house some of the million-plus poor Haitians left homeless by the January 2010 earthquake. An outbreak of cholera in Haiti has resulted in more than 2,500 cases and 200 deaths. People forced to live in the island’s huge campsites are highly vulnerable to cholera, which is caused by bacteria transmitted through contaminated water or food. The house-building project, run by Irish charity …
