Do we really want pro union voices?

As a 24-year old I had a boss who was a great mentor to me. I was a young East Belfast Protestant and he was a 40-year old veteran of the Civil Rights movement and a staunch republican from Andersonstown. We agreed about very little politically and frequently had heated arguments on the issues of the day (it was 1986/87) and on the constitutional issue. Yet I revered him as both advisor and friend and he treated me as a …

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Who speaks for us now ‘the other side’ barely exists for me and my kids?

My wife and I left Belfast for England in October 1997 – exactly six months before the Good Friday Agreement. We left with our first toddler son and were happy enough to take him away from a society that in his first six months had given us the ending of the first ceasefire and the renewed street violence surrounding the 1996 Drumcree. We returned in February 2011 on his fifteenth birthday and with his eleven-year-old brother also in our number. …

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