SeaanUiNeill

In a less degenerate age, the sixteenth century Lord of all Ulster, but in my current incarnation, a one time film maker, animator and producer/director, currently a visual artist, iconographer, writer, historian, neo-Jacobite and, I believe, a political moderate with serious polycultural leanings. Even so, I would like the old place to perhaps develop some of its own culture rather than simply borrow styles from the homogeneous mix available for the discerning plagiarist from other International art sources. I remember the Queens Festival when it was worth going to, not so very long ago. Also, I'd give a lot to see a serious re-forestation project, deciduous please.

An Answer to “The hurl was ours”: why the article needs to do rather more than simply shift culpability…

| Readers 2131

The Soapbox piece “The hurl was ours” put up on Saturday night, sets out to present an alternative advocacy for the working-class community of east Belfast through a significant qualification on the racist riots of this last week. It identifies personal credentials to authorativly speak on this: I’ve lived in Belfast most of my life; I’m writing this listening to helicopters overhead for a second day. I know these streets, and I know these communities, and I know, looking at …

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The Outdoor Primary School, Learning from the living world…

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In September 2025 TOPS, The Outdoor Primary School in Greystones, Co Wicklow will open its doors on its first term. Its website describes it as ……a pioneering new school in Ireland that will cover the skills of the Irish National Curriculum through inquiry-based learning whilst being immersed in the natural world. Students will help direct their learning through projects where they are encouraged to question and explore the world around them, whilst also learning core skills in Literacy and Mathematics. …

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“The Ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door…”

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O what has made that sudden noise? What on the threshold stands? It never crossed the sea because John Bull and the sea are friends; But this is not the old sea Nor this the old seashore. What gave that roar of mockery, That roar in the sea’s roar? The ghost of Roger Casement Is beating on the door. W B Yeats from New Poems (1938). The Irish News reports that legal action is being currently planned in order to …

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Varadkar Calls an All Party Pledge “making reunification an objective, not just an aspiration”…

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Earlier this year Leo Varadkar was invited to the  Keough School of Global Affairs, at Notre Dame University foe a public discussion of Irish current affairs specifically on current changes in Irish civic life and the political future of the island of Ireland. The Keough-Naughton Institute is a multidisciplinary global research hub “bringing Ireland to Notre Dame, Notre Dame to Ireland and Ireland to the world”. The institute characteristically hosts programs and events to highlight how Ireland’s uniqueness speaks to …

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The Controversial Legacy of Frank Kitson in Northern Ireland…

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Frank Kitson has been fulsomely praised in death through a number of obituaries while others have damned him over what is widely seen as his background role in the Ballymurphy massacre (August 1971) and in the killings at Derry on Bloody Sunday(1972). Frank Kitson had joined the Rifle Brigade as he was turning twenty in the months after the end of WWII. In choosing a career in the Army he had gone against a family tradition of naval service that …

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Two hundred and thirty years ago today a unique visionary French feminist of the Enlightenment Olympe de Gouges was guillotined…

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The execution took place the day after she had stood trial for her writings which had criticising the descent of the high deals of the French Revolution into recrimination and bloodshed…. …….the execution took place ….towards 4 P.M. ; while mounting the scaffold, the condemned, looking to the people, cried out “ Children of the Fatherland, you will avenge my death.” Universal cries of “Vive la République” were heard amongst the spectators waving hats in the air… De Gouges and …

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The Belfast Shipyard Expulsions and Their Aftermath, 21st July 1920…

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The general election held in 1918 had completely transformed the post-war politics of Ireland, with the Sinn Féin candidates winning a majority of FPTP seats by a landslide vote. These newly elected members boycotted Westminster and established an alternative assembly in Dublin on 21st January 1919. Despite the mounting campaign of political violence that had also developed during 1919 and in early 1920, by July Robert Lynd could still accurately write, “So far as the mass of people are concerned, …

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A personal brush with CoVid-19….

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A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic.    Attributed to Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference by the author Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko. When one is writing non-fiction, the books one inevitably buys pile up. Last week an order of new shelves arrived and by Sunday I was ready to put up a few banks of them in the least cluttered part of my library and decant the tall forty inch piles collecting on my stairs and around …

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Review of Guy Beiner’s “Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster”

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“This is the past and it has to stay in the past. We don’t want to see any more of it.” Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster, Guy Beiner, Oxford University Press, 2018. Over the weekend the PSNI were called to manage an incident with a car bomb within the Walls of Derry. The car was parked in Bishop’s Street, just by the courthouse and directly across the road from the Masonic Centre that …

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