Books

The polite rebel: Sheelagh Murnaghan

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The polite rebel: Sheelagh Murnaghan by Allan LEONARD 3 October 2019 Sheelagh Murnaghan was the only Liberal Party MP (1961-69) in the Northern Ireland Parliament, representing the constituency of Queen’s University Belfast, which was the venue for a launch event of a new biography about her remarkable life. There were many Murnaghan family members in the audience of a few dozen attending. The book, Sheelagh Murnaghan, was commissioned by the Albert McElroy Memorial Fund, which was established to commemorate the …

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‘Unless we start listening, we’re not going to move forward’

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“Unless we start listening, we’re not really going to move forward,” says Julieann Campbell, editor of the Unheard Voices collection of women’s stories from the Troubles. She was interviewed in the latest Forward Together podcast. Julieann reflects in the podcast on the impact on her of the interviews with women about their experiences in the Troubles. “I think it has affected me on several levels, emotionally and in my work,” she says. “It is a fact that it has made …

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How Loyalism Remembers: Review of Ghosts of the Somme by Jonathan Evershed

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‘… commemoration of the Somme represents a (if not the) chief means by which Loyalists are able to participate in the political, cultural, and social life of Northern Ireland and attempts to circumscribe particular commemorative forms risks further alienating Loyalists from processes of peace-building in which they already perceive themselves as having little stake.’ – Jonathan Evershed, Ghosts of the Somme, p. 19 This is the most important argument in a new book by Jonathan Evershed, Ghosts of the Somme: …

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James O’Brien and the lost journalistic art of asking decent questions…

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Ever since I started Slugger back 2002, and having only just discovered the opportunities which blogging offered to a humble, prospecting researcher like myself I’ve always been interested as much in the cultural effects of net based comms as in the subject itself. With our John Hewitt session coming up, I thought it timely to look at the latest writing on the subject and so I called into Blackwells on Monday and I couldn’t pass James O’Brien’s How to be …

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Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland by Jonathan Blake – Essential Reading for the Summer Season

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Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland (Oxford, 2019), a new book by American political scientist Jonathan Blake, is essential reading as Northern Ireland’s summer parading season begins in earnest. Blake helps us understand why those who parade – and those who don’t – are almost always talking past each other. Readers of this book should gain a better understanding of why those who parade genuinely feel that their culture is under attack and believe that their participation in …

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Book Review: Southern Prods and the search for a place within their own state…

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Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s search for place in independent Ireland is a collection of exploratory essays edited by Ian d’Alton and Ida Milne. It is published by Cork University Press 2019 ISBN 978-1-78205-298-2. It is hard to credit today but when I left Belfast for Galway in 1974 there was a sense of entering the faraway and unknown. Belfast Protestants were pretty thin on the ground there so far as I could tell; indeed, the only other fellow Northerner …

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‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

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The above quote by the American writer, William Faulkner, could have been crafted with Northern Ireland in mind. We need look no further than the murder of Lyra McKee a few weeks ago for evidence that Faulkner was right on the money. I thought my days of hearing news of the violent deaths of friends had long passed but seemingly not. I woke up to read of Lyra’s death in the news. Not only was her killing reckless and heartless, …

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Reporting the Troubles: 2 Prime Ministers, 5 P O’Neills, the last death knock, and addressing legacy issues

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Brian Rowan and Deric Henderson speaking about Reporting the Troubles at a Creative Holywood conversation.

Recalling working on Prime Ministerial visits, receiving IRA briefings from five different P O’Neills, collating tens of thousands of pages of notes, deciding to no longer knock the doors of bereaved relatives, and thinking out loud about how to address legacy issues, when Brian Rowan and Deric Henderson sat down on Thursday evening to discuss their contributions to the book ‘Reporting the Troubles’, they had no idea of the tragic events that would happen just a few hours later in Creggan.

A legacy process should be about why the Troubles should never happen again

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Brian Rowan and Deric Henderson speaking about Reporting the Troubles at a Creative Holywood conversation.

On Thursday evening, hours before Lyra McKee was fatally shot in Creggan, Brian Rowan was speaking about Reporting the Troubles in Holywood. Throughout the event, he often pivoted away from pure reminiscence and returned to the subject of legacy, arguing for an inclusive and society-wide process that asked less about what had happened but instead focussed on why it happened and crucially why it should never happen again.

Book Review: Neither Here nor There – The Many Voices of Liminality, featuring Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Liminality. It’s not necessarily a word that pops up in everyday conversation – unless you are an anthropologist. A new book, Neither Here nor There – The Many Voices of Liminality (The Lutterworth Press, 2019), edited by Timothy Carson, offers an impressive range of accessible, eclectic, entertaining, and informative meditations on liminality. Among its 17 contributing authors is poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama, leader of the Corrymeela Community since 2014. Liminality is the disorientation or unsettling that takes place …

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Don’t Mention the War: Legacies of the Troubles and Their Impact on Brexit

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Is this the calm at the centre of the hurricane? The eerie, robotic, delusional calm of Brexiters as they respond with condescension to the exasperated questioning of journalists that of course there are digital and technological ways of monitoring the border, and of course the EU needs the UK more than vice versa, and it is bound to cave in “when they see the whites of our eyes”; the “calm bewilderment” of the EU as they survey the unfolding horror in …

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Country before Party? A UUP book launch discussion

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Image source: (c) Allan LEONARD @MrUlster

At the launch event for “The Ulster Unionist Party: Country before Party?” there was a roundtable discussion former-leader Mike Nesbitt, press officer Lauren Kerr and Alex Kane (its former director of communications). They discussed the party‘s performance, policies and appeal as well as its future role in Northern Ireland politics. Read about what was said and watch back the conversation.

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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How will we Remember Martin McGuinness?: Review of David Latimer’s ‘A Leap of Faith’

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A new book by Rev David Latimer, A Leap of Faith: How Martin McGuinness and I Worked Together for Peace, tells the story of the surprising but strong friendship between Latimer, the minister at First Derry Presbyterian Church, and the late Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. It was a controversial friendship. There were those within Latimer’s own congregation, the wider Presbyterian Church, and unionism more generally who found it difficult to contemplate his close ties with a former IRA commander. …

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Future Ireland / Healthcare in ‘A New Ireland’

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In producing the report – now a book – ‘A New Ireland’ this year, I conducted lots of interviews asking people about the prospect of Irish reunification.  The issue of healthcare in a united Ireland was consistently cited as a major concern. Northern perceptions of the southern system are very negative.  Views within the Republic are not that positive either, for sound reasons.  But it is only fair to point out that the NHS in Northern Ireland is in crisis.  …

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‘The Good Friday Agreement’ by Siobhán Fenton: a reminder of the sheer scale of the mountain still to be climbed

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This very readable, thoughtful book reminds us of the sheer scale of the mountain still to be climbed in Northern Ireland. More worryingly, though, it left me with the feeling (although that may be more to do with my professional cynicism than with Fenton’s own belief) that we haven’t a hope in hell of getting much beyond first base on the mountain.

Faith beyond the Shadow of the Abuse Crisis: Review of Aidan Donaldson’s The Beatitudes of Pope Francis

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There is no doubt that Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland has been overshadowed by the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. On Radio Ulster’s Talkback discussion on the eve of the visit, presenter William Crawley strained to steer the conversation in any direction other than abuse. Slugger’s own Brian Walker focused on abuse in his post-visit analysis. And in my own reflections, I argued that the visit ‘had become an unofficial referendum on the Papal handling of clerical sexual abuse …

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Henry McDonald in conversation about his book – Martin McGuinness: A Life Remembered #feile18

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Watch back journalist and author Henry McDonald in conversation about his photo essay book – Martin McGuinness: A Life Remembered – which was published by Blackstaff Press. The discussion examined the genesis of the book, the changing face of Martin McGuiness, and reflected on some key moments in the Troubles on which McDonald had reported.