There are events in your life they say you are never likely to forget. The death of a parent. The birth of a child. An unexpected act of kindness from a stranger. A visit to Auschwitz/Birkenau. This last was an experience which now hides within a small pocket of my memory, like an unwanted but necessary souvenir. Every now and then I begrudgingly take it out, examine it and place it back. Every now and then I wish I didn’t …
Belfast’s tenth annual 4 Corners Festival (30 January-6 February), begins in a week’s time. One of the aims of the inter-church festival is to inspire people to visit and explore all four corners of the city, especially areas they have not ventured before. The festival’s popular ‘Wonderful Wander’, which takes place this year on 5 February, is a guided walk that encourages people to see Belfast in a new light. Caroline Clarke from Belfast shares her experiences of last year’s …
From a report by Connla Young in today’s Irish News: A CO Tyrone man has claimed the Irish army came within minutes of invading the north to highlight the plight of nationalists faced with a sectarian onslaught in the late 1960s. Killian McNicholl (82) from Dungannon has broken his silence on secret plans by the Dublin government to force an international crisis more than 50 years ago. While it was already known that the Irish government had drawn up a …
Who recognises the profound shift towards fairness and equality in the last fifty years in Northern Ireland? Historical facts may not change, but as the world transitions and power shifts, our perspectives should also adjust. Otherwise we may be condemned to an interminable cycle of Groundhog Days.
From the BBC report: Survivors and relatives of those killed in the Miami Showband murders are to receive close to £1.5m in damages. The resolution of legal action against the Ministry of Defence and the Police Service of Northern Ireland was announced at Belfast High Court on Monday. The victims had argued there was collaboration between the loyalist killers and serving soldiers. Three band members were killed near Newry in 1975. The bomb and gun attack happened in July as …
During this year’s C. S. Lewis Festival in November, EastSide Partnership held an event to mark and celebrate the extraordinary achievement of the BBC’s Year ’21 podcast. The 50th – and final – episode airs today. Year ’21 reconstructs the events of 1921, week by week, using ordinary people’s stories, archival research and insights from expert historians. It explores the year of Northern Ireland’s formation in surprising and original ways. Approaching 500,000 downloads so far, Year ’21 has already been …
As is so often the case in Northern Ireland, the hyperbole around Bertie Ahern’s recent comments about the ignorance of East Belfast and “ghetto” Protestants (I paraphrase but that’s the essence of his comment) has been loud. Also, again as usual, it has missed the point and therefore let genuinely guilty parties off the hook. Of course Bertie Ahern wasn’t being sectarian. There is nothing in his political past to suggest that he would be that way minded. And of …
Crawford Gribben’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford, 2021) is a remarkable read. With a narrative spanning almost two millennia captured in a main text of just 220 pages, Gribben covers a vast amount of ground in a relatively concise text. His achievement is to provide much needed perspective on where Irish Christianity came from and where it may be headed. The book is published by an academic press and Gribben is a historian at Queen’s …
It’s been a sad few days for Irish literature as we note the passing of two notable Irish literary figures. Máire Mhac an tSaoi was not only a poet, but also an Irish language scholar, author and at one point a career diplomat. It is Brendan Kennelly’s passing that I feel the most, however. Coming from a scientific background I am no literary critic, but to me his work seems accessible, powerful, impactful and unpretentious all at the same time. …
The 2020 COVID pandemic turned Belfast into a desolate city. Shops, schools, pubs, restaurants, churches all closed. The city’s usually bustling streets took on an eerie atmosphere. The lack of cars, planes and taxis created an ominous silence. Part of COVID’s defining experience was how unique it felt to us. We hadn’t experienced a pandemic for an entire century since the 1918-19 influenza pandemic killed 50,000,000 people worldwide. However, historically, disease outbreaks were a day-to-day occurrence and part of life. …
Adam McGibbon is a writer, campaigner, and a former vice president for welfare at QUB Students Union. Last year, the old Queen’s University Students’ Union building – with its decades of history – was pulled down. Few know that in 1971, 50 years ago this week, it was the site of a police and army siege, an incident which made headlines across the UK and Ireland – and involved a future British Prime Minister. BBC Rewind (login required) has preserved …
I’m sure everyone must be feeling as exhausted and frustrated as I am to see that once again we’re back to groundhog day once again with the European Union and the UK launching into another period of tense negotiations. I don’t want to spend a lot of time going over what is currently going on when there is plenty of fine – and infinitely more qualified – commentary available elsewhere, except to say that it sounds like the UK is …
The Sarah Everard murder is the stuff of nightmares. A serving police officer, Wayne Couzens showed a warrant card and used handcuffs as he kidnapped Ms Everard before her rape and murder. Thankfully he was caught fairly quickly and he will spend the rest of his days behind bars. But the Met has a lot to do to restore public confidence in the police, especially amongst women. If you have not watched it yet the BBC documentary Bent Coppers: Crossing …
It’s hard to believe that in the wake of their boycott of the Queen’s visit to the Republic in 2011, Sinn Féin’s First Minister Martin McGuinness petitioned to meet her on a subsequent visit to Northern Ireland. As we’ve come closer to the anniversary of partition attitudes have not just hardened, but got more slapdash and careless. As Tony Horwitz writes of the remnants of the American civil war he found in the 1990s: Everywhere, it seemed, I had to …
And to finish the week, Newton Emerson throws some light on the politics of the President’s refusal to come Armagh in October as a part of the decade of centenaries… Under his Machnamh centenary programme, described as “inviting reflections on the War of Independence, the Treaty Negotiations, the Civil War and Partition”, the President has spent a year hosting academic seminars on contested commemoration, ethical remembering and, above all, on colonialism as the overriding context for the centenary. It is …
It’s unusual for the DUP, and other Unionists for that matter, to be exercised at the non-visit of a President of Ireland. The reaction sounds like a mixture of genuine disappointment, wounded vanity and point-scoring. In the case of the DUP, glass houses come to mind. Whatever the reason, the nature of the clamour achieves little and has launched a tirade of sniping political comment on social media. This is something which Archbishop Eamon Martin, shortly after the low-key launch …
“In newspaper work you have to learn to forget every day what happened the day before. Newspaper work is valuable up to the point it begins to destroy your memory.” – Hemingway As my engineer friend Hugh puts it, for much of my time on Slugger, I’ve tried only to share what I feel is important, perhaps not obvious but nevertheless true. That’s increasingly important in a world abundant in information. If you can (and you haven’t already), I thoroughly recommend …
This is a round-up of various tweets, TV shows and articles that give interesting perspectives on what is going on in Afghanistan. The Times tours Bagram Air Force Base, which is now in Taliban control. Click through to see all the tweets. One of the odder decisions of the Americans was to give the Afghanis airplanes and helicopters. There was just the small matter of them having very few people who could fly them or service them. You can be …
When I was at Queen’s in the mid-90s, I fell in with a bunch from Omagh. They used to regale me with stories of nights out at the Riverbank. I always assumed the Riverbank was a bar or nightclub but when they invited me down to Omagh one weekend, I discovered the Riverbank was the actual riverbank where groups would gather to drink before going on to the Clock disco. I have many happy memories of nights out in Omagh, …
On this day 50 years ago the old Stormont government launched Operation Demetrius. An attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Catholic community by randomly locking them up. To the surprise of no one, the policy backfired spectacularly and many consider it the best recruiting tool the IRA ever had. The main failure of the policy (apart from the obvious: locking people up without trial) was they were using old intelligence that was sometimes decades out of date. …
