Talking to writer and novelist Neil Hegarty about the talk ‘2031’ he will deliver at next week’s Imagine! festival, imagining what this island might look like in a decade and asking whether we’re prepared for the political, societal, environmental changes that will surely have a huge impact on the way life is going to play out?
Ahead of next week’s packed programme, Imagine! festival are calling for your ideas to imagine a better post-pandemic Belfast. How would you Build Belfast Back Better? You can submit up to three ideas that reimagine the city in the face of the pandemic and the challenges presented by Brexit, increased poverty, loneliness and mental health issues.
A quick rummage through the Imagine! Belfast programme coming up between 22–28 March. Under the strapline of The State of Us, there’ll be exhibitions, workshops, lectures, film, comedy, music, spoken word, lectures, theatre and quizzes. Voices from at home and abroad. The festival isn’t afraid to challenge. It doesn’t expect participants to agree with everything that is said. It’s about making people think. Widening their horizons. Broadening their understanding. Developing their empathy. Helping them figure out why – and if – they truly believe the hunches and biases they may have been living with for a lifetime.
Paul Mullan is the Northern Ireland director at The National Lottery Heritage Fund. 100 years ago this year the partition of Ireland created two new states on this island, and with that the United Kingdom as we know it today was established. For some this represents an event that should be celebrated, while for others it represents something quite different, a sense of loss and discomfort. It is often said about Northern Ireland that we share a past but not …
What we now call Covid-19 appeared as a new disease in China in late 2019. It rapidly spread worldwide as a pandemic with countries struggling to manage it, and to prevent their health services being overwhelmed while simultaneously keeping their economies functioning. Before considering some of the issues around this, I though that an historical perspective would help to understand how and why “we are where we now are”. Leprosy is one of mankind’s oldest scourges. It’s mentioned in the …
Her Loyal Voice is a blog which gives a voice to loyalist women. This is Part 1 of a series exploring the findings of their recent Loyalist Women’s Engagement Survey. What becometh a woman best, and first of all? Silence. What second? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence. Yea, if a man should aske me till Domes daie I would still crie silence, silence. —Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 1560 The silence of women’s voices endures today. Her Loyal …
I heard Ruby Wax tell Louis Theroux that what scared her most about interviewing Donald Trump (17 years ago) was that he was a narcissist. Well, tonight, he’s handed two seats in the Senate to the Democrats in Georgia by undermining conservative faith in elections. WATCH: Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock speaks as vote counting continues in Georgia's Senate runoffs. CBS News projects that the race between Warnock and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler now leans Warnock https://t.co/KjUGN77KG8 pic.twitter.com/DBvsjV5U9E — CBS News …
Alex Easton is one of two DUP MLAs currently representing North Down. Here he lays out what he thinks the current strength of the case for retaining the union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and why Northern Ireland needs more optimistic engagement with the future. Being passionate about the Union and never having done a piece for Slugger O’Toole before, I am hoping that those who oppose the Union will not be too hard on me for my first …
Historian Robert White has contributed to the excellent Writing the ‘Troubles’ blog which is a hugely valuable asset I’ve only just discovered. His contribution shows a remarkable level of self discipline in winnowing out the facts on who’s idea it was to have hunger striker Bobby Sands stand as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The answer he comes up with is very different to the publicly accepted version, ie that it was member of Gerry Adams’ kitchen cabinet Jim Gibney who first …
Julie Ann Corr-Johnson is a former Belfast City Councillor and now a Commentator. When I think of civil disobedience I think of occupation: sit down strikes in civic buildings, public and symbolic places and the blocking of critical infrastructure such as train stations, airports and ports. Examples of somewhat effective social and political movements agitating for change are dotted throughout our global history. The Glasgow Rent Strike for example. When during the First World War landlords sought to capitalise on …
Sixty odd years gone and there’s still life (I think) in this old dog. It was great to sing “When I’m sixty four” at the time, now I’m looking forward to “Never thought I’d live to be a 100” by good old prog rockers The Moody Blues. However in this article I’m going to look back. When was I first aware of “themmuns”? Sometime I think between 7 and 10. I remember thinking “Catholics are somehow different and are sort …
Trying to rewrite history is never a good idea. So when Sinn Féin’s official social media account claimed at the weekend that “On this day in 1905 Sinn Féin was founded” and proceeded to say that on that day “we outlined our position”, it naturally raised a few eyebrows within the historian community. The thing is with historians, they are fact-based people, so if you lie about something in history they will ruthlessly expose you for it. The backlash to …
So at the weekend Eoghan Harris took steady aim at one of the south’s most sacred cows. Unlike most of official Ireland, he looked at the first Bloody Sunday through the prism of a Liam Weldon song, Dark Horse on the Wind that warned how “the warriors spring from the earth to maim and kill their own”: RTÉ’s non-stop stream of nationalist necrophilia, with no balancing programmes such as Spotlight on the Troubles and Cops on the Frontline. RTÉ’s latest offering, Bloody Sunday, …
It seemed the annual poppy debate, like many events in 2020, was cancelled or run with socially distanced measures in place. It was not until Taoiseach Micheál Martin appeared in Enniskillen, laying a wreath on Remembrance Day that the topic resurfaced down in the South. It is not an overly new occurrence of a Taoiseach attending such event. Enda Kenny during his time as Taoiseach, started the tradition and was followed by Leo Varadkar and now Micheál Martin.
The Irish News on the 13th October published the names of the members of the NI Centenary Forum and reported that Sinn Fein and SDLP politicians, unlike their counterparts from the DUP, UUP and Alliance parties, declined an invitation to join. In addition, the report speculates that academics invited to serve on the Centenary Historical Advisory Committee, headed by Lord Paul Bew, declined the invitation due to ‘concerns that plans would not reflect the full story of partition.’ Apart from …
I see Jay has beaten me to the punch on today’s announcement in the Republic’s budget of a Shared Island fund. I generally agree with his headline that north-south cooperation finally has a budget, but I would also point out it has a lot of bases to cover. However, the point is to use this money to foster new investment and development opportunities on a North/South basis. And the Belfast Agreement (more observed in the breach than followed) is to …
“… self-interest defined in purely economic terms is an idea that reduces the Democratic Party to little more than the human resources department of American politics rather than a party concerned with the fundamental stuff of life: who we are, how we organise our society, and what it means to be American at this particular moment in history.” -Garance Frank-Ruta, The American Prospect, 2004 I don’t normally spend a lot of time on the US election campaigns, although I do …
I’m grateful to Brian Feeney in the Irish News for drawing my attention to a bravura performance in the Feile by my old friend David McWilliams. In my defence it happened on my birthday and so I was enjoying the fresh air on the edge of Brecon Beacons National Park. So I missed it. There’s some tough challenging lines in there for northern unionism (and northern nationalism besides), some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t and …
This is about the centenary of Northern Ireland. But first, a slight detour. In Lucy Caldwell’s, ‘Multitudes,’ one of her characters describes the heartache of watching her teenage school friend move from Northern Ireland to England. “They’ve had enough is what Susan’s mum says. She just can’t take it anymore. ‘This country,’ she says to my mum. ‘This country,’ my mum says back to her, and neither of them says anything else.” The scene has always stuck with me because …
Although the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the Second World to an abrupt end, the controversy over the use of nuclear weapons has never gone away. We are far less credible of the justification of military necessity and a desire to save lives than people in 1945 were, and while we know more about what happened than contemporaries did, the context in which the events occurred is less familiar. It is difficult to overstate that the fighting in …
