Society and Culture – Page 5 – Slugger O'Toole

Why the Critics of the ARINS•Irish Times Surveys are Wrong: A response to Professor Coulter

Soapbox on March 25, 2025, 9:07 am

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By Professor John Garry, Queen’s University Belfast. Professor Brendan O’Leary, University of Pennsylvania. Dr Jamie Pow, Queen’s University Belfast & Dr Dawn Walsh, University College Dublin. Professor Coulter has written a number of pieces (here and here) on Slugger O’Toole that are critical of the ARINS/Irish Times surveys. These criticisms are based on false premises and are wrong. Comparison with other academic surveys We will shortly address Professor Coulter’s unfounded methodological criticisms, but let us first confirm the substance of …

Happy World Poetry Day

David McCann on March 21, 2025, 11:28 am

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Happy World Poetry Day, everyone. A great moment to flag one of my favourite poems called For A Leader by John O’Donohue May you have the grace and wisdom To act kindly, learning To distinguish between what is Personal and what is not. May you be hospitable to criticism. May you never put yourself at the center of things. May you act not from arrogance but out of service. May you work on yourself, Building up and refining the …

Cambridge Union Debate: Songs of “unity” must find a new tune and switch from dissonance to resonance

Mick Fealty on March 14, 2025, 6:18 pm

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“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” — Buckminster Fuller As a norm I steer clear of united Ireland conversations, not because I’m not interested in the subject (it’s not going away any time soon), but because it is a discourse that quickly slips into the assumption there’s just one …

Irish Neutrality: “we need to deal with the world as it is, not the world as we would like it to be…”

Mick Fealty on March 12, 2025, 11:09 am

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It is gob smacking that the Dáil has yet to appoint any committees to scrutinise government in the sort of detail that is particularly necessary at a time in European history when the tectonic plates of international relations are shifting so radically. I cannot think of any time after civil war when the opposition in the south effectively went on strike and refused to do their jobs. In Northern Ireland (with our all inclusive democratic institutions) we’ve seen governments go …

There’s still something not quite right about the ARINS survey: Part Two (Surveys & Elections)

Soapbox on March 12, 2025, 9:24 am

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Colin Coulter is Professor of Sociology in Maynooth University. Today he continues to ask questions about the recent ARINS survey, and argues the case for making source data public and allowing legitimate criticisms into the public square. In the first part of this essay, we suggested that most of the shift in constitutional aspirations recorded in the latest ARINS/Irish Times survey may, in fact, originate in the inappropriate weightings applied to ‘community background’ in its two previous editions. But what …

We need to talk about the ARINS survey on Ireland’s constitutional futures (Part One)…

Soapbox on March 11, 2025, 3:19 pm

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Colin Coulter is Professor of Sociology in Maynooth University. Here he asks further searching questions about the “gold standard” ARINS survey, and what happens to the outcome if you adjust for weighting issues in the original sample. The latest instalment of the ARINS/Irish Times survey points to a sharp increase in support among the Northern Irish public for the project of reunification. In the space of just two years, there has, apparently, been a net shift toward the nationalist cause …

Ahead of the first annual British Irish Summit Shared Island remains the only viable game in town…

Mick Fealty on March 6, 2025, 7:27 am

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“…planning must precede a crisis rather than follow it, ensuring that shocks lead to constructive reform, rather than losses in resilience.” –Confronting the long crisis, Alex Evans • Bruce Jones • David Steven Today sees the first annual summit in London between the Irish and British governments. Although there are multiple crises facing both the UK and the EU bloc of which Ireland remains a part, for once there’s presently none in Northern Ireland. That doesn’t mean there won’t be …

“You can’t put things to bed if you’re a hypocrite, you can’t put things to bed if you’re a liar…”

Mick Fealty on March 4, 2025, 3:35 pm

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“…while examining its outer surface I have caught only a glimpse of the smooth and finely glazed inside of the bowl.” — David Abram If you can I recommend watching the two part series charting the life of former East Tyrone IRA man Brendan Hughes on iPlayer. Failing that you should be able to catch part two going out live tonight on BBC One NI at 10.40 tonight. It’s a glimpse into the life of a committed member of the …

Three cheers for NI’s first government programme since 2011, but next time can we ditch the bloody consultation?

Mick Fealty on March 3, 2025, 3:57 pm

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So finally, after at least one false start last Monday when the Alliance Agriculture minister noted that none of the Executive ministers with portfolios had seen any of the thousands of consultation contributions the Executive has published a PfG. I’ve not seen a copy but we have some ideas of what might be in it from Nolan this morning. It has nine cross cutting themes which include childcare, health, housing and the economy. There are social housing targets for 2027 …

Life Punishes the Late—Adapt or Die

Gerry Lynch on February 20, 2025, 2:14 pm

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A portrait of Donald Trump, featuring his signature blonde hair and serious expression. He is wearing a blue suit, white dress shirt, and blue tie, with a small American flag pin on his lapel. An American flag is partially visible in the background, along with ornate wooden paneling

This will be the first of many shattering weeks in 2025. Even the cleverest members of the establishment that is being routed have started to acknowledge publicly that the old order is dead. This isn’t a matter of a change in the personnel in charge, or even of long-standing diplomatic alliances, but of suddenly finding that the assumptions that most of us shared about how the world functions and how it should function are no longer correct. To think through …

Northern Ireland needs politicians and journalists with the courage to call government to account

Mick Fealty on February 12, 2025, 11:49 am

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“The human mind is incapable of rest, what it needs is change” -Winston Churchill There’s definitely a change in the air when it comes to the future of Northern Irish politics. Eighteen years the Executive and the power sharing Assembly has achieved a genuinely deepening peace, and from that peace has sprung a new prosperity. But it is unavoidably obvious what it has failed at too. Lee Reynolds (a former DUP SpAd) summarised the core problem, adroitly last Thursday on …

Should MLAs be paid more?

Brian O'Neill on February 6, 2025, 8:41 am

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From the BBC: For five years, the Independent Financial Review Panel (IFRP) set wages and expenses for politicians in the assembly. But the terms of the three panel members ended in 2016 and they were never replaced. The Assembly Members (Remuneration Board) Bill proposes setting up a new independent board. It is backed by the Assembly Commission, which includes representatives of the main parties. MLAs are already set to receive a small increase in their salaries this April. An assembly …

Stormont could do worse than develop a Sláintecare approach to health service reforms.

Mick Fealty on February 5, 2025, 12:16 pm

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I was on Nolan this morning discussing how the Secretary of State Hilary Benn had hit a few nerves yesterday on the first anniversary of the restart of Stormont when he laid out the abysmal Health record in Northern Ireland… 53% of people waiting for a first appointment with a consultant are waiting for more than a year in Northern Ireland. In England, that figure is 4%. That’s right, 53% compared to just 4%. Mr Benn said he agreed with …

Micheál Martin’s hard track through the harsh and unforgiving Alps of Irish politics…

Mick Fealty on February 3, 2025, 11:57 am

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So last Thursday Micheál Martin (a day later than scheduled because of some stormy weather in the Dáil) the man who many pundits once predicted would be the first Fianna Fáil leader never to become Taoiseach became Taoiseach for a second time. Indeed nothing was inevitable about Fianna Fáil’s return. When it happened in 2020 few believed it would last more than a few months. Leo Varadkar looked downright miserable at the very thought of coalescing with Fine Gael’s bete …

Remembering the Holocaust 80 years after the first liberation…

Mick Fealty on January 27, 2025, 11:20 am

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On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (and the 20th of my original post on the matter), here’s the moving words of my old friend Phillip Whitfield…. Day of Liberation (Bergen-Belsen, May 1945) We build our own prison walls, but that day the doors fell open. It was holiday time In the death camp. Lift him with courtesy, this silent survivor. Battle-dress doctors, We took him from the truck, put him to bed. The moving skeleton had crippled …

“We are gradually harvesting for good the energy of the whirlpool…”

Mick Fealty on January 24, 2025, 9:13 am

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“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” is a line from the unfinished essay A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley. A claim, hard to stand up these days when too much poetry has hedged its bets on bland, post modern subjectivism. But in the quiet, often understated work of Michael Longley, who has died, lies a courageous willingness to take on what many never found the words to express about the complex ways Northern Ireland would change …

Unionism needs to turn its values into positive action aimed at building a better Northern Ireland for all

Terry Wright on January 23, 2025, 3:30 pm

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The decision made by Secretary of State Hilary Benn MP with regard to the Stormont Brake can be added to the litany of Unionist ‘tilting at the windmills’ strategies. Unionism has to understand that if you created it, you have to own it. Political Unionism in the shape of the DUP, TUV and to a lesser extent the UUP contributed to the situation that is the outworking of Brexit. The latter did not encourage a ‘yes’ vote but was not …

The signal has gone out that unionism is weak and will always give in

Soapbox on January 21, 2025, 11:30 am

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Jamie Bryson is NI Director of Policy, Centre for the Union, a think tank focused on preserving all aspects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Here he critiques the DUP’s past claims to have cut the pipeline of EU law. “If there is a choice between remaining in office or implementing the Protocol, the only option for any unionist Minister would be to cease to hold such office” The words, on behalf of the DUP, of …

Jim Allister: Irish Parliamentarian of the year?

ItwasSammyMcNally on December 23, 2024, 10:44 am

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Jim Allister is a formidable and controversial political figure. An uncompromising Unionist with a political career which has also seen him resign not once, but twice, from the DUP. Jim doesn’t do compromise on his Unionist principles and that is perhaps best reflected in his decision to set up and lead his own Political Party – the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV). On one of those occasions he resigned because the DUP had decided to get into bed with Sinn Fein, but in more …

After #GE2024 even in the south Sinn Féin remains haunted by its own largely secret northern legacy

Mick Fealty on December 16, 2024, 4:47 pm

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I’ve put off writing an analysis of Sinn Féin’s fate in the southern general election on Feynman’s principle that “if you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.” I’m still not sure I do, so only time will tell if what follows is right. The party made two seat gains, but largely because of the addition of 14 extra seats in the 34th Dáil. All three of the larger parties lost vote share but Sinn Féin lost …