Society and Culture – Page 7 – Slugger O'Toole

Five takes on what second Trump may mean for Ireland…

Soapbox on November 7, 2024, 11:46 am

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David Moane is Dublin-based and retired who likes to comment on current affairs. Here we reprint his short first take from his Facebook page that focuses largely, but not exclusively, on what Donald Trump’s second term might mean for Ireland. FIVE TAKES FOR TRUMP’S SECOND TERM The Trump coalition extends well beyond the traditional Republican base and is more representative of America as it is today. The Democrats coalition is more brittle. This could be an insurmountable challenge for that …

Four Legs Bad … Sectarianism and Progressivism in Northern Ireland

Cillian McGrattan on October 30, 2024, 10:17 am

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Although Northern Ireland has long considered to be a paradigmatic case of ethnic conflict – a place apart from liberal democratic norms – much of its politics continue to replicate trends found elsewhere. The hollowing out of policy programmes works to shield decision-makers from accountability and denude voters of agency. Outwith policy options a kind of anti-politics takes hold whereby the stuff of debate degenerates into platitudes and virtue-signalling. Of course, that is part and parcel of the performative dimensions …

Questions facing Sinn Fein are reasonable and answerable it just can’t answer them honestly

Mick Fealty on October 25, 2024, 1:42 pm

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…novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognise that something has gone wrong. Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions Every time this storm around Sinn Féin looks like abating, something else kicks it off again. Wednesday’s committee meeting may have been a cynical attempt to strong-arm an Assembly committee into silence, but it also raised an important question. Is there an impermeable boundary between the First Minister’s civic …

Another escape from scrutiny as First Minister runs roughshod over Stormont committee…

Mick Fealty on October 24, 2024, 7:12 am

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I’m putting this up with a minimum of comment. It’s the Stormont Committee for The Executive Office (TEO) which has accumulated 1.7k views within hours of the session finishing. The reason being is that it is utterly shambolic. At the heart of the spectacle is an odd confusion about committee rules that have in place for 26 years. It’s not actually obvious if anyone on the committee (possibly even including the clerk) understood those rules up to the point they …

Sinn Féin’s secrecy crisis deepens as victim gives his version of the Ó Donnghaile story

Mick Fealty on October 20, 2024, 5:47 pm

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You knew Sinn Féin was in some trouble when it called for Paddy Kielty to be censured for a joke at the start of the Late Late Show, even though their ongoing saga has been pretty much the only thing in the southern domestic news for the last fortnight. Then on Saturday evening the Sunday Independent dropped a bombshell in the form of aa personal testimony from the young person Niall O Donnghaile sent the inappropriate texts which eventually lead …

Sinn Féin’s “politics of concealment” means that what we know now is certainly not “the story…”

Mick Fealty on October 18, 2024, 11:02 am

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an abandoned building with graffiti on the walls

In the weirdest consensus of post Belfast Agreement Northern Ireland Sinn Féin has agreed to a TUV proposal to cancel former Lord Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile. Just days ago he was using X to attack journalists for following the McMonagle story. That was before we knew about his own behaviour, and the real reason for his stepping down with a fine encomium from party leader Mary Lou McDonald. Along his official portrait, all evidence of his existence on Twitter has …

There’s no magic carpet out of Sinn Féin’s multiplying issues, other than to make some hard choices…

Mick Fealty on October 15, 2024, 3:45 pm

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So Sinn Féin’s troubles continue, this time they are merely deepening in the south. Over the weekend the party lost its second TD in a week to resignation. It wasn’t over the McMonagle case but the result of internal machinations. Kildare South TD Patricia Ryan resigned last Wednesday citing internal censorship by the national leadership of any criticism of the party’s dismal performance in the local and European elections, and the vetting of questions for Mary Lou McDonald. Then on …

In the Dáil Sinn Féin leadership still trying to deflect as further details emerge on McMonagle’s access to Stormont

Mick Fealty on October 9, 2024, 6:55 am

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You’d wonder what Pearse Doherty was on yesterday in the Dáil when his colleague and leader of the opposition treated their party’s liabilities around McMonagle with lurid insouciance, as it becomes ever obvious the whole party needs to go into rehab. Political parties are a particular type of voluntary organisation which plays an important role in gauging public sentiment and mediating between ordinary people and ultimately the institutions of government be it in opposition or as party of the executive. …

Question for Sinn Féin over its handling of convicted sex abuser: who had knowledge?

Mick Fealty on October 7, 2024, 10:40 am

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moon eclipse

“…uncertainty eases the way for con artists to make fraudulent claims” -Rob Nelson Listening to Carlo Gebler’s new podcast series for BBC Radio 4 on the Provisional IRA’s mass escape from the Maze Prison back in September 1983 you cannot fail to be impressed with its meticulous planning and ruthless execution by the prisoners. Organisation was to become the hallmark of Sinn Féin’s electoral success as they moved from a twin track armed/democratic struggle to a latter day commitment to …

Maurice Quinlivan TD on McMonagle: “I’ll be quite clear, I’m pretty sure we didn’t know…”

Mick Fealty on October 5, 2024, 8:43 am

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to be continued sigange

A messy few days in, and some inside Sinn Féin must be questioning the party hierarchy’s decision to make its head northern spin doctor carry the can for what increasingly looks like a much wider screw up. In 22 years I don’t remember anything like it. The problem with secrecy, be it that of the Catholic Church or in more recent times Sinn Féin’s problematic handling of sex cases within its own ranks, is that eventually it gets hard to …

Why Michelle O’Neill’s answers in the McMonagle case just don’t add up…

Mick Fealty on October 3, 2024, 5:35 pm

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It’s a sniper’s rule you only get two shots at the enemy. A third and they will figure where you’re hiding and you’re a goner. This is now Sinn Féin’s fourth scandal and it is very clear it just cannot deal with child sex abuse cases that involve its members. Being the fourth ‘shot’ the party can no longer expect to have the benefit of the doubt. Their defence on previous occasions was that they were historic, but policies were …

Why everything you’ve ever heard on the Northern Irish constitutional question is wrong…

Mick Fealty on October 1, 2024, 1:43 pm

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“…we don’t so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things”. – Ben Evans, via Memex 1.1. Like queuing for paper tickets for space trips once imagined in 1950s sci-fi, confident predictions of a near term border poll miss the fact that the future will track through possibilities adjacent to the present, not a linear projection of that present. Before I get to what I want to say, let me be clear about what I’m not …

Sinn Féin’s drop in the southern polls demonstrates the problem of “pre-fab” politics…

Mick Fealty on September 27, 2024, 1:24 pm

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There was a time when I paid more attention to polls than I have over the last six or seven years. To be honest I lost interest in trying to analyse them because with the increased frequency of each publication the variation between them became limited. In yesterday’s Inside Politics podcast from the Irish Times there’s a superb conversation hosted by Hugh Linehan with Theresa Reidy and Aidan Regan on the apparently sudden collapse of sentiment for Sinn Féin in …

A stiff warning to the DUP that “what got us here is not going to keep us here.”…

Mick Fealty on September 20, 2024, 4:30 pm

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…they are no substitute for a small number of strong local connections. -Benjamin Allen, researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard I was asked on Nolan yesterday to comment on Lee Reynolds analytical piece in The Critic magazine (brutally titled “Unionism has to wise up”), timed no doubt ahead of this weekend’s DUP party conference and the new leader’s first big set piece speech. The focus was consideration of a name change, to signal to the Northern Irish …

“We must robustly challenge those who still insist violence was justified…”

Mick Fealty on September 6, 2024, 11:46 am

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green and blue bird kissing each other

In The Irish Times Trevor Ringland challenges an oddly identitarian idea that’s been in vogue recently in ways it was not during the actual Troubles (especially if you had read An Phoblacht regularly) that it was the IRA that brought civil rights. This odd philosophy (which the comedian Andrew Doyle correctly acknowledges is present in both mainstream right and left discourses elsewhere) associates wrong doing, not by the individuals responsible, but layered for guilt primarily by identity. This has been …

As Colum Eastwood step downs as SDLP leader, will the next leader be any better?

Mick Fealty on August 29, 2024, 1:05 am

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school of gray fish

The Irish News’s John Manley breaks the news that Colum Eastwood is to step down as only the sixth leader of the SDLP since its establishment in 1970. It comes just over week after his UUP counterpart Doug Beattie also announced his departure. At first he put a brake on his party’s decline but in the 2022 Assembly election it suffered a huge anti DUP squeeze from Sinn Féin to which neither Eastwood nor his party had an answer. Now …

UUP: Clear policy grounded in a strategic direction would increase the possibility that commitment will follow

Terry Wright on August 24, 2024, 11:29 am

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A small bird perched on top of a tree branch

A lot of cheap shots are being taken at the Ulster Unionist Party as its latest travails are exposed. Previous comments of ‘warring tribes’, ‘impossible to lead ‘, of pseudo religious, cultural and political powerplays, all of which present, are mined to dismiss the UUP as a serious political party; incapable of providing constructive, creative and competent leadership even within its own membership. For too many years, it has struggled, often in a meandering fashion to do so. Its internal …

It is not enough to be non-racist; you have to be anti-racist.

Terry Wright on August 8, 2024, 1:34 pm

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I have just arrived home from attending an anti-racism rally in Guildhall Square, Derry-Londonderry. A few ideologues took the opportunity to platform their mantra but for the most part speakers followed the lead of current SDLP mayor, Lillian Seenoi Barr in refuting lazy stereotypical views regarding the major contribution that migrants who have come here to seek a better life, make to our economy, health and education sectors. I have personal experience of the healthcare provided by skilled practitioners from …

After the election, we need more bridge builders and fewer slick marketeers…

Mick Fealty on July 26, 2024, 9:59 am

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A thneed’s a-fine-something-that-all-people need. -From The Lorax by Dr Seuss, 1971 Culture eats strategy for breakfast they say. I’ve long believed that Alex Salmond knew what a lot of his Scottish nationalist cohort never really did, ie that before movement was possible he would have to tackle the cultural barriers to his party’s appeal. Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland has only fitfully understood that reality, in figures like Curry, Hume, Fitt, McGrady and Mallon and those all plied their trade …

After the election, even if the DUP faces a crisis then the rest of Northern Ireland does not…

Mick Fealty on July 17, 2024, 2:11 pm

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white wooden shed surrounded by trees

In the doldrum life of Northern Ireland politics losing one seat is a misfortune, two careless, three criminally negligent. To have escaped two more potential losses is a serious warning from the future for the DUP that for too long played just one card. Since the writ of that one card trick (keeping the FM’s job for unionism) ran out in the last Assembly election in 2022 the party has been on notice that it needs to find another reason …