Partisan patriot games will not unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter….

Today is the 225th Anniversary of the Battle of Saintfield. Over the course of the last decade we have managed to navigate the choppy waters of centennial commemorations. This period of remembrance and reflection has coincided with Sinn Féin becoming the largest party across our island. In the wake of this deep green tsunami, the parties that once dominated nationalist Ireland, North and South, have been increasingly forced to reassert their own republican credentials and sidestep nuance. Connolly House (or …

Read more…

1798, a cross-community rebellion…

The return of inflation, a fuel crisis, strikes and recession, together with Russia’s invasion of a neighbouring state, all to the soundtrack of a resurgent Swedish pop group, has prompted many to ask if this is the 1970s all over again. However, some striking parallels with today’s problems can be found almost 200 years earlier, in the 1790s, with a cost-of-living crisis, climate change, unpopular wars and, to add a particularly local flavour, constitutional upheaval and sectarian strife. So, in …

Read more…

Review of Guy Beiner’s “Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster”

“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 …

Read more…