an audience with the Queen at her official royal residence in Northern Ireland

Unionism’s anglophobia

Brian Spencer on June 5, 2016, 8:07 pm121 Comments | Readers 2569

The slogan used to be ‘Brit’s Out’. It marked a gross misunderstanding of the people of Northern Ireland. As Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote of the Easter Rising: “Irish-Ireland wrote and talked as if it assumed that the battle would be over once Dublin with its garrison of dentists’ wives had surrendered.” The “British” of Northerm Ireland are the several hundred thousand people loyal to the Crown, not the Crown forces. While the “Brits Out” slogan is no longer daubed, the …

“Now meetings seem almost routine and we have dispensed with the fig leaf…”

Pete Baker on June 24, 2014, 6:57 pm17 Comments | Readers 60

Like boiling a frog… After the party’s opposition to her first truly historic official visit to Ireland, this week, on the third occasion of the Northern Ireland deputy First Minister, Sinn Fein’s forgetful Martin McGuinness, being presented to the UK Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, the earlier pretence has finally been dropped. As Liam Clarke notes in the Belfast Telegraph In another sense, the Queen and Martin McGuinness may look back on how difficult that first meeting between them had been …