The veneration of the dead is common across humanity, in some societies even to the extent of praying to dead ancestors. Most countries do not go to that extreme but it is common for nation states to venerate leaders from the past. In the USA politicians even now talk about what the ‘founding fathers’ of their nation meant when they wrote the constitution over 200 years ago. Are we correct to place such trust in guidance from the past? What …
“It’s the farmer in the field, and the pilot that he finds, Hides him in his barn, till all his wounds have healed. Or the baker making extra bread, to give a starving man, Or people helping people, who they’ll never see again.” The poem, “The Ordinary People”, by Sharon Kerr, is one of the dozens of items on display at an exhibition at Bangor Carnegie Library, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2023, remembering the millions killed in the Holocaust …
Commemorations should carry their own health warning. Fintan O’Toole supplies one relevant to the current context. Writing in the Irish Times in January 2005 on the extremist tradition in Ireland he warned that ‘what matters is not what happened but how it is remembered. And that precisely is what the IRA is now fighting for. Its struggle is for the control of the memory of the Northern Ireland conflict’. I was reminded of this reading Declan Kearney’s piece of 29 …
There were pockets of the UK where the war barely reached. Belfast was one of them until the night of Tuesday, April 15, 1941, when more than a quarter of the people who died in the whole of the Troubles perished in one bombing raid. The city was particularly ill prepared since it was assumed it was too far north for the German bombers to go. The docks area took a hammering: whole neighbourhoods were almost wiped out at the …
If you missed it, this is well worth listening to the whole of this Audio Boom from Nolan this morning. listen to ‘Another unionist bid to change name fails – what next in Newry playpark row? #BBCNolan’ on audioBoom There’s a number of points worth picking up, not least Conor Murphy’s defence of Ray McCreesh’s Attempted Murder charge as being part of a war. But this segment from a caller called Alex in Lisburn is also illuminating. I used to …
Having been invited to attend, almost unanimously, by Belfast City Council, an Irish Government Minister has taken part in the Battle of the Somme commemorations at Belfast City Hall for the first time. From the BBC report Soldiers from across Ireland fought side by side in the World War I. As with previous years, Sinn Fein councillors did not attend the main commemoration. [Alan Kelly TD, the Minister of State at the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport], who laid …
