Future Ireland / How will the PUL be accommodated in a United Ireland?

This week, we’re featuring submissions from readers on the theme of ‘Future Ireland: Alternative Conversations about Unity and the Union’. Competition winners will be published on Saturday. By ‘Danny Boy’. According to the demographics, there could be a nationalist majority within Northern Ireland in the not-too distant future, which some think will automatically lead to the re-unification of this island. So what will happen to all those people living within Northern Ireland who class themselves as being from the PUL …

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Queen’s Chancellor (and Commonwealth chief) under fire over Sri Lankan abuses

Kamalesh Sharma, the secretary-general of the Commonwealth – and Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast – is under fire after being accused of withholding crucial legal advice that could have prevented Sri Lanka from hosting the imminent heads of government meeting. The legal opinion said that the firing of the Sri Lankan chief justice by President Mahindra Rajapaksa was a contravention of the Commonwealth Charter, which sets out the supposed shared values of the member states: democracy, human rights and the …

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Gay Mitchell and the Commonwealth

Gay Mitchell may be no stranger to Slugger, but for those unfamiliar with the other candidates in the presidential election, Cormac McQuinn’s critical piece in the Daily Mail back in July provides a useful introduction to the Dublin MEP. That Slugger piece from 2006 links back to Mitchell’s address to the annual Fine Gael Collins-Griffith memorial in August 2006 on the Fine Gael website, an item which is no longer accessible (or archived) although some quotes and more comments can be read here and here. …

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