Conflict – Page 7 – Slugger O'Toole

“Republicans should remember that the third colour in the Irish flag is Orange…”

Mick Fealty on May 20, 2013, 1:25 pm

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Last Thursday’s The View gave most of the programme over to the vexed issue of parading. It includes a number of noteworthy points. Neil Jarmin points out that the Parades Commission has missed an opportunity offered it by Paddy Ashdown’s Strategic Review of Parading to give it a more robust set of processes (that might give people more realistic expectations, and enable it to field appeals). As Better Together noted some time back here on Slugger: …the volume of complaint …

After the political victory of the GFA is Northern Ireland slipping back into another ‘big sleep’?

Mick Fealty on May 20, 2013, 12:24 pm

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Men it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) Speaking of Fionola, her essay in an excellent collection from the British Council, gets a mention from Robert Fisk this morning (h/t Kate), where he quotes her saying, “springtime honeymoon period is over, the cherry blossom blown away, and we are now …

UTV Insight: Collusion and some of its innocent victims…

Mick Fealty on May 8, 2013, 4:46 pm

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Last night’s piece is well worth watching through to the end… Here’s the money quote from Barney Rowan in the third section… “You put Special Branch in the dock, and they will put the State in the dock…” …and possibly more than the state. Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and …

Celebrated in London, Sam Thompson’s “Over the Bridge” is as powerful today as ever

Brian Walker on May 7, 2013, 7:18 pm

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Last Sunday the great James Ellis, still rockin’ at 82, poet, translator and household name in the 1960s and 70s as Bert Lynch in the gritty TV cops series Z Cars, saluted the cast of the London revival of the late Sam Thompson’s prophetic shipyard play Over the Bridge, just after the performance . Jimmy had special cause to salute and be saluted. He was the play’s first director in the Belfast of 1961 and thereby hangs a tale I’ll come to shortly. …

“A lot of Northern Irish funding rewards bad behaviour” (with few positive outcomes)

Mick Fealty on May 3, 2013, 7:08 am

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Pete Shirlow was in Washington last night, briefing staffers on Capitol Hill about the current situation in Northern Ireland. The US – Ireland Alliance site has his report, which in turn draws on insight and data from two different surveys. Here’s how he opens: the peace process appears to be moving at two speeds in which some communities remain caught in a perpetual cycle of poverty, sectarian asperity and intra-community devotion whilst others are shifting into less antagonistic positions. These …

“They’ve had the time, they’ve had the money, they’ve had the opportunity…”

Mick Fealty on April 19, 2013, 6:09 pm

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Refreshing to hear someone call it as it is.. and John Cunningham of the Camlin Group certainly laid it on the line last night on The View… “It’s like watching children argue, arguing at school. What relevance does it have? Why don’t they put it all behind and really look and address the problems that we’re facing. “We’re not facing these arguments and these historical things are not going to change the way we go forward. “They’re only going to …

The political vacuum is compromising the standing of the PSNI

Brian Walker on March 5, 2013, 12:42 pm

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When criticism is made from both directions it’s often said that the subject of the criticism must be doing something right. I suspect that’s what Matt Baggott is thinking now over the rows about recent arrests on both sides of the divide. There is an alternative view of course; he may be getting it wrong across the board. Either way a small storm of whataboutery is blowing. It must not get out of hand. Willie Frazer is a hero to …

Collusion: Whitey Bulger and the FBI’s international trade off for domestic information

Mick Fealty on February 25, 2013, 10:42 am

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Fascinating piece by Ed Moloney on Whitey Bulger, an Irish Boston gangster who was ‘turned’ by the FBI relatively early in his long career of domestic crime, was later allowed a little international sideline: In 1975, Bulger agreed to become an FBI informer and was largely left alone by the authorities, who were mostly interested in what he knew about rival Mafia gangs. In 1994, his FBI handler tipped him off about an impending indictment and he fled Boston. For …

“Simply because if you fill in a form you could get charged with an offence”

Mick Fealty on February 22, 2013, 12:45 pm

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So, Mervyn Gibson rocked the boat on The View last night, when he noted the Orange may, after taking legal advice, choose not to notify the Parades Commission… Why? because one of the outcomes of the recent flag protest is a new ‘understanding’ that if you don’t notify the Parades Commission, there is nothing they can do. In other words, everything returns to the status quo ante; minus any form of prior notification being required by police or parades commission. …

Aftermath of a riot as it used to be done in Belfast…

Mick Fealty on February 22, 2013, 9:59 am

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The footage here is, I think, shot in the Beechmount area of west Belfast (I take correction on that) in 1988. No commentary, just raw footage. The presence of masked paramilitaries underlining the absence of security forces. Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

#Flegs: They haven’t gone away you know…

Mick Fealty on February 18, 2013, 1:28 pm

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There was a lot of upset Crusaders and Cliftonville supporters on Twitter at the weekend. Apparently flag protesters from other parts of Belfast (let’s call them predominantly Blues and Glens supporters) turned up at the away turnstiles to prevent Cliftonville’s majority Catholic support ingress to the ground. Result: the season’s big game between the two top clubs in the local Premier league gets call off. It hasn’t gone unnoticed elsewhere that the target was Cliftonville (currently sitting on a nice …

The bombing of McGurk’s Bar and the loss of innocence…

Mick Fealty on February 18, 2013, 10:03 am

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I meant to get this up on Slugger last week, but since I was out on the hoof from Tuesday to Thursday I never quite found the time to get to it. It’s a video pulled together from interviews conducted by Northern Visions of family members of the victims of the bomb at McGurk’s bar in New Lodge. There’s barely any politics in the first part, although it does give a flavour of the times with some fragmentary details of …

First Minister issues warning over alleged political connection to punishment shooting…

Mick Fealty on February 14, 2013, 10:06 am

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There’s little to say about this just yet other than to note that the return of punishment shootings in Belfast is hardly a sign of health in the so called peace process. A returning to old ways? The fact that the PSNI are questioning Sean Kelly, the man convicted of the Shankill bomb (and released on licence), will not do much for public confidence either. Indeed, it has already prompted the First Minister to issue the following statement: “The family …

Dolours Price and the human cost of armed revolution…

Mick Fealty on January 31, 2013, 10:32 am

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Very good piece from Kevin Myers in the Indo yesterday: Like many of their generation, they [the Price sisters] were hellbent on achieving the utterly unattainable: a united Ireland by force of arms. I knew a couple of their IRA Andersonstown colleagues, Mairead Farrell and Sean McDermott: intelligent and likeable, yet driven by a fearsome and quite lethal intensity, they did not expect to survive the struggle, and their fatalism was duly justified. He concludes: What a waste of a …

Micheál Martin – opportunism and cynicism of the very worst kind

Eoin O Broin on January 20, 2013, 10:48 am

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The award for opportunist of the week must surely go to Micheál Martin. His hastily written opinion piece in Wednesdays Irish News was a timely reminder of Fianna Fáil’s cynical approach to both the peace process and to politics. For weeks Belfast city centre has been brought to a standstill by illegal loyalist blockades. Night after night the same protestors have returned to their own neighborhoods and engaged in running battles with the PSNI causing real disruption to their own …

Ongoing #Flegs disturbances point to a chronic rather than acute failure in NI Politics…

Mick Fealty on January 14, 2013, 10:16 pm

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Richard Irvine writing in the Irish Times today makes a point worth considering… In fact the magnitude of the unionist victory is not only unchallenged by these Sinn Féin tactics, rather it is underscored. Unionists should be delighted that republicans have so little ambition that they can achieve only small and compromised symbolic victories like the flag-lowering. The real danger then to unionism’s triumph comes not from republicanism, not even dissident republicanism, but from themselves. In this crisis, with loyalist …

“In her hands golf balls which she said were thrown by her nationalist neighbours…”

Mick Fealty on January 14, 2013, 3:53 pm

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Worth watching this piece from Gerry Adams at a Presser at the weekend. “It is not spontaneous, it is not organic, it is orchestrated it is planned. This was a deliberate policy of coming to these so-called interface areas and attacking people only on the basis that they are Catholic.” Except here’s the UTV news from last week, which reports another version of the truth and a group of loyalist protesters returning from the centre of Belfast: Indeed, Mr Adams …

“…a disruptive loyalist protest outside an empty Leinster House on a busy retail day”

Mick Fealty on January 7, 2013, 3:23 pm

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So, now it is the SDLP who are getting it in the neck from the flag protesters. Patsy McGlone (who has said nothing on the matter, so far as Slugger is aware, but who is unfortunate enough to live in a UVF dominant part of the world) has had a bullet in the post. And Claire Hanna has had her house shot up. The Police Service of Northern Ireland has confirmed the incident involving East Belfast nationalist politician Claire Hanna …

We need fresher thinking than this

Brian Walker on January 3, 2013, 11:17 pm

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Two New Year articles worth noting which struggle with the abiding theme. Given prime billing in the Irish Times, Robin Wilson laments the anti-democratic and physical force elements in both of our traditions as we move further into the decade of commemoration. His historical sweep of a century reinforces his determinist case against the GFA accommodation, leading to his usual bleak conclusion. For Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, the Northern Ireland “peace process” was defined by a realpolitik where moral …

Stormont’s inaction driving the handcart back towards the brink of the past?

Mick Fealty on January 3, 2013, 7:52 am

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Or predictions thread for the year to come is still a work in progress, but you don’t need a crystal ball to tell you the shenanigans at the year end suggest that already Stormont’s institutions are having some difficulty staying in touch with where the politics of the street is moving. Alan Murray notes in yesterday’s Tele: …many of our politicians on both sides are out of touch with reality. Political current affairs programmes on our local television and radio channels …