History and ideas

The disaster of the 1970s: truisms in need of challenge?

Turgon on August 22, 2015, 5:59 pm

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As I noted previously in relation to the 1983 election campaign there is a tendency in political analysis to accept truisms which are historically inaccurate or at least highly incomplete. One of the recent manifestations of this tendency (also related to the current Labour leadership campaign) is that Corbyn is going to take the UK back to the 1970s: the implication being that this would be dreadful. Whilst I make no comment on whether or not Corbyn would do this, …

Despite the Haass setback we are not the prisoners of the past but masters of our own fate

Brian Walker on December 31, 2013, 10:22 am

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The issues of the Haass process are only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed it might be said that the talks were unlikely to succeed without rigorous challenge and examination of the beliefs and assumptions the parties brought to the table. Behind the tortuous details of flags, parades and the past are the competing narratives which need to be challenged and explored before we can reach the point of agreement of how to live with them. Beyond the groves of …

Drama shows best how much Northern Ireland has changed

Brian Walker on May 15, 2013, 3:00 pm

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The distinguished Arts commentator Mark Lawson has an interesting blog post in the Guardian pegged to the new BBC2 thriller series “The Fall,” set in Belfast and launched on Monday night. He uses it to discuss the impact of “British ” in the BBC. He rightly observes the big change, that it’s now Scotland with its independence debate where the “British” in” BBC” expresses more of an issue than it does in today’s Northern Ireland. However I think he gets “The Fall” slightly wrong, although the headline …

What is history for again?

Brian Walker on February 17, 2013, 11:26 am

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A growing row over Michael Gove’s proposed new history curriculum for England may well spark a bout of Brit bashing in Slugger and other places. Anything that seems to encourage the “great man theory “( History p 165 et seq)” of British history will be dumped on, but not only on this side of the water. One person’s theory of responsible British citizenship is another’s indulgence of imperial nostalgia and whitewash. On the row itself, the Observer report claims that even up …

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 …

Essex, Bacon and the early treachery of (Irish) politicians…

Mick Fealty on October 19, 2012, 9:45 am

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I used Google Plus to interview an old friend from schooldays to talk about a series of lectures he’s holding next week in the Linen Hall Library on one of the least considered and probably most pivotal moments in the history of Ulster. Dr Hiram Morgan looks at that critical period that led under the Scots King James the Sixth (First of England) to the thorough plantation of Ulster. It coincides with the rise (and establishment) of a professional political …

Eric Hobsbawm: a tarnished or triumphant reputation?

Brian Walker on October 2, 2012, 8:57 am

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How is it possible to be a major historian and an apologist for communism? It may depend on the breadth of your horizons. Without tackling the question head-on, Eric Hobsbawm who died yesterday at the age of 95 explained himself in his own terms on this fundamental point in the introduction to Age of Extremes :The short twentieth Century 1914-1991 he called The Century: a Bird’s Eye View. His synthesis on this most terrible and most transforming of centuries that …

Garret FitzGerald

Brian Walker on May 19, 2011, 9:13 am

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How sadly ironic that Garret FitzGerald should die at the moment when his main mission in politics has literally been crowned with fulfillment. In Towards a New Ireland and throughout his career he championed his big idea, uncomfortable to unreflective nationalists, that unionists were as Irish as they were and had to be understood in their own terms. This idea was accompanied by attacks on “partitionism,” the paradox of verbally aggressive but negative republicanism that only served to drive unionism further into …

Tony Judt

Brian Walker on August 10, 2010, 6:35 pm

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Tony Judt, the great historian of modern Europe, is dead from a terrible neurological disease. The news commands attention out of our usual box. Judt was not afraid to preach a social democratic humanism to fill the vacuum left by the end of ideological conflict. He was that rare thing for an Englishman- a public intellectual, although based on New York. Born an east end Jew, and later a volunteer serviceman in Israel, he caused uproar there by advocating a …