story telling

Getting Derry the investment it needs will take an all-Northern Ireland mindset…

Mick Fealty on August 19, 2025, 11:36 am

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On Nolan on Friday we discussed Colum Eastwood’s claim that as an MP he often found it easier to get things done when Stormont was down than when it was up. He wasn’t advocating for abolition, but merely stating there’s a serious case to answer. His particular beef was the way the northwest and Derry in particular has been neglected in spite of the fact that city has had representation right at the top of the Stormont tree. Martin McGuinness …

Ireland needs new stories for a stable social compact in a protean digital era

Mick Fealty on August 21, 2017, 3:54 pm

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Good to see Fintan O’Toole dig a little deeper into the narratives which have helped construct Irish public life and, more importantly, sustain its public imagination and self-conception. This from the first in a series that assays some seriously under-regarded ground: …people do need a sense of collective purpose, a sense that there is something that they belong to and that belongs to them. All the evidence is that if one set of stories no longer makes sense, people do …

SF’s obscurantist use of ‘narrative’ and untying the knots in language to understand what is really being said…

Mick Fealty on March 18, 2014, 2:37 pm

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As mentioned at the time, Declan Kearney’s blog for the BelTel was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least that apparently disjunctured reference to ‘narrative’. Nowadays there are academics in place who study narrative not as part of literature, but as part of a separate study of how stories affect the way we perceive the world. Interestingly Dan Hodges recounts his first encounter with the phenomenon in New Labour: When I used to work for the Labour Party much of our time …