Books
Against Remembrance – Seminar & Book by David Rieff
Is the best way to overcome the legacy of conflict simply to forget about it? Author and journalist David Rieff spoke on this subject last week in a seminar at the Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS) at Trinity College Dublin. Rieff has recently written a book titled, Against Remembrance (published in Ireland by Liffey [...] more »
The Irish political journalist’s problem with partial disclosure…
The nod and wink politics of Ireland’s last two or three decades as practised par excellence by Bertie, Albert and Charlie is ultimately what has the Republic in the stew it’s in. Don’t get me wrong, the effective monitoring of those exercising of power does not demand full disclosure of everything all the time. But [...] more »
Children of the Revolution (Bill Rolston)
What was life like for children of political activists during the Troubles? A new book by Bill Rolston and published by Guildhall Press during the summer has collected together the stories of twenty Children of the Revolution whose parents’ activities – and in many cases, imprisonment – had a significant affect on childhoods and life [...] more »
Great BIG Politics Quiz: prizes to vie for!
Courtesy of Stratagem, here’s the awesome prize list for the Great BIG Politics Quiz, supported by Slugger O’Toole, and being held next Thursday, 22 September at 7:45pm in the Black Box, Belfast. There’s enough in this valuable prize hamper to keep even the most anorakish of political anoraks going for quite some time – and plenty [...] more »
POTD – Corrected misspelling
As A follow on from yesterday’s POTD on Chichester St, this from the New Lodge. (ED Syntax corrected) more »
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday (Neil MacFarquhar)
With perhaps the longest title of any book I’ve read this year, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East gives an insight into the lives of people living in Middle East through the eyes of journalist Neil MacFarquhar. MacFarquhar’s father was a chemical engineer [...] more »
Do Words Matter?: Book Review of Political Discourse and Conflict Resolution – Debating Peace in Northern Ireland
I share many of the concerns of Andy Pollak, whose recent post ‘My Response to the Slugger Begrudgers’ zeroed in on the ‘relentless flow of negativity’ of some Slugger commentators. Pollak’s post was largely concerned with the medium of the blog. Indeed, I think the anonymity of the online world encourages extreme discourse and allows [...] more »
The ANC, the IRA and the rise of influence of the left within Sinn Fein…
World by Storm has a nice piece up on the IRA’s role in helping MK, the armed wing of the ANC, in the 1980s. In particular he sees a strange alchemy at work there: …if one can think of a clearly legitimate contemporary struggle it was that against apartheid and it is to the credit [...] more »
A poem for the day – Launching the Whaler Juan Peron
A Belfast epic, and one of my oldest poems, the opener of my first collection, Grub. The gist of the story was found in Moss & Hume’s Shipbuilders to the World: 125 Years of Harland and Wolff, Belfast, 1861-1986, which tells how Eva Peron was due to launch a huge whaling vessel in Belfast, built [...] more »
So what are you listening to right now?
Be it music or an audio book or the radio or tv or the chitter chatter of the particular environment that you find yourself browsing Slugger. What are you listening to? What’s on in the background as you surf slugger? Right now, as i post this, i’m listening to CW.Stoneking. What about you? more »
Spare us a phoney row about racism, we’ve got enough on
A silly media row about racism just had to figure in the riots’ post mortem. Was the Tudor history expert David Starkey racist on Newsnight when he said: The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in [...] more »
Learning from 1798?: Northern Ireland’s Upcoming Decade of Commemorations
Last year, the Lilliput Press released a new extended edition of Tom Dunne’s Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize winning book, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798. First published in 2004, Dunne’s book provoked considerable controversy with its critique of the ‘commemorationist’ history that Dunne believed dominated the 1998 commemorations of the 1798 Rebellion. The book blasted the involvement [...] more »
A poem for (yester) day – Affshore
In the early 90s I was living in Portmuck, Co Antrim, with a small child who thought the beach was where you lived, rain or shine, day or night. A gas pipeline was being laid between the Ayrshire and Antrim coasts, and the ‘supergun‘ scandal was in the news. Then the same news told us [...] more »
Sunday Supplement
It being Sunday, we’ve all got time to consider and ponder things at greater length than during the working week, yes? If it’s good enough for the Sunday papers, it’s good enough for this guest blogger. So here’s the review section… Actually, it’s my introduction to a book published last year, Goin’ Down Slow: selected [...] more »
Turas, by Colin Neill – a story of strangers in a strange land
Colin Neill’s first novel Turas peeks into a world in which many Ulster Protestants feel uncomfortable. It’s 2020 and the Irish unification that unionists and loyalists confidently predicted would never happen has become a reality. President Adams is ensconced in Phoenix Park. The newsreader reported that … a short ceremony at Stormont had confirmed the [...] more »
A poem for the day – Crowd Scene after Kung Fu – the Headcrusher
Alias raised a point last night about whether references in a poem to the facts or symbols or lexicon of local politics automatically made a poem political. And earlier in the week Pippakin said there was no reason why I should stick to ‘political’ pieces. This, then, started life as an exercise in 1970s nostalgia [...] more »
A poem for the day – The Pipe-bomber
This is another one from the late 90s, that I think is a response to or expression of a sense of depression at the low-level post-ceasefires violence from loyalist organisations that didn’t ‘get it’ or see anything in the ‘process’ for themselves or were just too plain sectarian to care (delete as applicable). Though I [...] more »
A poem for the day… Bonfire Makers
Mick has generously let me take up his offer to guest bloggers a while back, and the idea is that, a la Moochin Photoman, I’d post a poem a day for the month of August, with the odd book review or other more or less ‘cultural’ item thrown in. In deference to the appetites of [...] more »
Discussing e-books on BBC Radio Ulster Saturday Magazine
You never know where a blog posting will end up — on the back of my praise for Libraries NI making available e-books for loan via the Overdrive mobile application, I was asked to participate in a discussion on BBC Radio Ulster’s Saturday Magazine programme, presented by John Toal. The panel included Helen Osborn (Director [...] more »
How poetry fuelled the Arab Uprising
‘Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found its words’, like all great maxims, this musing of Robert Frost may seem on the face of it too suspiciously beautiful to hold any real truth. But with recent events in Egypt, the world watched as a nation which had long [...] more »
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