The deal is done, the Conservative Party cabinet members have parted ways and the identity of the Leave campaign leadership in Britain has become clear (Boris apart.) But, locally, the political breakdown of the differing factions has been known for quite some time, and bears an uncanny resemblance to how things panned out in the more…
Here Trevor Ringland responds to Chris Donnelly’s proposal to co-opt the Irish Tricolour as the only way of resolving the raft of flag disputes. He argues that the issues left unresolved by the longest period of sustained political violence in Irish history cannot be addressed by returning to old arguments, but by creatively breaking new ground within more…
[But not Fermanagh and South Tyrone? – Ed] No. She tried that. It didn’t work. So the Sinn Féin Ard Chomhairle invented a constituency for her. Sinn Féin’s attempts to rewrite the past clearly have no time limit. Witness the party’s shenanigans over candidate selection in Fermanagh/South Tyrone for this year’s Northern Ireland Assembly election. more…
Will the debate over Europe provide a welcome distraction from the normal politicking during Assembly elections? Will it lift public and political heads out of purely local issues to think about the bigger picture and how Northern Ireland sees itself within Europe? Or will it heighten our identity politics?
There was so much violence back then. That year alone saw 98 people lose their lives. Like the violence itself, the people who died came from all perceived sides in the conflict. However, almost half those who died were recorded as ‘civilians’. I was a 15 year old civilian in the summer of 1987. Despite more…
John Bodkin Adams was born in 1899 in Randalstown, educated at Coleraine Inst, and qualified in medicine from Queen’s Belfast. He worked as a GP in Eastbourne on the Sussex coast. He was tried for murder in the 1950s, but acquitted. Subsequently, there have been suggestions of political interference at the highest levels in his more…
Introduction As we enter into the final week of what has been, so far at least, a flat and turgid election campaign; a few things are becoming increasingly clear. The first, and most important, is that there is no route available for this government to be re-elected. At the start of this campaign I predicted more…
A Belfast High Court judge has adjourned the application for a judicial review of the controversial new law criminalising the paying for sex following a last minute intervention by the Northern Ireland Attorney General on behalf of the Office of the NI First and Deputy First Ministers (OFMDFM). Interestingly, as the BBC report notes A barrister representing the more…
There will be no resolution to our vexed flags dispute unless and until the Irish National flag is afforded formal recognition within Northern Ireland. Three years ago today, I posted about a Platform for Change public discussion on the theme of Flags and Identity. Three years later and, apart from the loyalist flags protest dying more…
A poll for The SUN conducted by Lucid Talk online with 2,886 responses (balanced by gender, age, area of residence and community background) shows a majority at this stage voting to stay within the European Union. (The poll has a margin of error of 3.9%) The headline figures show that if a vote were held today more…
SOAPBOX – Ali FitzGibbon responds to yesterday’s post agreeing that the price of administering public resources can be disproportionate to the budget but arguing that participative budgeting would prone to localism, dominant interests and fails to capture the boundary-smashing, crazy adventure, the surprise and imaginative leaps that are the essence of the arts.
SPOTLIGHT ON SPOTLIGHT – The view from an audience member at the recording of Tuesday evening’s Spotlight debate. And a close encounter with two large rats on the way home!
As most of our regular readers know, I typically get a group of people together to review the party election broadcasts from the various parties in Northern Ireland. However, with the twists and turns in the current Irish general election, I thought it would be interesting do something similar for the party election broadcasts in more…
SLIGO LEITRIM: A new (four) two county constituency which looks set to give Leitrim back a TD at least. Inclusion of bits of Donegal and Cavan mean there will be strong geographical trend in the transfers. Look out for recrimination in Fine Gael if the three candidate strategy backfires.
FREE MARKET – why doesn’t it apply to the arts sector? Rather than calling for more funding for culture, why not use participatory budgeting and let the public decide on how at least some of the budget is spent?
David McBurney and Jonathan Bell (NI Open Government Network) argue that the growing gap between citizens and government can be bridged by a more open, generative approach to involvement in government monitoring and participation in policy making. There is a growing distance between people and their representatives and a general disaffection with politics. We are faced with more…
GAMING RTÉ: Sinn Féin is unhappy with the coverage it gets on RTÉ. The national broadcaster is obliged to provide proportionate coverage to all parties. Given a detailed report of GE2011 indicated a heavy bias towards SF and Labour, it is likely the party is just suffering a sharp corrective.
There’s been a decline in Bombardier’s business globally (not just NI). Specifically the new C Series jet has run into commercial trouble, not least because the fuel efficiency it hoped would be a strong selling point has been neutralised by the oil price collapse. According to the BBC… Bombardier Vice-President Michael Ryan said: “The whole global aerospace more…
RED FLAG – Will Paul Nolan and Dominic Bryan’s suggestion that politically expedient zero sum game if the Assembly legislates for all councils to fly the Union flag on 18 designated days, while local voluntary agreements offer the best way to tackle unpopular unofficial flags.
Imagine a Housing Minister and a Member of Parliament demanding a meeting with a Housing Association to oppose houses being built in their shared constituency in spite of the area being plagued by a lengthy housing waiting list. Well, imagine no more. The Irish News led with a story yesterday alleging that the then DUP more…
