The Brexit debate has released a tsunami of irony which is in danger of drowning us all. If you’ve not been living in an octupus’s garden you’ll know that Arlene Foster is very fond of the UK. The other day she drew a shimmering picture of the outward-looking, multi-ethnic, twenty-first century desirability of it all. And […]
Tag Archives | Northern Ireland
The growing Catholic/nationalist population: is it the death-knell of unionism?
Few people today would dispute that, when the state of Northern Ireland was set up in 1921, the intention was that it would have a permanent Protestant/unionist majority. But the state didn’t rely simply on a contorted line on the map. Gerrymandering and discrimination were put in place, to keep nationalists politically neutered. Derry was […]
‘Who Fears to Speak of Fairness and Equality?’ by Catherine Kelly
Catherine Kelly is a native of Carrickmore, Co. Tyrone. She is currently a doctoral student at SUNY Albany, focusing on political rhetoric from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. She is a graduate of Columbia University, New York and Queen’s University, Belfast. In the recent election in Northern Ireland, one party campaigned on the time –honoured […]
Democracy by Joe McVeigh
For all our experience of elections and referendums here in the six counties there is still in some British and unionist quarters a great reluctance to accept the democratic will of the people. There is a reluctance to accept that in the north east of Ireland there are people living here like myself who have […]
The Boundary Commission and democracy
Odd, isn’t it, how little attention we pay to the creation of constituencies. In the good old bad old days, nationalists and republicans knew that wards and boundaries were mapped out so that the result would be a unionist majority wherever possible – and even where seemingly impossible, as was the case in Derry, where […]
Thinking the unthinkable
It’s a terrible thing to say, but there must have been newsmen and women who were glad to hear about that huge bomb in Baghdad the other day which killed over a hundred people. Not that newsmen and women are more heartless than the rest of us; it’s just that some of them must have […]
YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!! by Harry McAvinchy
I’m having a John McEnroe moment . You might remember the tennis player’s exasperated outcry at Wimbleton all those years ago. He was a “punk” tennis player back then …a Young Turk of Tennis, prone to explosions of ire and fury….Very, very entertaining amid the strawberries and cream decorum and all that blazered gentility. […]