Tag Archives | Northern Ireland

Karen says No. And she knows what’s good for us. Right?

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 […]

Continue Reading

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 […]

Continue Reading

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 […]

Continue Reading

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 […]

Continue Reading

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. […]

Continue Reading