Northern Ireland has changed – and unionism has been left behind. But if the party can’t dominate, it won’t participate What will a unionist never do? Bend the knee. What will he never give? An inch. When will he change? Never, never, never. What will he do when his back is against the wall? Fight. What will he say when ...
(The Guardian, May 8, 2022) The Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, put it politely. It would be “undemocratic” for the Democratic Unionist party to refuse to form an executive in Belfast after the elections, he said. But the DUP will refuse to enter an executive, now that Sinn Féin has massively outpolled it, and a majority of Northern Ireland’s people has ...
The Guardian The road I grew up on in Drumahoe, on the outskirts of Derry, has been on the news lately, and not in a way that makes me proud. Journalists stand at its junction with the main road from Belfast, pointing up at the purple flag of the Parachute Regiment fluttering high on a lamp-post. They explain its significance ...
In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic tale, the civilised Jekyll, fascinated by the duality of his personality, manages to embody his evil side in the depraved Hyde, then finds he cannot control the transition between the two. Hyde runs amok. That’s Doug Beattie’s twitter account, firing out messages full of attitudes and ...
For young unionists, Irish unity is ‘just another issue’ alongside many others The artist Dermot Seymour once explained why his paintings often featured headless men: if you are a Protestant in the North you are not allowed to think for yourself, because “you might talk sense and that threatens their insecurities”. Your neck, he said, would be twisted until you ...
Parties which claim to uphold human rights have abandoned women (Irish Times Oct 26, 2021.) It was quite the “manel” on display last week when the leaders of the North’s main Christian churches, and their Council of Churches, gathered in the Church of Ireland’s cathedral in Armagh to mark the centenary of partition. Most quoted in the extensive news coverage ...
(The Guardian, 9/10/2021) A powerful new play has just opened at Belfast’s Lyric theatre. The Border Game, by Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney, is a fractured love story and a sharp political satire about the legacy of partition. Its setting is an abandoned customs hut on boggy ground beside a broken barbed-wire fence that marks the border between Northern Ireland, ...
(Irish Times) The sole survivor of the the IRA’s Kingsmill massacre has accused the Irish Government of hypocrisy and of “speaking out of both sides of its mouth” over its attitude to the legacy of the conflict in the North. Alan Black said the Government had spoken out last month against the British government’s decision to “draw a line” under ...
A campaign to stop Belfast’s first Irish-language preschool shows how dysfunctional unionist politics has become. (Susan McKay for The Guardian) The hard men of Ulster loyalism are adept at spotting Trojan horses. Belfast’s first Irish-language preschool, planned to open in September, wouldn’t get past them without a fight. This weekend, as the school announced it would look for another location, ...
Brian Feeney reviews "Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground" (Irish News) SUSAN McKay's new book, Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground, should be compulsory reading for both sides of the divide here: for nationalists, who only see their stereotype of northern Protestants confirmed by every utterance of unionist politicians; and for unionists also, who don't realise those same politicians don't represent the ...
(for The Guardian) In the early hours of a summer morning in 1991 Tom Oliver, a 43-year-old father of seven children, left his home in the border county of Louth in the Republic of Ireland to attend to a calving cow in a field on his farm in the Cooley mountains. Hours later, his body was found on a remote ...
If you want to see the 17th century squaring up to the 21st and letting it know what it thinks of it, come to Northern Ireland for the Twelfth of July. There, you will see huge, tall, wooden pyres set alight, on which the election posters of politicians deemed disloyal will be burned along with the flag of the neighbouring ...
Susan talks to Una and Andrea about her time in the Irish Press and its "downstairs office" (Mulligan's pub), her tenure at the Sunday Tribune and Vincent Browne's prowess as editor, her feminist politics and how that informs her work, and, of course, unionist politics. Una & Andrea's United Ireland · BYLINE: Susan McKay ...
Susan McKay on the lives of northern Protestants: "It's a full-blown crisis within Unionism" 21 years on from her book Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, Susan McKay revisits the lives of that community in her new book Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground. She talks to Irish Times' Arts & Culture Editor Hugh Linehan about the strong forces now acting on ...
(for the New York Times) BELFAST, Northern Ireland — It was meant to be a year of celebration. But Northern Ireland, created in 1921 when Britain carved six counties out of Ireland’s northeast, is not enjoying its centenary. Its most ardent upholders, the unionists who believe that the place they call “our wee country” is and must forever remain an ...
Twenty years after journalist Susan McKay wrote a book about Northern Protestants, she once more takes the temperature of the tradition right across society in the north with her new book, Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground. The publication comes at a time when the ground is indeed shifting, with the fall-out from Brexit and an increasing number of people wondering ...
And so it was that on the centenary of the day on which George V came to Belfast to open the first parliament in Northern Ireland, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson became the leader of the DUP, pledging to return from Westminster to reveal his “vision to lead unionism into its second century”. In 1921, the King urged that the new regime ...
DUP MP Gregory Campbell has been criticised for correcting author Susan McKay who said she was speaking from Derry at the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Himself an MP for East Londonderry, Mr Campbell told Ms McKay she “probably meant to say” she was speaking from Londonderry “but didn’t”. She replied: “I’m quite happy to call it Londonderry Mr ...
(from France 24) One of the many consequences of Brexit is the creation of a customs border in the Irish Sea, a move that for some in Northern Ireland has awakened old unionist fears of separation from the mainland. There's also been a lot of talk about the Northern Ireland Protocol stirring up dormant tensions between unionists and republicans. But ...
By Peter McGoran for Belfast Live Susan McKay's new book Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground, sheds a light on Protestant people in Northern Ireland from a wide range of backgrounds Susan McKay, author of new book Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground, has said that there is "diversity" in the Protestant community which often goes unrecognised at a political level, as ...
Susan McKay shares her musical memories and chats with Des on the Island about growing up in Derry during the Troubles, how she couldn't wait to leave, but quickly found herself returning to help set up the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre ...
The North has changed dramatically, and unionism, instead of celebrating the centenary of the foundation of the Northern Irish state it used to dominate, is in crisis (in the Irish Times) “It’s a limed nest, this place, I see a plain Presbyterian grace sour, then harden, As a free strenuous spirit changes To a servile defiance.../...it shouts For the Big ...
Three Families and the truth about abortion in Northern Ireland (The Guardian, May 11, 2021) "Waiting,” we are told in the BBC drama Three Families, “is all there is to it.” That intense, fraught, prolonged suspension of time, during which everyday life somehow has to go on, is one of the main themes of the two-part series. A young woman ...
(Irish Times, May 21) On Monday, Joel Keys, a 19-year-old part-time supermarket worker from Belfast, joined the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) which includes proscribed paramilitary organisations. On Wednesday he was sent out, dressed as if for a funeral in a black suit, white shirt and tie, to warn the British government that if it did not accede to his organisation’s ...
The DUP has wildly exaggerated the harms done by power sharing – and now Northern Ireland is slipping out of its grasp The Democratic Unionist party had a front-page ad in the Belfast News Letter yesterday. “This union works,” it declared. “Lets build for the #next100.” As the first minister and leader of the DUP, Arlene Foster should have been ...
(in The Guardian) Fearing democracy, the DUP and loyalist groups are retreating into a paranoid huddle A few of the boys and men asked about their alleged involvement in last week’s street violence in Northern Ireland spoke as if struggling to remember troubled dreams. A person was holding a plastic off-licence bag. They had already had a lot of drinks ...
(in The Guardian) With loyalists renouncing the Good Friday Agreement, the DUP must listen to others who share the country’s narrow ground Ian Paisley Jr did not inherit his late father’s brutal eloquence. Earlier this week, in protest at post-Brexit trade agreements for Northern Ireland, loyalist paramilitary groups wrote to the prime minister informing him they no longer supported the ...
(Irish Times, March 1 2021) As the Proud Boys are to Trump, so the loyalist paramilitaries are to the Democratic Unionist Party. They are what you are left with when democracy lets you down. “We will fight guerrilla warfare against this, until the big battle opportunity comes,” the DUP MP for East Antrim, Sammy Wilson, declared last weekend in respect ...
(for London Review of Books) Last month , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat ...
Do not underestimate the significance of the Northern Ireland rejection of the Tories’ ‘stay alert’ guidance for coronavirus The disuniting of the kingdom quickened pace this week, leaving the prime minister in freefall after his incoherent Sunday night speech, while the first minister of the Northern Ireland executive, DUP leader Arlene Foster, joined her Sinn Féin deputy first minister, Michelle ...
(Guardian, 21 Jul 2020) On 11 April 2015, Ella Parry stood beside her small pink car, outside her council flat in Shrewsbury, watching the road. She was waiting for her mother to drop off her 17-year-old sister, Becky. The sisters were planning to go shopping together in Chester. “Ella got into her car as we arrived, so I just caught ...
Irish Times, Nov 4, 2019 He was a showman, Gay Byrne, first and foremost, but he was a showman in Ireland, and that made all the difference. He made his name with a national broadcaster that was set up primarily to make the Irish people submit to government. That, in Byrne’s earliest years with RTÉ, meant that fear of the belt ...
…the deadly trade in diet pills (Guardian, 14 Aug 2020) DNP is an industrial chemical used in making explosives. If swallowed, it can cause a h orrible death – and yet it is still being aggressively marketed to vulnerable people online. Written by Susan McKay, read by Andrew McGregor and produced by Esther Opoku-Gyeni ...
Irish Times Jun 23, 2020. This country has to wake up. The whole society needs help coming to terms with the psychology of families in which there is child abuse.” Sophia McColgan said that to me in 1997, two years after her father was sentenced to 238 years in prison for multiple instances over many years of sexual and physical ...
(in the New Yorker) “Hello lovely,” she’d messaged me. “You in Derry anytime soon?” I loved Lyra’s easy way with affection. Twenty-nine years old, she was half my age. We’d become friends through writing and our shared obsession with Northern Ireland. I got back to her that, yes, I would be up to visit my mum that weekend, Easter weekend ...
Lyra McKee is dead. A beautiful young woman, brimful of life and love and creativity, has been sacrificed to the bigotry of people who could never in any imaginable circumstances be reconciled to peace. They say they are the true keepers of the republican flame, the defenders of the people of Derry. But today the people of Derry are among ...
How dare dissident republicans claim to ‘respect’ the writer. They have silenced a woman who told the stories of their forgotten victims (from The Guardian 19 April, 2019) “Derry tonight. Absolute madness.” That was Lyra McKee’s last tweet as she stood beside a police Land Rover watching young boys in masks hurling petrol bombs that smashed and flared on to ...
(The Guardian - Long Read) After a trial that dominated the news, the accused were all found not guilty. But the case had tapped into a deeper rage that has not died down. The verdicts were unanimous and came swiftly. After a trial that had lasted nine weeks, with four defendants and multiple charges, the jury deliberated for just under ...