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 ...
(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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
(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 ...