Every word will be scrutinised – when the fine detail of the north Belfast marching formula is revealed.

This is not just about unblocking a parading route from the Woodvale up part of the Crumlin Road – and it is not just about marching and protesting.

Think of the policing money that runs down the drain at this time every year and upon what else it could be spent – and think also of the battered image of Belfast and how this place, supposedly at peace, is undermined.

There is nothing dramatically new about the proposed agreement.

This idea of a return march to complete the banned 2013 twelfth parade has been on the table before – as a last return march.

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His life story spans the ‘war’ and the ‘peace’ of this place – a place of conflict that has now been given the chance of something better.

Yes, it is also a place still terrorised and traumatised by what we call The Past – the hell it has been through and in which many still live – a past understated and perhaps even trivialised in the oft-used term ‘the Troubles’.
We have all fallen into the way of that understatement, that easy and convenient use of a phrase that says nothing and means nothing.

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The article below is taken from the latest online edition of The Detail, the web-based current affairs magazine and stablemate of Trevor Birney’s growing film production empire which recently released, via Fine Point Films, a docudrama about Bobby Sands called ‘66 Days‘.

I have read this piece several times. It is based on a speech given by SF MEP Matt Carthy and no matter how I hold it – up to the light, sideways, upside down or at various angles – it seems to be saying the same thing: the Good Friday Agreement is as good as it gets, folks!

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Words of wisdom, or the way out to the wilderness – that’s how Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt’s announcement that his party will go into official opposition in the Stormont Assembly will be judged.

Unlike the Dail in Dublin, which after weeks of wrangling has finally agreed a minority Fine Gael government, the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein will dominate the Stormont power-sharing Executive with 66 seats between them out of 108 in the Assembly.

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Pearse and Carson by the late Joe McWilliams

Easter, 1916 – a terrible beauty was born. It had a dark and little seen twin; a terrible ignorance of the people of the North. 

South of the border, the Easter Rising is almost universally acclaimed. A singular understanding of history imposed, and a singular way of being Irish understood. Professor Michael Laffan wrote:

“When I was a schoolboy… reading Carter’s history of Ireland, more space was devoted to Pearse than to all the other leaders put together or to the Easter Rising. There was almost a state-imposed distortion whereby not only are the Irishmen who fought in the British army in the First World War airbrushed out, the constitutionalist tradition was seen as a dead end.”

Not only did Ireland of the twentieth century airbrush the constitutionalist tradition, they erased the avatar of a loyal Irish-British person and burnt the hard-drive.

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