Personal Legacy
I had a friend big and strong, during the days we got along,
Out of school and on the street, play was simple, we done no wrong.
Cowboys and Indians, fish and chips, lolly pops and onion rings.
Collecting the boney, watching TV, we would talk for hours of many things.
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George Bernard Shaw portended Northern Ireland as “an autonomous political lunatic asylum”. How right he was. I’m not sure that was the creator’s intention, however. Read more
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Back in the late 1980’s I got to know a guy who was an Inspector in the RUC, a very interesting character, a Catholic policeman incidentally, who could sometimes be quite forthright in his views on the force he worked for.
That he didn’t care who knew we were friendly was evident by an invitation one time to meet in the canteen of the police station where he was headquartered, in full sight of colleagues and canteen staff. I could never work out why but I suspect he had a reason. Read more
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A war hero was elected to the Assembly as he buried his 15-month grandson.
Ulster Unionist Doug Beattie, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, won a seat in the Upper Bann constituency days after his family was shattered by the sudden death of Cameron Tindale. Read more
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TRUTH RECOVERY, THE JANUS EFFECT AND LEGACY ISSUES.
Many political commentators, representatives of victims groups, traditional nationalists and unionists and ‘assorted others’ hope that the recent elections to Stormont will herald, finally, a move towards full truth recovery and the mixture of retribution, revenge, recognition and support that will surely follow. The ‘victims’ lobby firmly believe that they have been seriously overlooked and probably re-victimised by the failure of successive Stormont initiatives in general and by a succession of Secretarys of State in particular. Most people would have some degree of sympathy with victims on this issue. It seems that when the ‘peace process discussions’ reached the ‘home straight’, attention to detail on the ‘victims issue’ was overlooked in order to get the agreement over the line, so to speak. This is now coming back to bite us all on the bum. The debacle of the ‘on the runs’ and other unpalatable decisions introduced by Blair and his acolytes have had the media ‘spotlight’ shone on them and it’s now the time for victims and survivors to take centre stage. Read more
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By Dr John Coulter
9/5/2016
Introducing compulsory voting, lowering the voting age to at least 16, and making Citizenship Studies on the importance of the ballot box part of the school curriculum should be three crucial parts of the planned Programme for Government over the next five-year Assembly mandate.
The outcome of the Stormont poll can be easily summarised: compared to 2011, the DUP, UUP, Alliance, Independent and TUV got the same final tally of seats; Sinn Fein lost one seat in its tally; the SDLP lost two; the Greens up one, and the Left-wing People Before Profit Alliance won two. Read more
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Tonight is the one hundreth anniversary of the death of my great great uncle during a German bombardment of the trenches after a succesful trench raid by the Ulstermen – a talk was recently held in the Masonic Hall (the old Tamlaght / St Lukes Church of Ireland Church Hall), Coagh on Private Robert Sands and other men from Coagh who died in the Great War.
In this centenary year of the Battle of the Somme the tragic and brutal slaughter of the Great War`s must never be forgotten. The freedom`s and civil & religious liberties we cherish should never be taken for granted. 100 years ago one of my forebears, Robert Sands, made the ultimate sacrifice as part of the 36th Ulster Division. Our family cherishes the memorabilia we have including a portrait, a hand made stick carved by Robert Sands, his medals, his will and enlistment certificates for both Robert & his brother David Sands issued by the authorities in Ireland from Dublin Castle.
The Sands family & myself (my mother is Sands) still live in the same townland of Urbal 100 years later – the same house in fact.
The Inniskillingers, Foot and Dragoons can be traced back to 1688 and the Battle of the Boyne.
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Two pictures tell the tale. The first was taken in 1983 in the aftermath of that year’s British general election, the second on Friday in the wake of the Assembly election count in West Belfast.
Gerry Adams is carried shoulder high by jubilant supporters after the Sinn Fein leader won the West Belfast seat in the June 1983 Westminster general election.
Gerry Carroll is carried shoulder high by jubilant supporters after the People Before Profit (PBP) candidate topped the poll in Friday’s NI Assembly election count in West Belfast
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The Short Strand housing estate is a fiercely republican enclave in predominantly loyalist east Belfast. In these tightly packed streets, several thousand Catholics hunker down in an area of tens of thousands of Protestants. Close by one of the major routes of Orange Order marches, the Short Strand has long been a flashpoint. It was here that the IRA fought one of the first battles of the Troubles, resulting in three dead and 26 wounded. And there are still problems, with what some rather stupidly call “recreational rioting”. Stones and worse are regularly thrown over the peace wall separating the communities.
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