Category Archives: Current Affairs

The tourism industry in Northern Ireland has been flourishing in recent years – visitors from around the world flock to the Giant’s Causeway, Titanic Belfast and filming locations for TV series Game of Thrones.

But there’s another side to the tourist trail. Troubles-related conflict tourism is booming as thousands queue up to visit places they’ve seen on TV or read about in books. Read more »

The ‘disappearance’ of a widowed mother of 10 remains one of the most shocking IRA killings of the Troubles. In this extract from a new book, Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker inquires into the Price sisters’ role in her death

Jean McConville was 38 when she disappeared and had spent nearly half her life either pregnant or recovering from childbirth. She brought 14 children to term and lost four of them, leaving her with 10 kids ranging in age from Anne, 20, to Billy and Jim, the sweet-eyed twins who were six. Read more »

If you can’t see a problem, then you can’t fix it; and if you can’t see, or won’t accept, that you are part of that problem, then the route out of that predicament becomes all the more challenging to navigate.

After almost 650 days without government on the political hill at Stormont, the question is shifting – no longer when a functioning government will be restored but, rather, if it will be restored. Read more »

The week from the 23rd to the 30th October 1993 saw twenty four people lose their lives in one of the bloodiest weeks of the ‘Troubles’.

The killing started with the Shankill Bomb on the Saturday and there were other killings during the week, before concluding with the Greysteel Massacre on the following Saturday. Read more »

Statement by Ed Moloney, former director of Boston College Oral History Archive:

The judgement by the Belfast High Court today upholding the PSNI-Boston College action to confiscate the tapes of interviews given by the project’s republican co-ordinator and principal interviewer, Anthony McIntyre comes as no surprise to those of us who have witnessed this process since it began over seven long years ago. Read more »

IT WAS the horror 25 years ago which was the catalyst for a series of tragedies that brought the peace process back from the knife edge. Bimpe Archer hears how, even in the darkest days after the Shankill Bomb, compassion flowed across the sectarian divide.

“WE BELIEVE it was the beginning of the end of what was called the Troubles – the madness had stooped so low it couldn’t get any lower.” Read more »

The Daily Mirror leads with a mental health story, an academic’s warning that trauma from the Troubles has been been passed to unborn children.

Research shows some evidence that a parent’s trauma can affect the genes passed to their children, Professor Siobhan O’Neill from Ulster University said. Read more »

Think about what is happening inside the Northern Ireland Office right now, and what is due to happen in New York in just a few days time.

In Belfast and London, there are decisions to be made on the responses to the legacy consultation; decisions on what next after asking questions on a proposed structure involving a new Historical Investigations Unit (HIU), an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR), an Oral History Archive and a reconciliation element. Read more »

The Case for the United Kingdom

Recently there has been some debate from members of the public in Northern Ireland as to the Benefits of the United Kingdom, this got my old grey cells thinking so I have listed a few which comes to mind : Read more »