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
Posted in Current Affairs
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
Posted in Current Affairs
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
Posted in Current Affairs
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
Posted in Current Affairs
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
Posted in Current Affairs
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
Posted in Current Affairs
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
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A former IRA leader in east Tyrone has disputed claims that loyalists and republicans reached an “understanding” after a secret meeting in the early 1990s.
Fresh claims about the meeting have emerged just weeks after Sinn Féin MP Francie Molloy said he met two members of the UVF and a Protestant clergyman in a hotel car park near Dungannon. Read more
Posted in Current Affairs
In a packed Belfast hall, there is a silence as a set of new TV and radio adverts are given their first public airing.
They are chilling. The screams of a young lad, lying on the floor, calling for his mother after being shot in the knees, are difficult to listen to. Read more
Posted in Current Affairs
On August 22, 1972 Mary Casey’s father was killed along with eight others when an IRA bomb prematurely exploded at the Customs Office in Newry, she fears a hard Brexit could see customs checkpoints becoming targets again. Read more
Posted in Current Affairs