Longkesh Inside Out

Are we all just victims of Domestic Abuse?

Listening recently to the various discussions about the IRA and the ‘will they, won’t they say sorry’ debate reminded me about the plight of victims of domestic abuse.

Ever since Declan Kearney penned a piece for the IRA’s, (sorry they don’t exist anymore), for Sinn Fein’s news sheet An Phoblacht this debate has been taken up by journalists and some politicians. The Sinn Fein PR machine is in overdrive and is working towards some sort of response once they feel the time is right and enough people will be seduced by their words.

Read more »

Developing Community Leadership and Community Organizations

 William Mitchell

With so much media attention this week to one mural in south Belfast what is it about Northern Ireland that has us fixated with images on walls?  Changing from one image to another will not necessarily change how people think.  What is more important is to work with the mindsets of the people in the community so that they begin reimagining life.  Another contentious mural in Belfast is the one which dominates the landscape of Mount Vernon.  However, a former UVF political prisoner has been working tirelessly for years to transform the lives of those who live behind the mural and how they are perceived by others.  Read here about his attempts.

Read more »

Ex-BLANKET commentator DR. JOHN COULTER is a columnist with the British Labour Party’s Tribune magazine. He argues if the Labour Party can organise among the Loyalist working class, it can outflank the Tories’ latest Northern Ireland venture.

Read more »

Do you know anything about mixing colours?  Red and blue make purple….red and yellow=orange.  But what happens when you mix green and orange–what do you get then?

Read more »

As the 1st of July fast approaches many of us will be involved in remembrance services for those who died at the Somme on that day in 1916.  Luckily the vast majority of us will never know the horrors those men endured.  This short poem tries to capture the fears the men would have experienced in the moments leading up to going over the top of the trenches that morning.

Read more »

DELUDED— AND CLINGING ON BY THEIR FINGER NAILS

 An interesting article in yesterday Irish News—and that is something you very rarely say about his weekly column—from the top class apologist for Sinn Fein, Jimmy Gibney.  Not so genial Jim is commenting on the previous days staged events when his former Commander in Chief Martin McGuiness shook the hand of his reigning Monarch, Queen Elizabeth the Second.

Read more »

As an ex-Royal Ulster Rifleman, Ex-Royal Irish Ranger, ex-Belfast Fireman, and ex-Loyalist Political Prisoner, I am totally disgusted with  this latest act of treachery by this cowardly British Government.

Read more »