“a 65% to 17% majority for Northern Ireland remaining in the UK suggests little room for doubt.”
Tweet From the conversation on BBC NI Spotlight tonight there are challenges for all the political parties in the results of the polling by Ipsos Mori. But here are the reported results on the constitutional question. Not surprisingly, more than 90% of those who identify themselves as Protestants told the pollsters they wanted to stay [...] more »
Irish Agriculture Minister: “Somebody is selling rogue product and somebody knows about it and is responsible.”
Tweet Still early days in the investigation into the discovery of more beef horse meat at a number of meat processing plants – and note Mick’s update here. However, the cause of the trace amounts of pork DNA and equine DNA in some ’beef’ products is still likely to be different. But there are a few quotes [...] more »
Detail on the tests on the stored meat in Newry…
Tweet Okay, after a day of confusion (some of it self inflicted on my part), as near as I think we have it, this is statement from Newry and Mourne District council, clarifying the situation of the meat at Freeza Meats, which had ONLY in storage (ie, not part of the production at that plant): [...] more »
Keep Slugger Lit For 2013
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Active Discussions
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“a 65% to 17% majority for Northern Ireland remaining in the UK suggests little room for doubt.” (15)
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The perils of being born in May or June: The Transfer Test (6)
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Richard III, history and the pressing needs of a modern university… (8)
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Belfast Project (Boston College tapes): “an invitation to people to engage in deep moral reflection on the consequences of war and political violence” (13)
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Irish Agriculture Minister: “Somebody is selling rogue product and somebody knows about it and is responsible.” (3)
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Farewell to Gaelscéal (31)
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Detail on the tests on the stored meat in Newry… (2)
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BTW, who did kidnap Kevin McGeever? (22)
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The Niedermayers and the cascading misery of our dirty little war… (56)
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Simon Coveney breaks the news of horse meat found in Newry plant… (12)
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Farewell to Gaelscéal
Tweet I am writing this article in English (though I will probably write something similar in Irish for Gaelscéal) because I want slugger fans, the majority of whom are English readers, to read it and engage with the issue, rather than get bogged down in whether or not it should be in Irish or English. [...] more »
Richard III, history and the pressing needs of a modern university…
Tweet I don’t know if you watched it, but C4 had a documentary on the uncovering of Richard III last night. R3, it seems, may have been more significant as a fictional character in Shakespeare than as an significant monarch in the history of the English state. A mere punctuation between prolonged civil war (as [...] more »
BTW, who did kidnap Kevin McGeever?
Tweet I’m grateful to Tom Sykes for collating the strange story of the kidnapping and imprisonment of Kevin McGeever. To be stored in the curious and strangely unexplained category… [Only legal answers to the rhetorical question in the title will be allowed...] more »
Simon Coveney breaks the news of horse meat found in Newry plant…
Tweet Last night, Simon Coveney was on Prime Time (4 minutes in) with Miriam O’Callaghan. Coveney is Agriculture Minister for the Republic but he is also chair of all the agriculture ministers across Europe just now by dint of Ireland’s Presidency of the European Union. He’s clearly in a very hot seat just now, and [...] more »
The Niedermayers and the cascading misery of our dirty little war…
Tweet At least, from time to time, someone remembers. Anne Marie Hourihane recalls just one terrible event out of many in the year 1973. Much as it is never far from my finger tips Lost Lives does not recall the interminable damage wrought on families long after their loved ones were taken in the midst [...] more »
Another problem in the meat distribution network?
Tweet Hmmm… Not what we needed… A Northern Irish company has been identified as the source of halal food found to contain traces of pork DNA. McColgan Quality Foods Limited in Strabane, Co Tyrone, insisted swift action has been taken to identify and isolate the products which are supplied to the UK Prison Service. In [...] more »
#Belfast2020: Future will have to be more integrated than its troubled past…
Tweet On Nuzhound this morning there are two stories one above the other, which demonstrate the problem of trying to manage Northern Ireland’s (and Belfast in particular) problems from the sidelines. John Simpson makes the blindingly obvious statement that integration is the key to Belfast’s woes. In many older parts of Belfast the population is [...] more »
Belfast Project (Boston College tapes): “an invitation to people to engage in deep moral reflection on the consequences of war and political violence”
Tweet The topic of the Belfast Project – an oral history of republican and loyalist paramilitaries that is archived in the Burns Library at Boston College – is one that Slugger O’Toole posters have been tracking for some time. Taking a step back from the latest developments to look at the project as a whole, [...] more »
An Irish Borgen?
Tweet Dyspeptic Scots columnist Kevin McKenna (now where did that name come from?) is so right when he says Scottish politics are too boring to mount a drama like Borgen. But then, Alex might reply that Scotland is not an independent country – yet. Staying glued to Borgen though fits perfectly into Scottish culture. Manfully, [...] more »
In the UK housing market it’s back to the 1970s
Tweet The ever widening gap in regional property values is spelt out in Mail Online is even more remorseless detail than the news section of its source, the upmarket estate agents Savils. Homes in the ten richest London boroughs are worth the combined total of houses in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it emerged yesterday. And [...] more »
Abiding human and economic ties between Ireland and Britain
Tweet David McWilliams this week had a useful reminder of just how close Republic remains to the UK, and not just through the land border we all love to obsess on. About three or four years I began to hear the fresh accent of working class Dublin begin to make itself heard on London platforms [...] more »
The perils of being born in May or June: The Transfer Test
Tweet Tomorrow morning, thousands of children will open envelopes to discover how they have performed in one (or both) of the unregulated transfer tests sat by Primary 7 pupils in November/ December of 2012. The arguments concerning the merits or otherwise of the test and academic selection at age 11 are well rehearsed and are [...] more »
Malcolm Brodie the magnificent
Tweet To a younger generation the spate of tributes to Malcolm Brodie, for a lifetime the sports editor of the Belfast Telegraph, may be a bit of a puzzle. “One of the greats,” a legend “ and so on may not be descriptions that you would easily associate with someone who gloried in the minutiae of [...] more »
Friday Thread: Why shared values and beliefs come before trust
Tweet One of the things we are seriously short of in Northern Ireland is ‘trust’. Trust, argues Simon Sinek, is not reliability, it springs from you share with others: What’s a nation? A single group of people with common set of values and beliefs.And the single biggest challenge that any culture or any organisation will [...] more »
Just saying: “Any crack? No. Youse all f***ed off”
Tweet Great stuff… more »
Health Protection Agency report backs up Edwin Poots
Tweet Last year there was some controversy over Northern Ireland Health Minister Edwin Poots refusing to lift the permanent ban on men who engage in gay sex from giving blood. Many wanted NI to come into line with the rest of the UK which insists the donor must not have had gay sex within the [...] more »
If Adams is a prisoner of his own past, can he provide a future for Sinn Fein?
Tweet Matt Cooper has a good piece on Gerry Adams, that contingent apology for the murder of Garda McCabe, the longer term problem of political credibility: …it was notable how the man who maintained that he was never a member of the IRA, let alone one of its most important leaders, could take it upon [...] more »
UK’s strongest constitutional card may be the very mildness of the loyalty it invokes…
Tweet John Lloyd argues that the moment for unity is over. I’m not sure I agree with him in that regard, in the sense that the moment has never yet appeared. Thus far, Sinn Fein’s call for a border poll has only served to emphasise a growing political distance between Northern Ireland and the south. [...] more »
Will unionism’s long 2012 be seen as the year when the wave broke?
Tweet With the #flegs protests seemingly diminishing, it seems like a good time to wrap up where 2012 has brought unionism, although it can be pretty much summed up in one word – crisis. It was a year in which there were early signs of modest progress visible to DUP leader Peter Robinson in March and by November he felt confident to proclaim that the constitutional debate [...] more »
The NI Planning Bill 2013: A goldmine for lawyers, a field day for objectors and a mess for the rest of us?
Tweet Planning law isn’t something that usually excites a lot of people, but hidden away in the Planning Bill, published on Monday 14th January is something that should arouse even the most flaccid of neo-liberals. Taken for granted by most of us, the planning system should act on behalf of all of us to ensure [...] more »
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Stay out of Libya: counterinsurgency doesn’t work
Tweet A moment of some significance in journalism perhaps, as the New York Times reviews the current talked about book, The Wrong War: Grit, St
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