“against parties which are fundamentally sectarian..”

On today’s Politics Show, vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party Northern Ireland, Jeffrey Peel, set out his party’s case for the “electoral pact” [and more? - Ed] with the UUP.  Reaction round-up here. See also Michael’s noting of Tom Tim Roll-Pickering’s argument.

Pete Baker @ 02:01 PM | Comments (1)

Is Woolies’ time up?

There’s nothing like nostalgia to bring home the strength of the recession, as old fixtures of life start to slide.  Many on my generation will feel a pang at the news that Woolworth’s is fighting for it’s life. particularly at this time of year. 

Brian Walker @ 11:53 AM | Comments (4)

Hotline to No 10 at Stormont

Bob has the details of where Gordon Brown’s true confidantes are.

Michael Shilliday @ 10:02 PM | Comments (4)

“a party that aspires to offer all voters the chance to vote for it should not step aside”

Tory blogger Tom Roll-Pickering has his own view on who should stand where at the next general election.

At the end of the day any party has the right to stand wherever it likes (and can get nominated) and equally has the right to not stand. Seats belong to one, and only one, group of people - the voters of those seats. By all means parties can choose where to deploy candidates, but a party that aspires to offer all voters the chance to vote for it should not step aside, especially for a party that is elsewhere trying to exterminate it.

Michael Shilliday @ 10:00 PM | Comments (4)

The Thinkers..

I should probably point out that Typalyzer didn’t take very long at all before deciding which type of personality Slugger is.. Via Peter Robins at the Telegraph blog. Anyway.. here’s what they said about Slugger O’Toole

The Thinkers - The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

The case for the defence rests..

Pete Baker @ 09:19 PM | Comments (12)

Blasts from the past. Patriot priests?

Youtube is becoming an increasingly interesting resource and is being used as a form of open video archiving.

Tonight on irishrepublican.net I came across two pieces on republican priests.

Fr Patrick Ryan

Fr Pat Moloney

Mark McGregor @ 07:57 PM | Comments (11)

The basic cause of most of the trouble in the Congo right now is the intervention of outsiders

Spotted on one of my of my favourite websites/blogs on European and left politics, Spectrezine (I just love that name), is a piece from Tony Iltis, originally written for Green Left Weekly, on the ongoing conflict in the Congo and some of the causative factors for the decades long conflict in the region.

Mark McGregor @ 06:45 PM | Comments (2)

“Even Chamberlain had a piece of paper”

The BBC are reporting that Peter Robinson is claiming to have been private assurance that the army council has gone away permanently. The BBC are quoting him as saying: “It’s important that those who are in the leadership of the republican movement make it very clear publicly, as they have done to us privately, that the IRA is out of business for good and is not going to return.” This has drawn a predictably stinging response from Jim Allister “Even Chamberlain had a piece of paper, all Peter has are “private assurances” from the republican leadership - the same leadership which assures us Gerry Adams was never even in the IRA! “

Turgon @ 06:21 PM | Comments (24)

The ‘Scots-Irish’ in America

Professor Brian Walker from the School of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast has a piece published in the Irish Times today about the Scots-Irish in America.

He points out that over half of some 40 million people who gave their country of origin as Ireland are actually of Protestant ascent. He also points out that many were Ulster Presbyterians, descending from Scotland in the 17th-century:

“To explain this situation attention now focused on the Scots Irish. The first waves of emigrants from Ireland to America in the eighteenth century consisted largely of Ulster Presbyterians, numbering about a quarter of a million people, who were descendants of 17th-century Scottish immigrants to Ireland. Due to their early arrival and thanks to a multiplier factor, it was argued, their descendants made up a major part of those in America with an Irish background.”

The article offers interesting reading and shines a light on the extent of immigration by Protestants, of Scotish origin, from Ireland to America. I recalled when reading the article the story from the Ulster-Scots musical ‘On Eagles Wings’.

Andrew Charles @ 04:42 PM | Comments (37)

“I was not seeking to endorse such cynical exploitation of people’s prejudices..”

The corrective to a David Adams article on Thursday, from Adrian Guelke of Queen’s University, in today’s Irish Times letters page brings some welcome clarity to Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams’ recent invocation of Afrikaners.  From Adrian Guelke

What Gerry Adams was doing in his New York speech was invoking a previous negative stereotype of Afrikaners to criticise people he considered hardline Unionists. A listener raised the use of negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups, such as the Serbs. I responded by noting that in the recent conflict between Georgia and Russia, the existence of a negative stereotype of the Russians dating from the Soviet era had made it easy for a number of Western politicians to blame Russia for a conflict that had in fact been initiated by Georgia. In saying sadly that this was the way of the world, I was not seeking to endorse such cynical exploitation of people’s prejudices but simply to acknowledge that demonisation of whole nations can be an effective political ploy.  I was not saying I liked this reality.

Pete Baker @ 01:52 PM | Comments (16)

Irish banks tottering

With US banking giant Citygroup on the brink while publicly protesting it has sufficient assets, the same applies writ small to Irish-owned banks.  The Sunday Times, with its greater distance from the Irish fray accuses them of covering up the worst, but they’re not alone. The whole Dublin establishment, politicians, business and media are trying to contain a crisis which as elsewhere has exposed the fact that with world bank lending in freeze, state guarantees to banks are not enough. The choice, debated in Irish Times correspondence seems to lie between the disappearance of independent Irish banks altogether and state recapitalisation and mergers. The banks’ vulnerablity can’t be doubted.

Brian Walker @ 09:48 AM | Comments (14)

“but he was motivated by the desire to establish uniform circular motion”

Will Crawley has a good post [and links] on the apparent identification of the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus in Poland - assuming that the hair found in a book once owned by the astronomer was his.  But there’s an interesting caveat to the story in this Cambridge University hosted Copernicus biography.  Btw, Heidemarie Stefanshyn Piper says ‘thanks’. Galileo Galilei, maybe not so much.

Copernicus is often portrayed as a revolutionary figure who advocated a heliocentric system, overthrowing existing systems and institutions. Yet, his monumental work, the De Revolutionibus, is far from a revolutionary manifesto for modern astronomy. Copernicus is known to have carried out many observations (though he explicitly mentions only about 27), and none seems to have been crucial for formulating his theory. The work follows closely the structure of Ptolemy’s Almagest, it is based on parameters and data from Ptolemy, and his dedication to the Pope is written in a fashionable style. He does indeed provide a model of the universe in which the earth and all the other planets orbit around the sun and the earth acquired a daily rotation, but the sun itself was not quite in the center of that universe. He established the order of planets and devised a system which accounted for the movements of planets without equants, but he was motivated by the desire to establish uniform circular motion, itself a classical ideal. Copernicus certainly believed that this was the true system of the physical universe, but this conviction was not shared widely by his contemporaries for various reasons.

Pete Baker @ 10:55 PM | Comments (1)

Wot no Ulster Scots..?

Is gra liom ar an mead seo ar an suíomh gréasáin ríoga Briotanach nua seo: “Tapadh leibh airson tadhal air làrach-lìn oifigeil Monarcachd Bhreatainn...” It is Gaelic, but not as we know it Jim…

Mick Fealty @ 10:43 PM | Comments (11)

General election faint sweat

We’re having the election in June next year,” Peter Mandelson, the business secretary, told journalists at a drinks party last week, with a stage wink. In case anyone missed it, he added: “That was a joke.” But around Westminster, the idea is now being discussed with utmost seriousness.

It was the long time Brown mentor and bank roller Geoffrey Robertson who fuelled the speculation with the Evening Standard, said Standard stable mate Mail pol ed Ben Brogan in his blog today, while over in the news pages he ran Brown’s denial on Radio 2. No repeat then of last year’s near fatal fumbling over an election date. The denial is very plausible of a super Tuesday June 4 general election with the Euros and the English councils.  But as a reality and looked at locally, would it choke off at birth any faint hopes of an early UU revival in a Conservative brand?  Or would the time be ripe to unveil the Colonel for –er- south Belfast er - –umm -south Antrim?

Brian Walker @ 10:35 PM | Comments (10)

Crimbo idea for the training wheels leftie in your life

A few years ago I received John Lee Anderson’s epic biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life in my Christmas stocking and to be honest, regardless of the detail and it’s billing as the seminal work on a figure I’m reasonably interested in, I just never had the time or dedication to finish it.

This year I’m setting the bar a little lower and hoping someone dear to me will splash out on Spain Rodriguez’s graphic novel Che: A Graphic Biography.

I’m sure some may think a ‘comic’ on the life of a major leftist icon seems a little trashy or cheap but this comes from the pen of the man that brought us, possibly the first (only?) Marxist comic book superhero, Trashman. It’s bound to be worth a read for those that share the twin youthful delights of comics and socialist politics.

Mark McGregor @ 08:48 PM | Comments (26)

Tories end tax squabble, but Brown has left them standing…

On the right side of British politics there has been a long term tussle over taxation in play for some time. Some seem to think it has been resolved now, but the solution they appear to have chosen (fiscal tightening of public expenditure) looks as though they could be missing some more pressing issues in the global market place. Over on Brassneck I argue that there is a cultural problem attached to the fiscal issues the Tories want to address in government… In the meantime, decrying the appalling fiscal irrectitude of Brown only gets you so far. But you don’t have to dig very deeply to find the roots of that ‘boom’ in public sector spending in the long public ‘bust of the eighties and early nineties.

Whatever the day to day victories in the Commons, the Tories are now the ones faced with having to play catch up…

Mick Fealty @ 07:51 PM | Comments (39)

If you rattle the begging bowl do it with dignity

From the FT’s report on the implications of devolving policing and justice. this Gregory Campbell quote:

“If the government does not agree to cover all this over the next three years, I cannot see how we can go ahead with the devolution of policing and justice. We are not prepared to put up the money.”

No doubt there’s a proper financial case to be made. Fair enough.  But MLAs don’t fully realise how badly this sort of hollow backmail threat goes down with the whole of the political and official world over here, coming from people who think they deserve a reward for normal behaviour. To give them credit Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness and Nigel Dodds adopt a more hard headed approach.

The parties have put a joint request to Gordon Brown to provide Northern Ireland with more money. They met him in Downing Street on Wednesday, and reported yesterday that he had agreed to £900m of additional funds.

Brian Walker @ 04:58 PM | Comments (12)

On the Irish Republic’s thin grasp of Irish geography…

“When I was at school...” was always a presage to my mother telling me some obvious truth about the spellings or the sums I’d just got wrong for the millionth time… Later when we did geography at school we learned our Irish geography from a book that had been coincidentally written by a teacher at the local state grammar… Provinces, counties, rivers, mountain ranges, county towns… Now it seems in the last ten to fifteen years the people in the southern state have been slowly excising the mad old uncle from its memory: “The North, as far as Dublin was concerned, was the attic in which the mad old uncle might be allowed to drink himself to death.”: O’Neill links this priceless piece from Squinter:

Mick Fealty @ 04:41 PM | Comments (38)

“The Executive has agreed..”

According to the official statement following the first Northern Ireland Executive meeting for 154 days.

The Executive also agreed the establishment of the Education and Skills Authority (ESA) which is a key part of the Review of Public Administration and heralds a wholesale reform and modernisation of the education system.

Except that the original target date set for the ESA to be operational was 1 April 2008 - as noted when the Chief Executive Designate was appointed in December 2006. Then, in July 2007 the Education Minister, Sinn Féin’s Caitríona Ruane, announced a new deadline - agreed by the Executive.

“The Executive has agreed that I should progress my proposal to establish the Education and Skills Authority (ESA) and have it operational by April 2009 at the latest.”

So what they appear to have actually done yesterday, was to give the Minister an extension on that deadline - to 1 January 2010. BBC report here.

Pete Baker @ 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

UUP Tory Pact blog round up

Quickly, Cranmer was one of the first big Tory bloggers out of the blocks with the story… though far from being foisted upon the good Conservative burghers of North Down His Grace may find that North Down in my lifetime has never returned anything other than a maverick of left and right… According to private party research, Slugger understands that Lady Hermon is there for about as long as she chooses…

Update: Reader Ann upbraids me for leaving out Iain Dale (who must have posted after I posted this)…

Mick Fealty @ 04:03 PM | Comments (10)

“Blackbird over Lagan water”

On its fifth anniversary the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry has an exhibition of images of The Blackbird of Belfast Lough - poet Ciaran Carson explains why it’s the Centre’s emblem and the Guardian has some of the images from the exhibition whilst Ian Sansom, writing at the Guardian’s bookblog, claims responsibility. “This weird little scrap of Irish syllabic verse, probably from the 9th century, consists of just 24 syllables, broken up into eight short lines, which have somehow continued to echo in modern Irish verse: the little lyric seems to have stuck; it has proved itself, in Seamus Heaney’s words, to have “staying power".”

Int én bec
ro léc feit
do rinn guip
glanbuidi

fo-ceird faíd
ós Loch Laíg,
lon do chraíb
charnbuidi

Pete Baker @ 01:40 PM | Comments (16)

Slugger’s Daily Blogburst…

No UUP/Tory link up stories in this today, I’ll be doing a separate round up later (so get your blogs written up - pro and anti!)… Kicking off, the killing of Shane Geoghegan in Limerick last week has kicked off a whole tranche of discussion on Crime in the Republic… Over at the Irish Left Review, Paul O’Mahony notes the contrast in the heightened coverage now with the normally complacent view of gangland murders… In this podcast, O’Mahony inveighs against the normal reactive/regressive response to crime in Ireland… You can also catch him on last week’s Saturday View…

Mick Fealty @ 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

“None of your driveling, mindless comments..”

Or, and now for something completely different.. well, not completely different, but it’s an intelligent reponse - the Monty Python channel on YouTube.

Pete Baker @ 10:45 AM | Comments (7)

US advocates world powersharing as its own power wanes up to the mid century

With that particular intelligence community’s capacity for getting it wrong, the US’s intelligence assessment of the dispersal of power in the world by 2025 might deserve a cynical reaction, were it not for the fact that much of it is a statement of the glaringly obvious.  Remember the health warning though, that it’s the role of intelligence agencies to warn about threats rather than present opportunities or give a balanced view.
”

It is not a prediction.... “Nothing that we have identified in this report is determinative. Nothing in it is inevitable or immutable. These are trends and developments and drivers that are subject to policy intervention and manipulation.”

The key message is an admission of the decline of American power which the Iraq fiasco has only confirmed ( though they don’t say that).

The multiplicity of influential actors and distrust of vast power means less room for the US to call the shots without the support of strong partnerships.

What had the rest of the world been telling Dubya for years?  But The New York Times detects a glimmer of light.

“The appeal of terrorism is waning…

Brian Walker @ 10:22 AM | Comments (9)

Bertie: 51% plus one is not enough…

If it seems strange that the Belfast Telegraph is reporting this statement from Bertie just two days after he made a speech saying unification was an imperative for southern nationalists:

“The only way it can be done is if there’s a sizeable amount of people on the island of Ireland, North and South, believe this is the way forward. Fifty per cent plus one is not the way to do it. That would be a divisive thing to do. There’s no point having votes to find out that you’re 1 percent short or 1 percent over. That’s not the way to do it.”

It’s because that’s how he was thinking when Frank Millar interviewed him for his book “The Triumph of Politics"… Yet the truth is that the two things are not as irreconcilable as they may seem from a northern nationalist perspective. Such an approach however asks serious questions of the politics of confrontation (or rather non-confrontation) that dominated Sinn Fein’s 153 day long ‘civil action’ in the heart of government.

Mick Fealty @ 09:55 AM | Comments (117)