Journalist, author, broadcaster
Later this month, world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron will meet in the picturesque surroundings of the Lough Erne hotel in Fermanagh. Northern Irish politicians are hoping that the G8 summit will encourage tourism in the region, but many local campaigners believe that Fermanagh’s fabled natural beauty could be destroyed by plans for […]
The amount of vacant land in Belfast city centre is equivalent to the size of 265 football pitches, according to the Forum for Alternative Belfast. If this space was used efficiently, at least 50,000 more people could live within 20 minutes walk of central Belfast without the need for high-rise buildings or the destruction of […]
Unstated – an edited collection on the theme of Scottish independence – has already caused what Scots would call a stramash. The uproar began in December, just days before the volume was published, when excerpts of Alasdair Gray’s contribution, ‘Settlers and Colonists’, appeared in the Scottish press. Gray contended that since the 1970s, English men and […]
Belfast is often described as a patchwork quilt of conflicting loyalties. Most residents live on streets that are overwhelmingly nationalist or unionist. Imposing ‘peace walls’ physically divide communities one each another. This has long been the case on the Suffolk estate in West Belfast, where a small Protestant community of less than a thousand people […]
Apparently there were 43 illegal roadblocks in Belfast on Monday night. In a bar with Christmas lights on the ceiling, a hundred yards from a City Hall not flying the Union Jack, most drinkers were glued to their smart phones. The man beside me was scrolling through the #flegs hashtag on Twitter. (So was I.) His […]
In 2005, Northern Ireland’s joint Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister at Stormont published ‘A Shared Future’. The policy, an unashamedly irenic blueprint for a post-conflict society, included plans for addressing contentious issues such as flags and emblems and parading. Every government department would have to create action plans to ensure A […]
The proportion of Catholics in Northern Ireland has increased in the last decade, according to census figures released yesterday. The census shows that 48.36 per cent of the resident population are either Protestant or brought up Protestant, while over 45 per cent are Catholic or raised Catholic. The census, which was held in March 2011, […]
That security forces colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland during the Troubles has long been common knowledge, but David Cameron was right yesterday when he described the levels of state collusion uncovered by Sir Desmond de Silva QC as ‘shocking’. De Silva found that the men who murdered solicitor Pat Finucane at his home […]