Journalist, author, broadcaster
BELFAST — So far, 2015 has hardly been a vintage summer in Northern Ireland — and not just on account of the unseasonably cold weather. In recent weeks this small corner of the United Kingdom has witnessed clashes between police and pro-union marching bands, and ongoing attacks against security forces by Irish republicans opposed to […]
Belfast’s Shankill Road is among the most deprived in the whole of the United Kingdom [Peter Geoghegen/Al Jazeera] Belfast, Northern Ireland – Political allegiances are hard to miss on the Shankill Road, a short drive from Belfast’s city centre. Red, white, and blue bunting and union flags line the street. Shoppers pass a peeling mural […]
Belfast – On Sunday morning, prominent Irish politician Gerry Adams woke alone in a cell in Antrim police station. By the following evening, the Sinn Fein president was stepping onto a podium at an election rally at the Devenish Centre, West Belfast as an 800-strong crowd chanted his name. Adams, who smiled widely, did not look […]
Picture: Detail from a similar mural taken in 2007 by PPCC Antifa on Flickr A new mural in Belfast is hardly a major news story, but last November a painting appeared in the city that made headlines across Northern Ireland. Rendered on the gable end of a terrace house in East Belfast were two men, […]
On September 18, Scotland will hold a referendum on independence. A ‘Yes’ vote would bring to an end the 1707 Union, leaving behind a rump United Kingdom, comprising England, Wales and a Northern Ireland constitutionally marooned from its nearest – both geographically and emotionally – UK neighbour. Clearly, Northern Ireland has a lot at stake in September’s plebiscite. Nationalists and unionists alike […]
As party talks reconvened in Northern Ireland this week to resolve old disputes over religious and national differences, a small business in Belfast is using mutual respect to bridge the gaps in this split society. Restrictions on flying the union flag in Belfast has become a bone of contention Last Christmas, protests over the removal […]
Belfast, Northern Ireland – The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 brought Northern Ireland’s bloody conflict to a close, but signs of division remain 15 years later. In the capital Belfast, Catholic and Protestant communities are separated by euphemistic “peace walls”, most children attend segregated schools, and major questions around the past and future remain unresolved. A […]
On 15 August 1998, a car filled with a 500 pounds of fertiliser explosive was left outside S.D. Kells’ clothes shop in Lower Market Street in Omagh. At ten past three on a busy Saturday the bomb detonated. Around 220 people were injured and 29 killed in the blast, the heaviest death toll of any […]
If ever a country was defined by a punctuation mark, it’s Northern Ireland and the forward-slash. A history of conflict has produced some awkward semantic contortions: Catholic/Protestant, Nationalist/Unionist, and, of course, Derry/Londonderry, that waggish ‘Stroke City’. Less celebrated, but no less contentious, is another double take, the Maze/Long Kesh. Last week it was revealed that […]
Feature from latest Sunday Business Post August 15, 1969. Even those with the most cursory of interests in Northern Irish history will recognise the date of the British Army’s first deployment in Belfast. But for almost 40 years no photographic record of the soldiers’ arrival on the city’s streets existed, until an octogenarian with a […]