A Shared Home Place – Seamus Mallon Bond Street was a Protestant and Loyalist heartland which celebrated its historical totems with vigour. Growing up in the Waterside area of Derry, I can share and empathise with Seamus Mallon’s memories of his childhood. Our neighbours and the majority
Read more →GENTLE ON MY MIND Ever since I became bionic there’s been a constant need to stare at my feet as I walk; I’ve tripped over invisible cigarette packets, skited inexorably down the shiny paving stones of Alloa High Street praying for a wall to bring me to
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I wrote this a year ago after Sorcha arrived on the fifteenth of June, a few days after her mother, Jen’s birthday. June is a busy month as my elder brother, James, as well as grandchildren, Leo and Lilly Ann were all born in that month. Neill,
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One day towards the end of lunch, a large, noisy party arrived in the dining room. Thankfully, they occupied two tables which were not mine. However, I was pressed into service when their designated waitress came to tell me that they wished to be looked after by a Gaeilge speaker. Their leader was a rough looking, large Dubliner who had clearly had a few aperitifs and was nursing a pint of the black stuff. As they finished lunch and expressed appreciation for my attentiveness, the big fella said to me,
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Moray Place , Headquarters of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) and its West Lothian Local Association disowned me when I went on strike in solidarity with other Irish trade unionists on February 1st , 1972, following the murder two days earlier by British State forces of thirteen Derry civilians ; two of the dead were past pupils of the secondary school where I had worked the previous year.. Nor did I endear myself to the leadership in the 80s, when I successfully defeated the Executive with a motion on class contact time in my first appearance at an AGM . I don’t recall the year but Peter Andrews was President .
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The gerrymander of Derry City by the Unionists , with the support of the Stormont Government, was the prototype for sectarian control of the State; despite being 70% Catholic and Nationalist, through blatant manipulation of ward boundaries, the City remained under Unionist control
Read more →I was a 7 year old revolutionary when I learned my first few French phrases; ca va? je m’appelle; j’habite; je suis. Instantly hooked by the fantooshness, there commenced a lifelong fascination of the foreign and exotic. In P5 at Crieff Primary School I’d a wee notebook
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PUT THE GENERALS IN THE DOCK The buck stops at the top; that is the accepted chain of responsibility and accountability in organisations, institutions and in life. Slobodan Milosevic, David Duckenfield, Ratko Mladic : what links these names is that all were indicted for unlawful killings which
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The ingrained instinct of politicians is to consider how any comment affects their career prospects and so Sajid Javid, an ambitious Home Secretary, immediately responded in Daily Mail speak
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British civil rights – that’s what we were agitating and marching for in 1968. The demand was for the same citizenship rights as those enjoyed in Carlisle or Exeter, Reading or Inverness. With unemployment figures, ranked among the highest in Europe, local authority housing denied to the
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