Day light robbery of our democracy: the trap of the Anti-Protocol rhetoric…

Stairs going down.

Has there ever been a more ironically named political party across the UK and Ireland than the Democratic Unionist Party? The party, enabled by our broken political infrastructure, has graduated from padlocking swings in Ballymena on Sundays to effectively padlocking the doors to our democracy. It is currently holding the existence of democracy in Northern Ireland hostage, at the behest of an issue which they themselves have no idea what the issue being resolved looks like. Not only that: its …

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The Misidentification of Loyalism: ideologies that harm working class Protestants…

europe, northern ireland, belfast

Lost in translation I was born in 1993, into an area called Kells in County Antrim. I would be told as I grew up that Kells was a ‘loyalist area’. What ‘loyalism’ means as opposed to ‘unionism’ has become more and more confusing for me in recent years, and I think it lies at the heart of issues resurfacing now. While studying at Cambridge nearly a decade ago, I found myself having to explain Northern Ireland a lot. My first …

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Exiling NI Expats Can’t Become Another Political Game

30 January 2020 was my 27th birthday. That weekend also turned into my last time in Northern Ireland for a full 6 months. The pandemic that we have all experienced has been suffered in many different ways, and to different degrees. I won’t pretend that being a stranded celt in London meant I was on the sharper end of the experience, but you can only live through it the way you did and so while I ought not to have …

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We need leaders who are not only motivated by the muck of tribalism

Coming hot on the deals of the release of the RHI Report, if ever affirmation were needed of the sickly nature of our politics in Northern Ireland it was its reaction to the global virus pandemic, engulfing every aspect of living across the world. How quickly local political responses to the pandemic became an orange and green issue is the greatest indication of how deeply unwell our politics has become. As businesses wrestle with when and how to let staff …

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Lyra McKee’s murder must herald a transformation from our society’s complicity to gangs

There were two protest actions that came amongst the outpouring of grief from the murder of Lyra McKee.  Both challenged the complicity our society gives criminal gangs operating in Northern Ireland; those which shelter behind historic letters and seep through violent murals. Violent murals act to normalise their criminality, and their suffocation of working class areas across Northern Ireland. As do their gang flags. Put simply, paramilitary murals are the subliminal advertising of criminal organisations in Northern Ireland. To be …

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