Soapbox

Macha is a slugger reader from Armagh The Irish News reports… Over 30 metres of peace wall were removed to make way for the £7 million Black Mountain Share Space which is located at the former Finlay’s factory site on Ballygomartin Road. Funding for the building was sourced from the EU’s Peace IV Programme, along with the Republic’s Department of Rural and Community Development and Stormont’s Department for Communities. Funding was also provided by Belfast City Council. It is managed …

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Erica Blair is the pen name of a Belfast-based Free Speech Union member. At the risk of doing a Kier ‘my father was a toolmaker’ Starmer, I was brought up in a left-wing household in working class Belfast. We read the Daily Mirror. The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse sat on a shelf beside the 1969 street directory, two Reader’s Digest encyclopaedias (A-L and M-Z), a dictionary and the bible. I still have the poetry book and the street directory. …

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David Michell is Assistant Professor in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation at Trinity College Dublin at Belfast. You can follow him on Twitter. It’s good to see the Executive working on normal politics again. But the flag problem – one of the great unsolvables of the peace process – hasn’t gone away. And the fact that there hasn’t been much talk about flags recently means it’s a good time to talk about flags. The flag problem is several interlinked problems. The problem …

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Editors note: This OP by Jérôme à Paris an investment banker and blogger specialising in renewable energy projects is not for the faint hearted, as it includes a discussion of the design and usefulness of contracts for difference (CfDs) designed to provide confidence to investors in a very volatile market for electricity prices.  However, the significance for the general reader is that even in the absence of consistent state policies and subsidies, solar energy is basically becoming the core part …

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Macha is a Slugger reader from County Armagh I bought Slugger a Christmas Drink in 2020, so I’ve been hanging out here pretty regularly for at least four years. Often I read more than I comment, but I have been known to get drawn into long and sometimes heated debates. While people dismiss toxic online interactions, the effect of them is not insignificant. I’m quite clear on the belief that if you are awful online, being lovely in “real life” doesn’t cancel the awfulness out. …

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Philip O’Neill is a retired civil servant from Belfast I have always wanted to be a roving reporter and yesterday I got the opportunity to do so. Slugger was invited to the press launch for the new Grand Central Station, and as the usual suspects could not attend I was delegated to attend. You will have by now seen the coverage on TV or in the newspapers, however I have decided to look at the new station from a social …

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David Morrow is a Policy Analyst, Chartered Accountant, and Dad from Belfast.  He previously worked in policy at Stormont, and is writing in a personal capacity. The NI Executive has the money to fund affordable childcare. It spends it elsewhere NI has an affordable childcare crisis – bills for parents are close to £1,000 per month on average, over half of parents go into savings or debt to pay for childcare, and many parents (usually mothers) feel obliged to cut …

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Darcey Youngman is a writer, from Manchester, who recently graduated with an Masters in Creative Writing at Queens University. She currently based in Belfast and working at the Seamus Heaney Centre.  When I first moved to Belfast; I didn’t know the meanings of a flag. I didn’t know they stood for so much, and how I knew so little. I had held a union jack when I was younger, while celebrating the Queens Jubilee. My mum had painted one on my …

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Jérôme à Paris is a French investment banker specialising in large scale energy projects and was a regular  contributor on energy topics in the early days of Daily Kos – the main US liberal political blog – and also founded the European Tribune to focus on European issues. Nowadays he focuses on financing renewable energy projects and writes occasional blogs to counteract widespread public misunderstandings of renewable energy often propagated by oil and nuclear industry interests. Key themes include the …

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Séimí Mac Aindreasa is from the Shaws Road Gaeltacht in Belfast. His stories have been published in three anthologies and online. Consider the floor. The floor is an amazing thing. Unassuming and flat, it nevertheless commands enough respect that walls and roof are required to cover and protect it. We decorate it with fancy tiles; we smother it in shiny linoleum; we bedeck it with expensive rugs. We brush and wash it as if it were a prize stallion. We …

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John Wilson Foster FRSC is an Irish literary critic and cultural historian. Bio here… Between 2017 and 2023 I wrote newspaper articles and online essays in response to what I saw unfolding in the UK and Ireland after Brexit. I was shunting between Portaferry and Queen’s until late 2021 when I returned to Canada where I had spent my 28-year career as an English professor at the University of British Columbia. I wrote about what I saw as striking trends …

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Nekomimi is a slugger reader… Is it the best of times, or the worst of times, for a city to host the Olympic Games? The titular two cities of the novel refer to London and Paris, and we may look on the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and compare it with events in Paris last night. The 2012 opening ceremony to the London Games is held up as a masterful piece of modern propaganda, enthusing and reinforcing the …

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Ben M is a slugger reader from Dublin: Keir Starmer hasn’t wasted much time breaking with the Brexit past.  The King’s Speech last week introduced the Product Safety and Metrology Bill, allowing government ministers to follow European regulations as they’re brought in, without reference to Parliament. As Niall Ó Conghaile writing in the East Anglia Bylines says – “Between directives, regulations and decisions, there are very roughly 2,000 legal changes to the single market each year (figures can vary greatly). …

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Jonny McCormick is a Senior Director at LanciaConsult where he supports organisations going through complex change. He’s also a lifetime politics nerd, bookworm, and aspiring runner. You can follow him on Twitter. The dust is settling on the recent General Election. And, for Northern Ireland we potentially, possibly, might not have an election until 2027. When was the last time we had to store our Polling Station signs for so long?! I thought I’d share a few reflections on what …

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This is an address John Gray gave to the Reclaim the Enlightenment’s annual Bastille Day event on the 14th July 2024 One can hardly claim that the United Irishmen were pacifists but did they seek war? True that they were inspired by the fall of the Bastille and the French revolution but their original publicly declared objective was no more than securing a reform of the notoriously corrupt Irish parliament, an objective pursued by open democratic means during 1792. It …

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Ben M is a Slugger reader from Dublin This committee comprises Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, and some of the other southern-only parties, as well as Sinn Féin. That’s significant, outside of Leo Varadkar’s recent intervention, I can’t remember such cross-party support for UI preparation. Normally it’s just SF talking about it. I’ve long thought if I were a Unionist what would truly worry me about the UI issue wouldn’t be SF, it would be the southern parties starting a UI-preparation …

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Maurice Macartney is the author of Combinations: Denominations, democracy and the politics of nonviolence, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024 Donald Trump, blood streaking his face, rises above the security agents trying to rush him to safety and raises a fist in defiance. Above the group, against a blue sky, flies the flag of the United States of America. Like it or not, this is going to be the defining image of the US election of 2024, and indeed of this historical …

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Colm Ó Cionnaith is currently a Peace Studies MA student in the HJI Grad School of Peace and Public Leadership and Secretary General of UPF Ireland. Picture it: Oldbridge, Co. Meath, Ireland, July 12th, 2050, unified and at peace with herself and her new identity: green, white and orange; red, white and blue – equally represented and equally proud as they celebrate their contribution to the island’s present as well as the past … the new Defence Forces of the 32 …

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Alan Whysall is a former civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office who advised British ministers throughout the negotiations that led to the 1998 Agreement. He is now an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Unit, specialising in politics in Northern Ireland. He is the author of Northern Ireland: Challenges for the Next Government. A new report from the Constitution Unit, Northern Ireland: Challenges for the Next Westminster Government, is now published. It sets out the challenges in Northern Ireland that will face a …

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