good relations

Good Relations Week

Paul Gosling on September 25, 2023, 9:03 am

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Last week was Good Relations Week, the annual Community Relations Council event that aims to build relationships between people of different backgrounds in Northern Ireland, including across the traditional Catholic and Protestant divisions and also people of differing ethnicities. You might say this remains work in progress, which is not the fault of the CRC. Northern Ireland remains a toxically divided society – exemplified, and arguably amplified, by the inability of the two largest parties of the two largest communities …

Is Your Child Green or Orange?

Roy Fisher on December 6, 2018, 12:54 pm

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Children in Northern Ireland are continuing to be shoe-horned into Orange and Green identities, by the very programme set up to break down divisions. This article draws on a recent FOI request to the NI Executive, to show how children participating in ‘Together: Building a United Community’ (TBUC) Camps, ended up being designated as one community background or the other. A factor which surely makes it more difficult to break out of the cycle of polarisation in Northern Ireland, and which …

Belfast’s Festival of Fools: No laughing matter at the ‘Dome of Delight’?

Peter Doran on July 8, 2013, 3:24 pm

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Earlier this year, organisers at Belfast’s award winning Festival of Fools received news from Belfast City Council’s Tourism, Culture and Arts Unit that they were to be excluded from multi-annual funding. In addition, their annual allocation was reduced from £11,000 (2012) to £6000 (2013). The Festival’s funding from the City Council’s Community Festivals Fund remains unchanged. There’s a memorable scene in one of my favourite films, Anthony Manghella’s Truly Madly Deeply (1990). One of the main characters, Nina, is being drawn …