Soldiers, Soup and Sandy Row: Challenging a fixed mindset…

The anecdotal examples given here are intended to act as blunt signifiers, and can hopefully trigger a much broader conversation on identity and growth mindsets – concepts that are very much intertwined and blurred together, positively, across the community already The American psychologist Carol Dweck is renowned for her research on mindset theories, and her work is widely referred to in the education sector. The general idea is that people who welcome challenging situations, who embrace their mistakes and value …

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Loyalism must succeed where Sinn Fein has failed…

Moore Holmes is a Loyalist from East Belfast. You can find him on Twitter I have a fond memory of my dad telling me how foolish he thought the phrase, “learn from your mistakes.” Each time it came up in a conversation, he’d half-chuckle and half-scoff, provocatively asking, “why not learn from someone else’s mistakes and save yourself the hassle?” Although my dad would be at pains to point out that I’ve sung “Fathers Advice” far more than I’ve ever …

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Experiencing July 12th as a southerner

This summer myself and my podcast co-host Tim Mc Inerney travelled to Derry and Belfast to experience the 11th and 12th of July for ourselves and record our experiences for our podcast The Irish Passport. With our southern accents and southern registration plates, we got plenty of warnings to be careful — from both sides of the border. But we wanted to see and understand for ourselves what the Glorious Twelfth is all about, confronting our own biases and gaps …

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