Unionists

Tom Elliott and the battle for Fermanagh and South Tyrone…

Choyaa on November 30, 2019, 7:44 am | Readers 5827

Tom Elliot is very much the reluctant candidate in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone Westminster contest. I wanted to focus on this election battle and give outsiders a little context on the contest from a Unionist perspective. Within FST, Unionists are the minority community. If you ask any Unionist within the constituency what they expect from the election, the answer is a Sinn Fein victory. Having said that, there is a strong desire for representation at Westminster, a strong desire …

Protestant and Dissenter: the nonsense of Sinn Fein’s outreach

Turgon on September 14, 2011, 11:13 pm | Readers 636

Part of Sinn Fein’s pitch at the Ard Fheis was the idea of moving forwards “Towards a New Republic.” Alex Kane has pointed out what he calls the “Jekyl and Hyde” quality of Sinn Fein’s unionist outreach: Adams talked, as did Martin McGuinness the night before, of the need to have a “national conversation on the future of the island” and to win unionists over. But then he adds a paragraph about the “British having no right to be here” …

Protestant Alienation 2011

Turgon on June 8, 2011, 7:14 pm | Readers 53

Almost 20 years ago now the academic community in Northern Ireland first began looking at the concept of Protestant Alienation. Amongst the factors they identified were the feeling that the Hume Adams talks were creating a blueprint for the defeat of unionism which the British government might acquiesce to. That feeling of alienation increased with events such as the IRA ceasefire. Looking back it is now easy to read the IRA ceasefire as a victory for unionism: the IRA had …

Sometimes even 3 bins aren’t enough

Blank on August 2, 2010, 7:59 pm | Readers 1

This was at the top of my street until today (3 months after it should have been binned – by Neil Johnston of the UUP). It made a better attempt to stay out of the dustbin of history than the ‘party’ did.

“Ulster Unionists have never been adept at gauging the public mood…”

Mick Fealty on May 20, 2010, 1:50 pm | Readers 2

An English friend who knows more than the average Englishman about Northern Irish politics asked me in all seriousness, just a few days before the last election, whether the UUP was now anti Agreement. Well, I explained, not exactly and yet it looked that way if you were taking seriously anything Reg said (which was not a lot) on politics in the run up to the election. Davy Adams goes a little further than my English friend (or I would) …