OrangeFest 2011: it’s still about hating Taigs
SUPPOSE the Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging decided to organise a comeback gig in the shape of a white supremacist rally in Soweto. Naturally, the South African government would be concerned about the potential for public disorder. So would the best solution be to market the event as a touchy-feely, all-inclusive, fun day out for all the family? [...]
Taimour Abdulwahab al Abdaly: on the social calibre of suicide bombers
BY WAY of a coda to yesterday’s post, last Saturday’s events in Stockholm and the impending anniversary of the 1981 Hunger Strike campaign have still left me pondering what kind of people are willing to die for a political ideal, even though their death will bring it no closer. Sue R writes in the comments [...]
Taimour Abdulwahab al Abdaly: on suicide bombers and hunger strikers
TAIMOUR Abdulwahab al Abdaly managed to go through with a suicide bombing in the purest possible sense of the word. He died in Stockholm on Saturday night; no one else did. Two people were injured. Then again, eight people have today been injured after the rupture of a gas pipe in a Tesco store in [...]
Ireland’s crisis: prospects for Sinn Féin
RIGHT, somebody run the distinction between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael past me again. I did used to know this one, honest. Something to do with the civil war, no? I am being a little bit flippant when I joke about the similarities between Ireland’s two major parties, but only a little bit. British imperialism [...]
A Modest Proposal for preventing the bankers in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
IT IS a melancholy object to those, who walk through Dublin, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with hedge fund managers, followed by three, four, or six forex dealers, all in rags, and importuning every passing European Union bureaucrat and International Monetary Fund official for an [...]
Ireland: a bank with a small country attached
STAMOCAP, as all true Marxist theory nerds will recollect, is an ugly little acronym for state monopoly capitalism. It comes in Stalinist or Trot variants, but the basic idea is that modern economies are characterised by a fusion of financial capital and the state. About a decade ago I realised that the whole notion is [...]
Fr Chesney and the Claudy bombing: answers, please
UNLIKE the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, at least the police ombudsman’s report into the Claudy bombing did not cost anything like £195m. And it only took it eight years rather than 12 to establish for the record what everybody knew already anyway, which is positively speedy by comparison. Briefly put, Al Hutchinson found that [...]
OrangeFest 2010 and the right to demonstrate
REPACKAGING a deliberately intimidatory display of religiously-based ethnic supremacism as an all-inclusive carnival offering fun and frivolity for the whole family was always going to be a tall order. But that’s just what Northern Ireland has been trying to do for the last three years, with the Loyalist marching season now officially known as OrangeFest, [...]
Bloody Sunday: when it’s right to reopen history
PERHAPS the violence was not on the scale witnessed in Lebanon or Sri Lanka or Liberia or the Congo or Yugoslavia in recent years. But it is impressive testament to the English language’s command of euphemism that four decades of conflict in Northern Ireland can be popularly designated as ‘the Troubles’ rather than the civil war [...]
Bloody Sunday inquiry: open thread
PUBLICATION of the Saville Inquiry report on Bloody Sunday is obviously the only political story worth writing about today, and I’ll try to put some thoughts together after the document is released this afternoon. In the meantime, the comments box is open for observations. Bookmark It
