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Showing posts with label Irish Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irish Times. Show all posts
Irish Times 📰 Written by Fintan O'Toole.

Big wheels are being driven over democratic norms

Welcome to the dictatorship of the breakfast roll-atariat! All power to the HGV Soviets!

James Geoghegan, one of the leaders of the, declared on RTÉ’s Liveline the uprising “a revolution” that is “going to change Ireland forever”. Fair enough: this is arguably the most serious insurrection the State has experienced in a century.

But the rest of us are at least entitled to a little more information. A revolution against what? And what kind of permanent transformation does this truck-ulent vanguard intend to create in our lives?

There’s a point in any social upheaval when it shifts from being against the government to being against the state. The first is entirely healthy – a vigorous and disputatious citizenship is essential to a democracy. The second – and we’ve been here before through the long history of militant Irish republicanism – attacks the legitimacy of democracy itself.

It posits the existence of a superior group that is purer and more authentic than the rest of the citizenry and that therefore has the right to enforce its will. As Geoghegan crowed to The Irish Times, “It’s in our hands, we call the shots. Whatever we decide to do is what everyone else will do.”

Continue @ Irish Times.  

Ireland’s Far-Right Movement Will Emerge From The ‘Breakfast Roll-Atariat’

Irish Times ★ Written by Mark Hennessy.

Jim McVeigh writes the apologia for Martin McGuinness’s life, while Danny Morrison’s revised memoir is emotional, sometimes mawkish.

Regardless of his actions in the IRA – ones he proudly admitted to, unlike some – Martin McGuinness was blessed with the gift of likeability, even by those who would have happily seen him dead in his earlier years.

In Our Martin, Jim McVeigh has written the apologia for the Derry man’s life, presenting the increasingly visible argument “that there was no alternative” – one directed primarily at a generation who were not born to see the horrors of the Troubles.

The book knows on which side of history it stands. “What politicised me was the Civil Rights protest. It wasn’t anything I heard in the house, or even in my grandmother’s house in Donegal,” McGuinness is quoted saying.

His political awakening is put down to an interview he had to become an apprentice mechanic in 1965, one McGuinness believed he did not get because he was asked which school he had attended.

Its defence of the IRA’s actions is absolute. There is no mention of Patsy Gillespie, forced to drive a car bomb into a British army checkpoint . . .

Continue @ Irish Times.

Our Martin And All The Dead Voices

Irish Times ★ Written by Colm Keena. Recommended by Jim Monaghan.

Fresh detail about the decision of President 
Catherine Connolly to visit Syria in 2018 has emerged since the October election.

During the campaign Connolly repeatedly declined to say who had organised the trip to the war-torn country where the Russia-backed government of president Bashar al-Assad was involved in a complex and vicious civil war.

However, two days after the vote, the former TDs and MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, who accompanied Connolly on the visit, disclosed that they had organised the trip along with Daly’s sister Elaine, a trade union employee who separately ran non-profit tours for people who wanted to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

“We organised that trip ourselves, lads, seeing as you are so bloody interested,” Clare Daly said, speaking on the I4C Trouble podcast she co-hosts with Wallace.

She said the June 2018 trip was arranged with the help of people in Syria that she, Clare Daly, knew from an earlier trip she and Wallace had made in 2017.

Continue @ Irish Times.

New Detail Emerges About President Catherine Connolly’s 2018 Trip To Syria

Irish Times ★ Written by John FitzGerald.

Any move to unity in the near future could prove serious for an unprepared Northern Ireland economy

Thirty-five years ago, after 40 years as separate entities, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was followed by the formal reunification of the two Germanies in October 1990. This allowed very little time to plan the transition.

The decision to set a 1:1 exchange rate between the Deutschmark and the Ostmark drove up eastern prices and wages. With a single currency and a unified distribution system for consumer goods, the eastern price level, which had been 30 per cent lower in 1990, rapidly rose to western levels. Eastern wages had to follow suit, making many businesses in the former GDR uneconomic.

Because unification happened so rapidly and unexpectedly, the process was not very well managed.

The effects of the loss of competitiveness, as wages adjusted, were compounded by the very rapid sale of previously government-owned enterprises in the East before they could be reformed and put on a better financial footing. The result was wholesale closures in the East.

If more time had been given to reforming some of these large enterprises, they might have survived in the new unified German economy.

Continue @ Irish Times.

Lessons For Ireland From German Unification

Irish Times 📰 Written by Seanín Graham.

15-September-2025

On the livingroom wall in the Co Armagh home of David Adams hang photographs of him meeting Nelson Mandela and shaking hands with Bill Clinton.

The former loyalist paramilitary, who took part in the political negotiations that led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement, points to his favourite photograph taken at an Ethiopian refugee camp during his work with Dublin aid agency Goal.

“My children call it ‘The Davy Wall’, sneeringly,” he says, laughing while petting his ageing dog, Walter.

Since retiring from the Dún Laoghaire-based agency seven years ago, Adams (72) has kept a relatively low profile.

His profile was not always low. Adams was a senior figure within the Combined Loyalist Military Command, a group representing the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and the Red Hand Commando; he was heavily involved in the negotiations that led to the 1994 loyalist ceasefire.

He is a former member of the UDA, although he was never convicted of any offences while a member of the paramilitary organisation. He was also a leading figure in the now defunct Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), the political party linked to the UDA. His association with the group didn’t end well.

Continue @ Irish Times.

‘We Should All Be Ashamed’ 🪶 Ex-Loyalist Paramilitary Sees North’s Future In A ‘New Ireland’

Irish Times ☀ Written by Ella Creamer.

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of UK awards celebrating LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn from the awards over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a “Terf” – the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Two judges have also withdrawn from the prize process, and more than 800 writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. Boyne, who was longlisted for the main Polari book prize for his novella Earth, is best known for his 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and also reviews books for The Irish Times.

Author Nicola Dinan, who won the Polari first book prize last year for her novel Bellies, resigned from this year’s jury for the debut prize. Guardian journalist Jason Okundaye asked for his book Revolutionary Acts to be removed from this year’s first book prize longlist, while Andrew McMillan withdrew his book Pity from the longlist for the overall Polari book prize for non-debuts.

Heartstopper author Alice Oseman along with the writers Nikesh Shukla, Julia Armfield, Naoise Dolan, Seán Hewitt and Kirsty Logan are among the hundreds to have signed the statement.

Continue @ Irish Times.

Polari Prize 📚 Nominees And Judges Withdraw Over Inclusion Of John Boyne On Longlist

David Adams ✏ Writing in Irish Times.

Few things more sickening than self-pity of the manufactured, self-serving kind. Except, maybe, someone making a semi-career out of ‘oh, look at how I was able to change’

I occasionally meet people on the street, ordinary decent people from different backgrounds, who know me. But they walk silently past. Their attitude is wholly justified. 

I was once an apologist for a loyalist paramilitary organisation (the UDA) and its actions. These people, quite rightly, have nothing but disdain for paramilitaries and their past or present excuse-makers. Some in media have a similar attitude where I am concerned. Hardly surprising, given that they too are members of, and care deeply about, our society. 

I am told that their thinking is along the lines of: “This guy has some cheek pontificating about how things should be, given his past. A past that he has never sought to address or explain.” They too are wholly justified in taking that position. 

I should long ago have publicly addressed my past. I will try to do that here – and explain the reason for my recent pontificating.

I have never offered any plausible explanation for my joining a paramilitary organisation, for one simple reason: I don’t have any.

Continue reading @ Irish Times.

I Am Ashamed Of My Paramilitary Past ★ I Won’t Be Writing About It Again

Irish Times ðŸ—ž Written by Conor Gallagher.

Anti-immigration candidates have been using increasingly extreme rhetoric in run-up to the vote.

These candidates will seek to capitalise on rising support for the far right across Europe and the record levels of asylum seekers arriving in Ireland. 

Two years ago Patrice Johnson, who is running in the local elections for the Irish Freedom Party in Co Louth, posted a message on X, formerly Twitter, stating “Hate speech is just free speech that Jews don’t like!”

In other social media posts, she called Minister for Children and Integration Roderic O’Gorman a “groomer” and called for a former asylum seeker to be knocked out and “buried in the mountains”.

In one online conversation last year, she described a black man as a “trigger” and denied a contention by another poster that she was a “trigger lover”.

The Drogheda woman has also endorsed multiple posts supporting conspiracy theories, homophobia and violence.

The Irish Freedom Party, which was founded in 2018 to campaign for Ireland to leave the EU, is presented by its leader, Hermann Kelly, as a party of the centre right which, he says, “rejects any form of nazism and nuttery”. However, its members have a history of extreme statements.

Continue reading @ Irish Times

Record Number Of Far-Right Candidates Are Running In Friday’s Elections ✤ Will Any Get In?

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