By Eileen Harrisson - I grew up by Bangor, Co Down and, after obtaining a Joint Honours BA in Italian and Art from Aberystwyth University in June 1975, I returned to Northern Ireland. The severity of the illness that had led to my father being invalided out of the RAF during World War II was... Continue Reading →
By Struan W. J Kennedy- Early on in any serious reading into loyalism, one is likely to encounter two negative perceptions operating in tandem. The first is under-representation, loyalists feel let down by both mainstream unionist politicians and mainstream media. Secondly are cases of misrepresentation, on the rare occasions when certain movements do receive coverage,... Continue Reading →
By Cahal McLaughlin- Introduction In 2004, I filmed three interviews back inside the Maze and Long Kesh prison site, which became Inside Stories: Voices from the Gaol. The participants were a former prison officer, a former republican prisoner, and a former loyalist prisoner - all of whom reflected upon their experiences inside the prison. This... Continue Reading →
By Cillian McGrattan- Following the extraordinary scenes at the funeral of the senior republican Bobby Storey at the end of June 2020, commentators, north and south of the border, offered numerous explanations. My intention here is not so much to compliment nor to critique those framings. Instead, I wish to offer a preliminary reading on... Continue Reading →
By Christopher Lawson- Two cranes, Samson and Goliath, loom over the skyline of Belfast, a testament to the city’s rich industrial heritage. Although their owner, Harland & Wolff, survived its latest brush with bankruptcy in 2019, the shipyard’s workforce is now counted in the tens rather than the tens of thousands. Belfast’s other internationally famous... Continue Reading →
By Simon Prince- When Dungannon Urban District Council met in May 1963, a crowd of women and children were outside protesting its unfair housing policies. One of the picketers had a placard with the slogan ‘If Our Religion Is Against Us Ship Us to Little Rock’. Nine months later, families living in an old military... Continue Reading →
By Thomas Dolan- ‘One of our greatest weaknesses as a people would appear to be our uncritical acceptance of our past, our failure and refusal to examine the inadequacies and the failures as well as the successes of our past leaders and past movements. After all they were human. They must have made and did... Continue Reading →
By Abigail Fletcher- Writing on a wall is always political’. So writes Adam Turkington, organiser of Belfast’s annual Hit the North street art festival. One of the attractions of the 2019 event was an image of Lyra McKee, who was murdered by dissident republicans that April. The mural is accompanied by text from a letter... Continue Reading →
By D.A. Whitcombe- The Good Friday Agreement is often seen as the start of the peace process in Northern Ireland. As a child, I remember the relief on my parents’ and teachers’ faces when the result came in. However, there were plenty of people who voted against the Agreement: those who had not chosen ‘hope... Continue Reading →
By Katie Barnes- To write fiction about the ‘Troubles’ is to write about crisis. Anna Burns’ Booker Prize winning novel Milkman (2018) reimagines this crisis through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old girl, known as Middle Sister, who studiously avoids engaging with the history she is living through, however Burns’ narrative is ultimately underpinned by, and... Continue Reading →
