sluggerotoole--2020-08-10--Beyond Hume: The challenge to the ‘stick a flag on it’ politics, is to build better and longer for a

Beyond Hume: The challenge to the ‘stick a flag on it’ politics, is to build better and longer for all the people of Northern Ireland

Last week the Ireland cricket team , wearing black armbands for the old Derry warrior for peace , took on the ODI world champions and repeated the miracle of Bangalore , beat them with the same single last ball to spare and the same man , Kevin O ’ Brien , to dispatch them at the end .
Hume , as with much else in his long life , was no armchair cricket fan but someone who played several seasons for both City of Derry and Waterside Cricket Clubs .
He will have known Protestants who would later felt they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well because of the intimidation and violence of the IRA .
When you ’ ve played folk on the sports field you know every aspect of their character and the enabling culture that holds them and their community together .
Hume may not have been the most giving to unionism ( Devlin and Fitt thought him too rigid ) , but he knew IRA violence had tortured his city .
Disorder of the long campaign of violence He listened to the people who mattered ( the ordinary folks he had grown up with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an integral part of the originating story of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland , the blatant gerrymander of Londonderry corporation , and later the tragedy ( and public slander ) of Bloody Sunday .
But he was always clear that the Provisionals ’ long war polarised the people of his city ( disastrously for its Protestant minority ) , it reshaped Catholic communities such that dissent against was close to impossible .
By now , generations have lived with paramilitary arbitrariness and disorder ever since .
Somewhere in the academic literature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reluctance of IRA volunteers in the early parts of the Troubles even to hijack a neighbour ’ s car because they thought it wrong and immoral , but by the end of the conflict ( and for the legacy paramilitaries ) , it came to be viewed as a right .
Accordingly , paramilitaries still persist despite more than 20 years of commitment to peace under the Belfast agreement .
Only last year , in Hume ’ s home town , we witnessed the slaughter of young journalist Lyra McKee .
Even former @ @ @ @ @ @ @ children for punishment shootings .
These Human Rights violations routinely go unpunished partly because of the communal fear that ’ s been engendered by anonymous and unaccountable men with guns , and by a corrosive ambiguity towards the idea of ‘ political crime ‘ , which is never subject to any form of credible review .
This is why it is important not only to understand Hume the man but his legacy of resistance to the gun in Irish political life .
Tom McTague in The Atlantic magazine makes a crucial point , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as important as the life formerly lived : And yet , with Tom ’ s caveat very much lodged , much of the work Hume saw at the start of his career still remains for his successors to carry on .
This letter , published by the Irish Times back in 1964 , shows just how angry he was at the old Nationalist ’ s party failure to lead through democratic action : When Hume wrote that piece in 1964 the chief opposition to unionism was the Northern Ireland Labour Party who ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the reforming instincts of Terence O ’ Neill which were subsequently stymied by the often paranoid fundamentalism of Ian Paisley .
This was a moment of economic and political optimism on both sides of the border .
In the Republic , Seán Lemass had recognised the limitations imposed upon the Republic by DeValera ’ s trade war inward-looking economic development programme of the 1930s .
As early as 1959 Lemass announced that the traditionally acquisitive outlook of the Republic and that of his own political party Fianna Fáil upon Northern Ireland was no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had begun to thaw .
As O ’ Neill ( after the relative indolence of the Brookeborough era ) began to seek new light industries to replace NI ’ s fading industrial base so Lemass began to develop new practical strategies to bring new industry to Dublin and Cork .
This is the proper context in which to view the ( what may now look now as quaint ) optimism of John Hume in 1964 .
Without denying his community ’ s ambition for a united Ireland he put the pragmatic improvement in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ireland as a clear first priority .
And in doing so he identified sectarianism ( from wherever it came ) as a distraction to the fulfillment of those key goals of social-economic improvement and mutual development .
This was the mountain he clearly identified in the very first stages of his career as a political thinker and doer .
One of the most enlightening pieces on Hume ’ s politics is David McWilliams ’ column in the Irish Times on Saturday .
At first glance , it is a case study of how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can make a huge difference to poorer folk by giving them the possibility to act in their long term interest .
Credit , as I found out years ago in this 2003 interview is what builds wider circles of trust .
Credit is related to the word ‘ belief ’ as commerce is to the word ‘ community ’ : “ without it people will only do business with people they know , which limits the number of people they can do business with ” .
Little did the young Hume suspect that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be waylaid by a 30-year campaign of violence which ultimately put limits on its capacity to realise that ambition within his own lifetime .
And the pessimistic fatalism that that conflict gave rise to is still very much in evidence .
How violence drags on the collective mind Hume is much criticised , even today , by writers such as Ruth Dudley Edwards and Christopher Montgomery for bringing what was at the time a sublimely anti-democratic provisional movement in under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement .
That criticism is not only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Through Hume , Adams was brought into the peace talks and through him , a still-active IRA was still coldly using murder for its own strategic and tactical advantages even within the later stages of those negotiations .
It was galling for his own party to witness never mind Unionism at large .
And they would later pay the price as Adams took spent much of the following two decades taking most of the credit for what had largely been Hume ’ s own work .
As indeed , David Trimble suffered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ morality of this was tricky for any honest democrat .
One of its corollaries was to comparatively featherbed former terrorists in ways that later peace processes like those in Spain and Columbia ( who had the advantage of learning from NI ’ s mistakes ) conspicuously did not .
This , it can be persuasively argued , has had a lasting and dilatory effect on Northern Irish society particularly the marginalised working class from whom Hume himself sprung .
In this conversation with Kevin Cullen back in 2001 , he articulates his early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Even his most ardent critics acknowledge Hume ’ s lack of ambiguity on murder .
He spent himself in an often missionary pursuit of the cessation of such political crime , to the extent that both he and his party had little left to give by the time peace settled in .
His singled mindedness in particular exhausted his party leaving it with little left to give and in the hands of a series of caretakers who between them oversaw a long electoral decline and near eclipse by Gerry Adams and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Whilst this can not have been easy for him to witness from afar , as Eoghan Harris argues in the Sunday Independent , little enough of the blame for these subsequent failures attach directly to Hume : Redress for 20 years of ‘ stick a flag on it ’ politics ?
And yet in recent years has seen something resembling a sea change in northern politics .
The rise of the middle , which as Peter Shirlow has noted in the most recent edition of Cargo of Bricks has long been predicted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the movements of the 2011 census .
Some of that change is the result of the peace , of the unwinding of the cruel binaries of war .
It has introduced an ability and voter sentiment that was evident before the troubles struck , but which disappeared under the pressure of polarising violence from both the IRA and loyalist reactionaries .
This is one of the reasons why his legacy is still relevant to post troubles in Northern Ireland even now , after his death and more than twenty years after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Most of that work is still to be done .
Much of the assertions of confidence within Northern Catholics applies largely to those who following Hume ’ s example have done well for themselves comprise the new Catholic and unapologetic middle-class .
After 20 years with Sinn Féin at the head of Northern Irish nationalism single identity Catholic areas still account for some of the poorest educational outcomes and economic standing in the whole of Northern Ireland .
Despite such warm , self-congratulatory nostrums , recent focus on constitutional issues rather than the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ within the boundaries of Northern Ireland little has been done to improve the lives of our poorest citizens .
Hume was never so easily distracted by empty rhetoric or by flags and emblems .
He opposed the imposition of the McBride principles on the grounds that he did not want any disincentives to bringing new jobs where they were needed .
It was by such flinty pragmatism that the Republic dragged itself out of the doldrums of the 1950s to the heights of the Celtic Tiger but also the lows of the last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just climbing one mountain of ambition takes more than one lifetime .
Hume knew it involved real reversals .
It is sustained by tumultuous moments of success and then collectively admonished for its mistakes and missteps along the way with sudden and even long reversals of fortune .
Looking back on Hume ’ s career it is easy to view it through the lens of triumph , but the scars too were part of his long term victory .
However , his successes only came through a long and stoic endurance of such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s vision that marked him out amongst his peers : a quality that is ever in short supply in the politics of any nation .
It is often said that Hume sacrificed his party for the achievement of the Belfast Agreement .
But the fact is that the SDLP was the single most popular party , ahead of all others in terms of votes gained in the elections of 1998 .
Whilst what followed for his party was the equivalent of a long dark night of the soul in which its popularity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1998 figure over the following 20 years , more recently it has enjoyed something of a revival .
At his passing , the SDLP holds Hume ’ s old seat of Foyle by a 17,000 vote majority .
Elsewhere the pluralist Alliance and Green parties have made substantial inroads both on Sinn Féin ’ s and the DUP ‘ s core vote .
In part , this is a result of twenty years of stasis and failure which at its core an inability to agree ( probably the most Hume-ian word he ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a common purpose and a common programme for action .
Hume ’ s legacy belongs to all parties and none But it is also the emergence of a new generation of political voices in the form of Naomi Long , Claire Bailey , and of course the SDLP ’ s own Colum Eastwood as viable alternatives .
Between them , and to some extent the new taoiseach they have begun to painstakingly chisel out a new pluralist space .
Each in their own way is an inheritor of Hume ’ s tough-minded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ keyword ) worth can be gained without people from all traditions ( and increasingly none ) finding in whatever space the way and the means to work together .
This week Ian Paisley Junior chose to tell a story of Hume working in partnership not alone with his own father but with the UUP ’ s John Taylor in Strasburg , where , whatever the tumult at home , all three worked for the interests of Northern Ireland .
No nationalist , north or south , worth the salt of his or her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to ignore or even try to supersede the legacy of John Hume in this regard .
There is no magic blue pill ( or poll ) that can take away the challenging ( red pill ) work of uniting the people before territory .
Hume ’ s analysis of the indolence of the old nationalist party bears uncanny relation to 20 years of non-achievement of the dysfunctional partnership of the DUP and Sinn Fein in their dominant roles in Stormont ’ s Executive .
Adams ’ Cuige Uladh speech in 2017 might be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ difference between now and 1964 is that that indolence can be challenged without the immediate danger of plunging the whole state back into a violent , long-term dirty war of a kind not even its main protagonists want to see ever again on our island .
Many are deeply tired of the peace process sophistry , and some are walking away , not to the dissidents , but other more pluralist alternatives that show some understanding of the gains made by the Belfast Agreement , and the need to build on it , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fantasies of a border poll .
As Bertie Ahern noted at the onset of Sinn Féin ’ s recent three-year boycott of Stormont… The sum of Hume ’ s political life demands more than national reverence at the moment of his passing .
The understated modesty of his funeral belies his greatness as a visionary and statesman .
His legacy of gritty optimism in the agreed future he helped to nurture and broker is his greater gift .
It ’ s not a future of easy returns , but of great ones .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ their children and grandchildren grow to maturity and success that were it not John Hume might never have even existed .
And , we have to understand , as he did , I think , that as Michael Longley put it , peace… That ’ s not the easy way forward .
It ’ s one that takes the long term over the short .
It means focusing on what makes life better for people in the medium to long term .
In the world of 2020 , that still means helping people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the environment .
Not things guaranteed to bring votes .
And it means treating the people of Northern Ireland as an integrated interdependent whole regardless of long term constitutional aspiration .
Nothing of any import can change on the scale it needs unless it changes for everyone right across the board .
The one for youse one for us paralysis that we ’ ve endured for the last 20 years has failed the people of Tigers Bay as it has the people of Turf Lodge .
Both need the sort of unified action @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fortune of the city but the way that fortune is distributed among its citizens .
It can only happen with the sort of long term vision ( and combative energy that once made the SDLP the most popular party in Northern Ireland ) that Hume had for an Agreed Ireland , and to quote Longley , a prayer that all our daughters ( and sons ) might come to a proper house… Photo by Free-Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Last week the Ireland cricket team, wearing black armbands for the old Derry warrior for peace, took on the ODI world champions and repeated the miracle of Bangalore, beat them with the same single last ball to spare and the same man, Kevin O’Brien, to dispatch them at the end.
Hume, as with much else in his long life, was no armchair cricket fan but someone who played several seasons for both City of Derry and Waterside Cricket Clubs. He will have known Protestants who would later felt they had to leave town he loved so well because of the intimidation and violence of the IRA.
When you’ve played folk on the sports field you know every aspect of their character and the enabling culture that holds them and their community together. Hume may not have been the most giving to unionism (Devlin and Fitt thought him too rigid), but he knew IRA violence had tortured his city.
Disorder of the long campaign of violence
He listened to the people who mattered (the ordinary folks he had grown up with), and true to what became an integral part of the originating story of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, the blatant gerrymander of Londonderry corporation, and later the tragedy (and public slander) of Bloody Sunday.
But he was always clear that the Provisionals’ long war polarised the people of his city (disastrously for its Protestant minority), it reshaped Catholic communities such that dissent against was close to impossible. By now, generations have lived with paramilitary arbitrariness and disorder ever since.
Somewhere in the academic literature, there is a record of the reluctance of IRA volunteers in the early parts of the Troubles even to hijack a neighbour’s car because they thought it wrong and immoral, but by the end of the conflict (and for the legacy paramilitaries), it came to be viewed as a right.
Accordingly, paramilitaries still persist despite more than 20 years of commitment to peace under the Belfast agreement. Only last year, in Hume’s home town, we witnessed the slaughter of young journalist Lyra McKee. Even former IRA hard men there bring their own children for punishment shootings.
These Human Rights violations routinely go unpunished partly because of the communal fear that’s been engendered by anonymous and unaccountable men with guns, and by a corrosive ambiguity towards the idea of ‘political crime‘, which is never subject to any form of credible review.
This is why it is important not only to understand Hume the man but his legacy of resistance to the gun in Irish political life. Tom McTague in The Atlantic magazine makes a crucial point, that what comes after is at least as important as the life formerly lived:
History is complicated and nostalgia a seductive liar, as the former U.S. diplomat George Ball once remarked. Today’s Northern Ireland is a place that Hume envisaged and succeeded in creating. It is at peace and free to choose its own future. It is better than the one it replaced. But it also remains beset by deep problems. To solve them, the new generation of political leaders in Northern Ireland and beyond would be wise to look to the vision, strategic patience, and politicking that saw Hume’s vision triumph. But it would not be sacrilege to point out that some of today’s problems are the inevitable consequences of the stubborn realities that Hume’s necessarily imperfect vision could not solve. When giants die they are sanctified, but they do not often become giants by being saints. As Hume would have acknowledged, life is more complicated.
Optimistic roots of an agreed Ireland
And yet, with Tom’s caveat very much lodged, much of the work Hume saw at the start of his career still remains for his successors to carry on. This letter, published by the Irish Times back in 1964, shows just how angry he was at the old Nationalist’s party failure to lead through democratic action:
Leadership has been the comfortable leadership of flags and slogans. Easy, no doubt, but irresponsible. There has been no attempt to be positive, to encourage the Catholic community to develop the resources, which they have in plenty, to make a positive contribution in terms of community service. Unemployment and emigration, chiefly of Catholics, remains heavy, much of it no doubt due to the skilful placing of industry by the Northern government, but the only constructive suggestion from the nationalist side would appear to be that removal of discrimination will be the panacea for all our ills. It is this lack of positive contribution and the apparent lack of interest in the general welfare of Northern Ireland that has led many Protestants to believe the Northern Catholic is politically irresponsible and immature and therefore unfit to rule. Bigotry and fixation about religious divisions are the first things that strike any visitor to the North. The nationalist line of the past 40 years has made its contribution to this situation. Catholics of all shades of political thought are expected to band together under the unconstructive banner of nationalism.
When Hume wrote that piece in 1964 the chief opposition to unionism was the Northern Ireland Labour Party who’s brief flowering back then paradoxically matched the reforming instincts of Terence O’Neill which were subsequently stymied by the often paranoid fundamentalism of Ian Paisley.
This was a moment of economic and political optimism on both sides of the border. In the Republic, Seán Lemass had recognised the limitations imposed upon the Republic by DeValera’s trade war inward-looking economic development programme of the 1930s.
As early as 1959 Lemass announced that the traditionally acquisitive outlook of the Republic and that of his own political party Fianna Fáil upon Northern Ireland was no longer fit for purpose. North-south relations had begun to thaw.
As O’Neill (after the relative indolence of the Brookeborough era) began to seek new light industries to replace NI’s fading industrial base so Lemass began to develop new practical strategies to bring new industry to Dublin and Cork.
This is the proper context in which to view the (what may now look now as quaint) optimism of John Hume in 1964. Without denying his community’s ambition for a united Ireland he put the pragmatic improvement in the lives of the people in Northern Ireland as a clear first priority.
And in doing so he identified sectarianism (from wherever it came) as a distraction to the fulfillment of those key goals of social-economic improvement and mutual development. This was the mountain he clearly identified in the very first stages of his career as a political thinker and doer.
Action, not just words, matter
One of the most enlightening pieces on Hume’s politics is David McWilliams’ column in the Irish Times on Saturday. At first glance, it is a case study of how the small contributions of a Credit Union can make a huge difference to poorer folk by giving them the possibility to act in their long term interest.
John Hume understood that the power of credit was the power to imagine a different future. Credit gave people the power to plan, to set aside money today in order to borrow a bit to finance a future stake in society, whether by paying the rent on a flat for a son or daughter to go to university, obtaining credit to buy a machine in a mechanic’s garage, or buying a drum kit for a band.
Credit, as I found out years ago in this 2003 interview is what builds wider circles of trust. Credit is related to the word ‘belief’ as commerce is to the word ‘community’: “without it people will only do business with people they know, which limits the number of people they can do business with”.
Little did the young Hume suspect that his ambition to climb that mountain would be waylaid by a 30-year campaign of violence which ultimately put limits on its capacity to realise that ambition within his own lifetime. And the pessimistic fatalism that that conflict gave rise to is still very much in evidence.
How violence drags on the collective mind
Hume is much criticised, even today, by writers such as Ruth Dudley Edwards and Christopher Montgomery for bringing what was at the time a sublimely anti-democratic provisional movement in under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
That criticism is not only understandable, it’s also justified. Through Hume, Adams was brought into the peace talks and through him, a still-active IRA was still coldly using murder for its own strategic and tactical advantages even within the later stages of those negotiations.
It was galling for his own party to witness never mind Unionism at large. And they would later pay the price as Adams took spent much of the following two decades taking most of the credit for what had largely been Hume’s own work. As indeed, David Trimble suffered parallel losses to the DUP.
The morality of this was tricky for any honest democrat. One of its corollaries was to comparatively featherbed former terrorists in ways that later peace processes like those in Spain and Columbia (who had the advantage of learning from NI’s mistakes) conspicuously did not.
This, it can be persuasively argued, has had a lasting and dilatory effect on Northern Irish society particularly the marginalised working class from whom Hume himself sprung. In this conversation with Kevin Cullen back in 2001, he articulates his early suspicion of nationalism as a narrowing concept:
Even his most ardent critics acknowledge Hume’s lack of ambiguity on murder. He spent himself in an often missionary pursuit of the cessation of such political crime, to the extent that both he and his party had little left to give by the time peace settled in.
His singled mindedness in particular exhausted his party leaving it with little left to give and in the hands of a series of caretakers who between them oversaw a long electoral decline and near eclipse by Gerry Adams and a seemingly newly shriven and unstoppable Sinn Féin.
Whilst this cannot have been easy for him to witness from afar, as Eoghan Harris argues in the Sunday Independent, little enough of the blame for these subsequent failures attach directly to Hume:
John Hume is not responsible for any adverse results of his Herculean work for peace in his beloved Northern Ireland. He is not responsible for Northern nationalists voting for Sinn Féin. Nor for the southern media’s indulgence of Sinn Féin and the loss of our moral compass. John Hume never lost his own moral compass. His cherished peace process was taken from him by evil elements and used to erode ethical boundaries in both parts of the island.
Redress for 20 years of ‘stick a flag on it’ politics?
And yet in recent years has seen something resembling a sea change in northern politics. The rise of the middle, which as Peter Shirlow has noted in the most recent edition of Cargo of Bricks has long been predicted in a series of surveys and indeed in the movements of the 2011 census.
Some of that change is the result of the peace, of the unwinding of the cruel binaries of war. It has introduced an ability and voter sentiment that was evident before the troubles struck, but which disappeared under the pressure of polarising violence from both the IRA and loyalist reactionaries.
This is one of the reasons why his legacy is still relevant to post troubles in Northern Ireland even now, after his death and more than twenty years after the signing of the historic Belfast Agreement.
Most of that work is still to be done. Much of the assertions of confidence within Northern Catholics applies largely to those who following Hume’s example have done well for themselves comprise the new Catholic and unapologetic middle-class.
After 20 years with Sinn Féin at the head of Northern Irish nationalism single identity Catholic areas still account for some of the poorest educational outcomes and economic standing in the whole of Northern Ireland.
Despite such warm, self-congratulatory nostrums, recent focus on constitutional issues rather than the welfare and well-being of those still living within the boundaries of Northern Ireland little has been done to improve the lives of our poorest citizens.
Hume was never so easily distracted by empty rhetoric or by flags and emblems. He opposed the imposition of the McBride principles on the grounds that he did not want any disincentives to bringing new jobs where they were needed.
It was by such flinty pragmatism that the Republic dragged itself out of the doldrums of the 1950s to the heights of the Celtic Tiger but also the lows of the last 10 years. Changing the world or just climbing one mountain of ambition takes more than one lifetime. Hume knew it involved real reversals.
It is sustained by tumultuous moments of success and then collectively admonished for its mistakes and missteps along the way with sudden and even long reversals of fortune. Looking back on Hume’s career it is easy to view it through the lens of triumph, but the scars too were part of his long term victory.
However, his successes only came through a long and stoic endurance of such reversals and failures. It was Hume’s vision that marked him out amongst his peers: a quality that is ever in short supply in the politics of any nation.
It is often said that Hume sacrificed his party for the achievement of the Belfast Agreement. But the fact is that the SDLP was the single most popular party, ahead of all others in terms of votes gained in the elections of 1998.
Whilst what followed for his party was the equivalent of a long dark night of the soul in which its popularity drifted to below 50% of that 1998 figure over the following 20 years, more recently it has enjoyed something of a revival.
At his passing, the SDLP holds Hume’s old seat of Foyle by a 17,000 vote majority. Elsewhere the pluralist Alliance and Green parties have made substantial inroads both on Sinn Féin’s and the DUP‘s core vote.
In part, this is a result of twenty years of stasis and failure which at its core an inability to agree (probably the most Hume-ian word he’s left us) a common approach, a common purpose and a common programme for action.
Hume’s legacy belongs to all parties and none
But it is also the emergence of a new generation of political voices in the form of Naomi Long, Claire Bailey, and of course the SDLP’s own Colum Eastwood as viable alternatives. Between them, and to some extent the new taoiseach they have begun to painstakingly chisel out a new pluralist space.
Each in their own way is an inheritor of Hume’s tough-minded understanding that nothing of any lasting (keyword) worth can be gained without people from all traditions (and increasingly none) finding in whatever space the way and the means to work together.
This week Ian Paisley Junior chose to tell a story of Hume working in partnership not alone with his own father but with the UUP’s John Taylor in Strasburg, where, whatever the tumult at home, all three worked for the interests of Northern Ireland.
No nationalist, north or south, worth the salt of his or her own ambition for the island can afford to ignore or even try to supersede the legacy of John Hume in this regard. There is no magic blue pill (or poll) that can take away the challenging (red pill) work of uniting the people before territory.
Hume’s analysis of the indolence of the old nationalist party bears uncanny relation to 20 years of non-achievement of the dysfunctional partnership of the DUP and Sinn Fein in their dominant roles in Stormont’s Executive. Adams’ Cuige Uladh speech in 2017 might be channelling Eddie McAteer in 69.
The difference between now and 1964 is that that indolence can be challenged without the immediate danger of plunging the whole state back into a violent, long-term dirty war of a kind not even its main protagonists want to see ever again on our island.
Many are deeply tired of the peace process sophistry, and some are walking away, not to the dissidents, but other more pluralist alternatives that show some understanding of the gains made by the Belfast Agreement, and the need to build on it, not just as an excuse for majoritarian fantasies of a border poll.
As Bertie Ahern noted at the onset of Sinn Féin’s recent three-year boycott of Stormont…
“The idea of a border poll… was put there when when I was conceding Articles two and three of the constitution and we were giving up the territorial right of the north and I wanted to copper-fasten in that if the day came where on the principle of consent people in the north – of all traditions – voted for a united Ireland then we would have agreement on that. “It was not for some kind of sectarian vote or a day that the nationalists and Republicans could outvote the unionists and loyalists… if you want trouble again in the north play that game. It’s a dangerous game,” he said.
The sum of Hume’s political life demands more than national reverence at the moment of his passing. The understated modesty of his funeral belies his greatness as a visionary and statesman. His legacy of gritty optimism in the agreed future he helped to nurture and broker is his greater gift.
It’s not a future of easy returns, but of great ones. There are many living today who see their children and grandchildren grow to maturity and success that were it not John Hume might never have even existed. And, we have to understand, as he did, I think, that as Michael Longley put it, peace…
…is how we interact with one another, civilization. On the one hand, I’m interested in how we avoid tearing one another to pieces. Peace is not that, peace is the absence of that, peace is the absence of war: the opposite of war is custom, customs, and civilization. Civilization is custom and manners and ceremony, the things that Yeats says in “A Prayer for My Daughter.” We have a vocabulary of how to deal with one another and how to behave, a vocabulary of behavior, as well as things to say to one another …and out of that come laws and agreed ways of doing things…
That’s not the easy way forward. It’s one that takes the long term over the short. It means focusing on what makes life better for people in the medium to long term. In the world of 2020, that still means helping people tackle private debt, housing, and the environment. Not things guaranteed to bring votes.
And it means treating the people of Northern Ireland as an integrated interdependent whole regardless of long term constitutional aspiration. Nothing of any import can change on the scale it needs unless it changes for everyone right across the board.
The one for youse one for us paralysis that we’ve endured for the last 20 years has failed the people of Tigers Bay as it has the people of Turf Lodge. Both need the sort of unified action across the board that transforms not only the fortune of the city but the way that fortune is distributed among its citizens.
It can only happen with the sort of long term vision (and combative energy that once made the SDLP the most popular party in Northern Ireland) that Hume had for an Agreed Ireland, and to quote Longley, a prayer that all our daughters (and sons) might come to a proper house…
…Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
Photo by Free-Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


sluggerotoole--2020-08-10--Today is the 15th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Devlin…

The bedroom light was flicked on abruptly bringing me up from a deep safe sleep .
Confused , I struggled to understand what my sixteen-year-old son was saying ; there had been a fight ; his friends were hurt ; the police were downstairs ; they wanted to speak with me .
I sharply admonish him for going out again ; when I went to bed at 10.00 p.m. , he and his friends were playing video games in the back bedroom .
It was August 10th 2005 .
A policewoman stood awkwardly in the hallway , and I saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ door out in the darkness .
In the sitting room , she took details of the incident ; three schoolboys left my house at 10.45 p.m. , walked to the all-night garage , bought crisps and drinks and walked along Somerton Road towards one of their homes for more on-line video gaming .
On Somerton Road , by the homes of bishops , doctors and judges , two men attacked from behind .
One of the three shouted “ run ” but already another was being hit on the head with a wooden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My son and the other friend attempted to climb the fence of a school , but the friend was too slow and was punched and stabbed as he fell to the ground .
A passer-by came to their aid and he too was threatened by the attackers .
A car driving by scattered the attack as my son climbed back over the school fence and with the passer-by helped the wounded friends .
One was seriously injured and a GP living close by was called to give assistance ; the ambulance was on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ injured school boys to hospital .
My son and the passer-by were driven around in a police car in the hope of identifying the assailants .
They had no luck and now the police had brought him home .
The small policewoman sat awkwardly on my sofa in here oversized navy flack-jacket , her belt ; with gun , baton and handcuffs restricted her movements and her radio constantly twitters as we spoke .
Plain-clothes detectives would interview us later in the night she told me ; we should try to get some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My son was shaken , concerned , anxious , so I reassured him that things will be fine and to get some sleep until the police return .
At 2.30 a.m. two police Landrovers parked up in front of the house .
My son was out of bed first and had opened the door to the police as I arrive in the hallway .
They are young , tall and wore overall-type uniforms unimpeded with the paraphernalia the policewomen wore .
Could they speak with us ?
They ask the same questions and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been answered .
At this point they awkwardly suggested that one boy ’ s parents were outside and would like a word and now I realised the main purpose for their call .
In my living room the parents look shocked and drained .
The mother had a forced smile and a shake in her hand .
Could they speak to me alone ; could I ask my son to leave the room .
She avoids any eye contact with him , a boy she knew so well ; someone in and out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him in the hallway and the door closed her husband paced around a coffee table as she calmly told me her son was dead .
The paramedics and the hospital did what they could .
He was stabbed nine times in the back , and on one occasion , the knife had punctured his heart .
He was fifteen years old .
I was only able to struggle a few senseless pathetic words of consolations .
I was disarmed by her dignity and the rationalisation of her thoughts at this most tragic of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to speak , simply breathed loudly and deeply as he continued to pace around the coffee table .
For all her strength she can not tell my son ; could I please do this for her .
It was genuine , kind , considerate and warm .
A comment from a woman I had never met before this evening yet it was chillingly clear that , in spite of her composure , she was fully aware of the horror that had just visited her family .
It was a long night .
When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he was shocked into a confused silence .
I do what I could to console him ; the rest of the family were away leaving me feeling inadequate doing a job his mother , even his sisters , would be so much better .
I needed to get him to speak ; speak about his feelings ; his pain but sixteen-year-old boys do not do this easily .
Today , fifteen years on from the murder and ten years on from successful convictions hard-won , the shock and horror of that night still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that night that as a family we had been “ very lucky indeed ” and as the years pass how lucky we became clearer .
The wounded friend was fine after the killing ; a crack over the head and a glanced stab wound in his chest were shrugged off but he went through mental torture about an event no teenager should ever experience .
A close family suffered the pain of the death of their youngest ; a child , murdered on the way from the shops ; two hundred yards from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ defence , if any , would be offered for this murder , and none was , it can only ever be ; a senseless , brutal , callous , evil deed and its horror will ensure , for a small number of families , life would never again be the same .
For Thomas Devlin there was nothing more ; a young life extinguished long before its great potential could be fully realised .
On 21st February 2010 at Belfast Crown Court Gary Taylor and Nigel Brown were each found guilty of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ murder of Jonathan McKee .
Editors note : The family of Thomas Devlin gave their approval for this post , Brian .

The bedroom light was flicked on abruptly bringing me up from a deep safe sleep. Confused, I struggled to understand what my sixteen-year-old son was saying; there had been a fight; his friends were hurt; the police were downstairs; they wanted to speak with me. I sharply admonish him for going out again; when I went to bed at 10.00 p.m., he and his friends were playing video games in the back bedroom. It was August 10th 2005.
A policewoman stood awkwardly in the hallway, and I saw a parked police car through the opened door out in the darkness. In the sitting room, she took details of the incident; three schoolboys left my house at 10.45 p.m., walked to the all-night garage, bought crisps and drinks and walked along Somerton Road towards one of their homes for more on-line video gaming. On Somerton Road, by the homes of bishops, doctors and judges, two men attacked from behind. One of the three shouted “run” but already another was being hit on the head with a wooden club and was on his knees. My son and the other friend attempted to climb the fence of a school, but the friend was too slow and was punched and stabbed as he fell to the ground. A passer-by came to their aid and he too was threatened by the attackers. A car driving by scattered the attack as my son climbed back over the school fence and with the passer-by helped the wounded friends. One was seriously injured and a GP living close by was called to give assistance; the ambulance was on the scene quickly and took the two injured school boys to hospital. My son and the passer-by were driven around in a police car in the hope of identifying the assailants. They had no luck and now the police had brought him home.
The small policewoman sat awkwardly on my sofa in here oversized navy flack-jacket, her belt; with gun, baton and handcuffs restricted her movements and her radio constantly twitters as we spoke. Plain-clothes detectives would interview us later in the night she told me; we should try to get some sleep. It was now one-thirty.
My son was shaken, concerned, anxious, so I reassured him that things will be fine and to get some sleep until the police return. At 2.30 a.m. two police Landrovers parked up in front of the house. My son was out of bed first and had opened the door to the police as I arrive in the hallway. They are young, tall and wore overall-type uniforms unimpeded with the paraphernalia the policewomen wore. Could they speak with us? They ask the same questions and I stopped them explaining these questions had been answered. At this point they awkwardly suggested that one boy’s parents were outside and would like a word and now I realised the main purpose for their call.
In my living room the parents look shocked and drained. The mother had a forced smile and a shake in her hand. Could they speak to me alone; could I ask my son to leave the room. She avoids any eye contact with him, a boy she knew so well; someone in and out of her home for years.
With him in the hallway and the door closed her husband paced around a coffee table as she calmly told me her son was dead. The paramedics and the hospital did what they could. He was stabbed nine times in the back, and on one occasion, the knife had punctured his heart. He was fifteen years old.
I was only able to struggle a few senseless pathetic words of consolations. I was disarmed by her dignity and the rationalisation of her thoughts at this most tragic of moments. Her husband, still unable to speak, simply breathed loudly and deeply as he continued to pace around the coffee table. For all her strength she cannot tell my son; could I please do this for her. It was genuine, kind, considerate and warm. A comment from a woman I had never met before this evening yet it was chillingly clear that, in spite of her composure, she was fully aware of the horror that had just visited her family.
It was a long night. When I broke the news to my son he was shocked into a confused silence. I do what I could to console him; the rest of the family were away leaving me feeling inadequate doing a job his mother, even his sisters, would be so much better. I needed to get him to speak; speak about his feelings; his pain but sixteen-year-old boys do not do this easily.
Today, fifteen years on from the murder and ten years on from successful convictions hard-won, the shock and horror of that night still live with me. Penny Holloway said that night that as a family we had been “very lucky indeed” and as the years pass how lucky we became clearer. The wounded friend was fine after the killing; a crack over the head and a glanced stab wound in his chest were shrugged off but he went through mental torture about an event no teenager should ever experience. A close family suffered the pain of the death of their youngest; a child, murdered on the way from the shops; two hundred yards from his front door. No matter what defence, if any, would be offered for this murder, and none was, it can only ever be; a senseless, brutal, callous, evil deed and its horror will ensure, for a small number of families, life would never again be the same. For Thomas Devlin there was nothing more; a young life extinguished long before its great potential could be fully realised.
On 21st February 2010 at Belfast Crown Court Gary Taylor and Nigel Brown were each found guilty of the murder of Thomas Devlin and the attempted murder of Jonathan McKee.
Editors note: The family of Thomas Devlin gave their approval for this post, Brian.


sluggerotoole--2020-08-12--Pounds, shillings and pence: Stormont’s Fiscal Council…

I have before written about the idea of a fiscal council for Northern Ireland which was first mooted in the Stormont House Agreement .
When the new decade new approach agreement was published there contained a solid commitment to the establishment of this crucial mechanism .
The post war Labour government who established the NHS were committed to ending the regional disparities in relief which had become stark in the nineteenth century .
Across Britain and Ireland there was an old system of ‘ parish relief ’ which was largely left to the disposal of parochial authorities .
When the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put under the domain of regional authorities but again there was a lack of national consistency .
What motivated this post war labour administration was not only a belief in the idea of ‘ service free at the point of delivery ’ but an end to regional outcomes disparity .
This plan for national insurance of every citizen was inevitably incompatible with the Stormont system of governance .
As far back as 1938 the then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland , James Craig , had been given assurance that the Treasury would fund @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and since then a net surplus has been paid into NI by the central London Treasury .
By the time the Labour and Conservative post war governments had spent , rebuilt and refinanced the war torn nation it was impossible for NI to ever be a net contributor .
But the model began to crack when our economy slowed in the 1960s , traditional heavy industries who ’ d experienced a boom in the war period could not compete in a global economy blown open by the dominant USA .
The so called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reductions at the GATT straight-jacketed any UK government from raising tariffs and a weak pound meant that attracting investment ( especially in dollars ) was more vital over protecting old failing industries .
Therefore our politics slipped into ‘ moral hazard , ’ fiscal responsibility fell solidly off of the political agenda and economics centred on grant schemes from a treasury funded pot .
This is embodied most in the Minister for Commerce Brian Faulkner who said : Using resources in this fashion was a great short term buffer to big job losses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ underlying structural issues in NI ( other examples of expensive schemes include the Craigavon city project , the Lockwood Report and the Motorways project ) .
One example is the failure to reform education which occurred in the Republic of Ireland and England at the same time .
The two latter regions established a comprehensive secondary and tertiary education systems , they did this to attract investment in key skills sectors .
The moral hazard persists with the most egregious recent example being exposed by the RHI scandal , Sam Mcbride used the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Department of Finance civil servant in 1992 to illustrate the issue : His confidential assessment , which went to Stormont ’ s top mandarins , calculated that the previous year government spending in NI was close to 43 % higher than the average in the rest of the UK , and that in several areas of expenditure NI was receiving ‘ between three and four times ’ more than the UK as a whole .
The only area he could identify in which NI received less money was roads and transport [ bold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Westminster Northern Ireland Affairs committee produced a report examining how the Fiscal Council would work and how broad its mandate would encompass – just to add this is the only region on these islands without an independent fiscal council or budgetary responsibility body .
Sir Jonathan Stephens gave evidence to the commitment in which he argued that the council could give MLAs political voter for policy decisions ( think citizens assembly ) .
Paul MacFlynn in his evidence called for complete independence as an arms length body : Photo by nattanan23 is @ @ @ @

I have before written about the idea of a fiscal council for Northern Ireland which was first mooted in the Stormont House Agreement. When the new decade new approach agreement was published there contained a solid commitment to the establishment of this crucial mechanism.
The post war Labour government who established the NHS were committed to ending the regional disparities in relief which had become stark in the nineteenth century. Across Britain and Ireland there was an old system of ‘parish relief’ which was largely left to the disposal of parochial authorities. When the work houses were established they were gradually put under the domain of regional authorities but again there was a lack of national consistency. What motivated this post war labour administration was not only a belief in the idea of ‘service free at the point of delivery’ but an end to regional outcomes disparity.
This plan for national insurance of every citizen was inevitably incompatible with the Stormont system of governance. As far back as 1938 the then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, James Craig, had been given assurance that the Treasury would fund the NI state through ‘subvention’ and since then a net surplus has been paid into NI by the central London Treasury. By the time the Labour and Conservative post war governments had spent, rebuilt and refinanced the war torn nation it was impossible for NI to ever be a net contributor.
But the model began to crack when our economy slowed in the 1960s, traditional heavy industries who’d experienced a boom in the war period could not compete in a global economy blown open by the dominant USA. The so called’ “Kennedy Round” of tariff reductions at the GATT straight-jacketed any UK government from raising tariffs and a weak pound meant that attracting investment (especially in dollars) was more vital over protecting old failing industries.
Therefore our politics slipped into ‘moral hazard,’ fiscal responsibility fell solidly off of the political agenda and economics centred on grant schemes from a treasury funded pot. This is embodied most in the Minister for Commerce Brian Faulkner who said:
Firms have come to Northern Ireland, simply because we were able to offer them a factory ready made into which they could move literally within a matter of weeks.
Using resources in this fashion was a great short term buffer to big job losses, but it failed to address the underlying structural issues in NI (other examples of expensive schemes include the Craigavon city project, the Lockwood Report and the Motorways project). One example is the failure to reform education which occurred in the Republic of Ireland and England at the same time. The two latter regions established a comprehensive secondary and tertiary education systems, they did this to attract investment in key skills sectors.
The moral hazard persists with the most egregious recent example being exposed by the RHI scandal, Sam Mcbride used the example of a study conducted by a Department of Finance civil servant in 1992 to illustrate the issue:
His confidential assessment, which went to Stormont’s top mandarins, calculated that the previous year government spending in NI was close to 43% higher than the average in the rest of the UK, and that in several areas of expenditure NI was receiving ‘between three and four times’ more than the UK as a whole. The only area he could identify in which NI received less money was roads and transport [bold added]
Against the backdrop of this the Westminster Northern Ireland Affairs committee produced a report examining how the Fiscal Council would work and how broad its mandate would encompass – just to add this is the only region on these islands without an independent fiscal council or budgetary responsibility body.
Sir Jonathan Stephens gave evidence to the commitment in which he argued that the council could give MLAs political voter for policy decisions (think citizens assembly). Paul MacFlynn in his evidence called for complete independence as an arms length body:
As the fiscal council will be expected to criticise and evaluate government policies, the relationship between the council and government needs to be more distant. The report also noted how the OECD have found (internationally) that the most fiscally governments take independent advice and have such bodies. Therefore the need for this to be staffed by competent people wholly independent from political parties is vital. The report quotes Paul MacFlynn’s testimony that policy which is implemented and policy which isn’t implemented must be fully costed, specifically he pointed out that when NI diverges from UK wide policy a full costing should be required. With Stormont’s limited abilities at raising revenues he also called on the council to have full access to how income is distributed from the treasury and where exactly it is collected. The Fiscal Council deadline was July 2020, having now been passed and with COVID throwing the economic realities of the world into a tailspin it is more vital than ever that we establish a fiscal council.
Photo by nattanan23 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


sluggerotoole--2020-08-12--Happy Birthday Emmanuel Goldstein

Happy Birthday Emmanuel Goldstein

Scapegoating is always so helpful in politics , is it not ?
It ’ s so cost-effective , and saves so much trouble .
Rather than admit to your audience that there are no easy solutions to the problems facing your people , and that things are a lot more complicated than was previously thought , all you need to do is affect some fake moral outrage and point the finger at [ insert identifiable target here ] .
The practice has been used as long as politics has existed , of course , by all kinds of rulers .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s political environment is that there has arguably never been a more perfect breeding ground for such poisonous ideas .
Think about it : we live in a world where there are more and more media of communications , mostly online , and where a plethora of news sources ( some reliable , some not so much ) are competing for attention , and where increasing numbers of us are turning away from the “ MSM ” .
Officially the initials stand for Mainstream Media , but to all intents and purposes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they are used ) they mean facts and evidence that don ’ t support my beliefs and values .
As a result , certain rulers can lie compulsively about virtually anything , and get away it .
Perhaps the most insidious form of scapegoating is one that involves identifiable individuals : Are you worried about the state of your lot ?
It ’ s because of him , that devious , conniving type over there , who ’ s always involved whenever there ’ s a crisis or a hideous mess somewhere .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Fear not : just stick with us and our movement , don ’ t ask too many questions , and we ’ ll put him in his place .
For his part , if the Hungarian-American billionaire businessman George Soros ( who turns 90 today ) is at all worried about being the target of innumerable conspiracy theories , most of them emanating from the Mad Right , he isn ’ t showing it much : There may well , of course , be some wet-behind-the-ears political scientists who will scratch their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is about this left-leaning , socially conscientious , Democratic Party-supporting Jewish businessman and Holocaust survivor that so enrages the world ’ s looniest political commentators .
If you were to believe the nuttiest conspiracy theories about Soros , you would honestly take it as read that he was actually a member of the Nazi family , that he owns Antifa , and that he orchestrated the Black Lives Matter protests , the Central American refugee caravan migration , and the Catalan independence movement .
He has been accused of paying people to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Muslim immigrants , and of spreading COVID-19 .
He has even been blamed for an attempt on his own life in October 2018 .
It seldom seems to occur to the people promoting this kind of nonsense that if Soros had been such a powerful Blofeld-like mastermind behind such a range of events , then he wouldn ’ t have much time for anything else – like make money , of which he would in any case quickly run out , if his global reach really were so vast as the conspiracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Canadian newspaper The Province recently put it… George Soros is surely the Emmanuel Goldstein of our times .
In George Orwell ’ s iconic final novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , the Party have total control over the superstate of Oceania , with an all-embracing totalitarian regime that puts most of the thinking population under complete surveillance , and successfully censors all news and books , particularly history books , and keeps the population permanently hungry with strict rationing .
Despite the government ’ s all-powerful nature , it nonetheless is at pains to stress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Goldstein , supposedly the head of an underground resistance movement called the Brotherhood , is forever plotting to overthrow the state and undermine the people ’ s way of life .
All Outer Party members are daily expected to attend the Two Minutes Hate , in which they are encouraged to scream abuse at the Enemy or Enemies of the State of the day : The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day , but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure .
He was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Party ’ s purity .
All subsequent crimes against the Party , all treacheries , acts of sabotage , heresies , deviations , sprang directly out of his teaching .
Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies : perhaps somewhere beyond the sea , under the protection of his foreign paymasters , perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumoured – in some hiding-place in Oceania itself… Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party… He was abusing Big Brother , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia , he was advocating freedom of speech , freedom of the press , freedom of assembly , freedom of thought , he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed… Sounds familiar , doesn ’ t it ?
It ’ s generally believed that Orwell was modeling Goldstein on Leon Trotsky , the intellectual and favourite of Lenin who was ultimately outmanoeuvred and later exiled by Stalin in 1927 .
Over the next thirteen years Trotsky would be the target of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in which everything that went wrong in the Soviet Union ’ s supposed “ workers ’ paradise ” was blamed on him .
One fan of Stalin decided to act on the propaganda himself by driving an ice-pick into Trotsky ’ s head in his Mexican exile .
Naturally , many of Soros ’ s critics are at pains to deny that they are in any way anti-semitic , and point to things like how he makes money supposedly to undermine entire national economies .
Witness , for example , his making over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the European Exchange Rate Mechanism crash on Black Wednesday in September 1992 .
Well , yes .
He was a currency speculator .
It ’ s the kind of thing currency speculators do ( take , for example , the run on sterling that ultimately forced Britain off the Gold Standard in 1931 ) .
It was certainly the kind of thing other currency speculators have done to other economies around the world down the generations , although curiously few of those business figures have ever been named and vilified for any of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has Soros been doing with his billions ?
He is the chairman of a grant-making civic organization called the Open Society Foundations ( established 1993 ) , which provides funding for various non-governmental organizations ( NGOs ) around the world .
In the Foundations ’ own words , they are ‘ working for justice , democratic governance , and human rights.
’ The group ’ s activities include work to help refugees , educational projects , and supporting pro-democracy movements in various parts of the world .
OSF ’ s work has roused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the increasingly dictatorial prime minister of Soros ’ s native Hungary , but also of the governments of Russia , China , Pakistan and Turkey .
With critics like that , Soros and his organization surely must be doing something right .
Soros was a keen supporter of democratic reform in the Eastern European revolutions of 1989-91 .
Indeed , Orban , for all his hysterical rhetoric about Soros in Hungary ’ s 2018 elections , tends not to mention how he has in the past accepted money from the same businessman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is so despised by a number of figures on the right in the Western world and beyond is because he – well – he doesn ’ t behave like you would expect a successful billionaire businessman to behave .
Rather than greedily hanging on to his money in a sun-kissed Californian mansion accessible only by helicopter , he believes in spending his wealth on progressive causes .
LBC presenter James O ’ Brien , commenting on the attempt on Soros ’ s life nearly two years ago , reckoned that Soros was being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terms of the billionaire image archetype : Politically , the argument always has to be ‘ if you want a healthy economy you have to give more tax cuts to billionaires and you have to stop making them pay for poor people , and you have to give them more freedom and de-regulate workplaces ’ , and then they inject huge amounts of money into shady organizations that masquerade as think-tanks .
People during Brexit were alleged as deliberately trying to manipulate the results in order to make a killing on a shorted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wide out in the open , and he has done it much , much better than them ( worth about £8 billion ) , and he spends his money on trying to help people less fortunate than he is , and he ’ s a turbo-charged Democrat .
That ’ s why they hate him , and the Jewishness , of course , then just becomes a very , very useful tool with which to attack him .
In Orwell ’ s novel the reader has to decide for him- or herself whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exists – indeed , Winston Smith ’ s torturer O ’ Brien seems to hint that Goldstein and the Brotherhood are just useful fabrications to focus popular anger away from the government .
Classic scapegoating , of course .
Trotsky , though , was real .
George Soros is real , and the threats to his life are also real .
The least he deserves on his 90th birthday is to be able to live his life and continue his work in peace and safety , and for the poisonous bile circulating about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for what it is – a cynical diversion away from the real causes of our world ’ s problems today , being used by rulers with insidious scapegoat-flavoured agendas of their own .
“ Abner Dean : Two Minutes Hate ” by Fugue is licensed under CC BY-SA

Scapegoating is always so helpful in politics, is it not? It’s so cost-effective, and saves so much trouble. Rather than admit to your audience that there are no easy solutions to the problems facing your people, and that things are a lot more complicated than was previously thought, all you need to do is affect some fake moral outrage and point the finger at [insert identifiable target here]. The practice has been used as long as politics has existed, of course, by all kinds of rulers. The alarming thing about scapegoating in today’s political environment is that there has arguably never been a more perfect breeding ground for such poisonous ideas. Think about it: we live in a world where there are more and more media of communications, mostly online, and where a plethora of news sources (some reliable, some not so much) are competing for attention, and where increasing numbers of us are turning away from the “MSM”. Officially the initials stand for Mainstream Media, but to all intents and purposes (judging by the way in which they are used) they mean facts and evidence that don’t support my beliefs and values. As a result, certain rulers can lie compulsively about virtually anything, and get away it.
Perhaps the most insidious form of scapegoating is one that involves identifiable individuals: Are you worried about the state of your lot? It’s because of him, that devious, conniving type over there, who’s always involved whenever there’s a crisis or a hideous mess somewhere. The filthy, vicious puppeteer and manipulator. Fear not: just stick with us and our movement, don’t ask too many questions, and we’ll put him in his place.
For his part, if the Hungarian-American billionaire businessman George Soros (who turns 90 today) is at all worried about being the target of innumerable conspiracy theories, most of them emanating from the Mad Right, he isn’t showing it much:
I am proud of the enemies I have… My work and the work of my foundations consists of promoting and reinforcing open societies, so this tells me that we are doing something right… The downside is that we have just a little too many enemies right now.
There may well, of course, be some wet-behind-the-ears political scientists who will scratch their heads in bewilderment, wondering what it is about this left-leaning, socially conscientious, Democratic Party-supporting Jewish businessman and Holocaust survivor that so enrages the world’s looniest political commentators. If you were to believe the nuttiest conspiracy theories about Soros, you would honestly take it as read that he was actually a member of the Nazi family, that he owns Antifa, and that he orchestrated the Black Lives Matter protests, the Central American refugee caravan migration, and the Catalan independence movement. He has been accused of paying people to be anarchists, of plotting to flood Europe with Muslim immigrants, and of spreading COVID-19. He has even been blamed for an attempt on his own life in October 2018.
It seldom seems to occur to the people promoting this kind of nonsense that if Soros had been such a powerful Blofeld-like mastermind behind such a range of events, then he wouldn’t have much time for anything else – like make money, of which he would in any case quickly run out, if his global reach really were so vast as the conspiracy theorists claim. Moreover, as the Canadian newspaper The Province recently put it…
[T]here is a difference between “George Soros pays for and orchestrates protests” and “George Soros’s philanthropic foundation supports groups that employ people who are part of protests.” There are, surely, people around the world who show up at protests and who work for organizations that receive grants from Open Society, but they are not being paid to protest. To say they are attributes too much agency to Soros, playing on an anti-Semitic trope of Jewish people pulling society’s strings, and strips demonstrators who are taking to the streets with legitimate grievances – like corruption and police brutality – of theirs.
George Soros is surely the Emmanuel Goldstein of our times. In George Orwell’s iconic final novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party have total control over the superstate of Oceania, with an all-embracing totalitarian regime that puts most of the thinking population under complete surveillance, and successfully censors all news and books, particularly history books, and keeps the population permanently hungry with strict rationing. Despite the government’s all-powerful nature, it nonetheless is at pains to stress to the people that the Jewish intellectual Goldstein, supposedly the head of an underground resistance movement called the Brotherhood, is forever plotting to overthrow the state and undermine the people’s way of life. All Outer Party members are daily expected to attend the Two Minutes Hate, in which they are encouraged to scream abuse at the Enemy or Enemies of the State of the day:
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumoured – in some hiding-place in Oceania itself… Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party… He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed…
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s generally believed that Orwell was modeling Goldstein on Leon Trotsky, the intellectual and favourite of Lenin who was ultimately outmanoeuvred and later exiled by Stalin in 1927. Over the next thirteen years Trotsky would be the target of a sustained, vicious propaganda campaign, in which everything that went wrong in the Soviet Union’s supposed “workers’ paradise” was blamed on him. One fan of Stalin decided to act on the propaganda himself by driving an ice-pick into Trotsky’s head in his Mexican exile.
Naturally, many of Soros’s critics are at pains to deny that they are in any way anti-semitic, and point to things like how he makes money supposedly to undermine entire national economies. Witness, for example, his making over $1bn in shorting the pound during the European Exchange Rate Mechanism crash on Black Wednesday in September 1992. Well, yes. He was a currency speculator. It’s the kind of thing currency speculators do (take, for example, the run on sterling that ultimately forced Britain off the Gold Standard in 1931). It was certainly the kind of thing other currency speculators have done to other economies around the world down the generations, although curiously few of those business figures have ever been named and vilified for any of their extra-curricular work.
But what exactly has Soros been doing with his billions? He is the chairman of a grant-making civic organization called the Open Society Foundations (established 1993), which provides funding for various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world. In the Foundations’ own words, they are ‘working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.’ The group’s activities include work to help refugees, educational projects, and supporting pro-democracy movements in various parts of the world. OSF’s work has roused the ire not just of Viktor Orban, the increasingly dictatorial prime minister of Soros’s native Hungary, but also of the governments of Russia, China, Pakistan and Turkey. With critics like that, Soros and his organization surely must be doing something right. Soros was a keen supporter of democratic reform in the Eastern European revolutions of 1989-91. Indeed, Orban, for all his hysterical rhetoric about Soros in Hungary’s 2018 elections, tends not to mention how he has in the past accepted money from the same businessman.
Perhaps the main reason why Soros is so despised by a number of figures on the right in the Western world and beyond is because he – well – he doesn’t behave like you would expect a successful billionaire businessman to behave. Rather than greedily hanging on to his money in a sun-kissed Californian mansion accessible only by helicopter, he believes in spending his wealth on progressive causes. LBC presenter James O’Brien, commenting on the attempt on Soros’s life nearly two years ago, reckoned that Soros was being targeted principally for upsetting the applecart in terms of the billionaire image archetype:
Politically, the argument always has to be ‘if you want a healthy economy you have to give more tax cuts to billionaires and you have to stop making them pay for poor people, and you have to give them more freedom and de-regulate workplaces’, and then they inject huge amounts of money into shady organizations that masquerade as think-tanks. People during Brexit were alleged as deliberately trying to manipulate the results in order to make a killing on a shorted pound – whereas Soros has done everything wide out in the open, and he has done it much, much better than them (worth about £8 billion), and he spends his money on trying to help people less fortunate than he is, and he’s a turbo-charged Democrat. That’s why they hate him, and the Jewishness, of course, then just becomes a very, very useful tool with which to attack him.
In Orwell’s novel the reader has to decide for him- or herself whether the ultimate scapegoat Emmanuel Goldstein actually truly exists – indeed, Winston Smith’s torturer O’Brien seems to hint that Goldstein and the Brotherhood are just useful fabrications to focus popular anger away from the government. Classic scapegoating, of course. Trotsky, though, was real. George Soros is real, and the threats to his life are also real. The least he deserves on his 90th birthday is to be able to live his life and continue his work in peace and safety, and for the poisonous bile circulating about him on the Web to be exposed for what it is – a cynical diversion away from the real causes of our world’s problems today, being used by rulers with insidious scapegoat-flavoured agendas of their own.
“Abner Dean: Two Minutes Hate” by Fugue is licensed under CC BY-SA


sluggerotoole--2020-08-13--It is time to end the idiotic cap on the number of local students Northern Ireland’s universities ca

It is time to end the idiotic cap on the number of local students Northern Ireland’s universities can admit…

Many of us have a low opinion of Stormont at the best of times but along comes a story that highlights the utter head-bangingly stupid nature of some of their more crazy decisions .
Writing in today ’ s Irish Times Newton Emerson highlights the issue of the cap on local students .
From the article : This year ’ s undergraduate entry requirements show Northern Ireland ’ s universities operating a two-tier system : students from the North need significantly higher grades than applicants from Britain .
For example , Northern Ireland students need three As at A-level to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Belfast , while applicants from Britain need only three Bs .
To keep grants under control , Stormont capped the number of local students Northern Ireland ’ s universities can admit .
However , students from Britain can be recruited without limit , as they pay full fees .
This has caused or entrenched a series of disastrous trends .
One-quarter of students have to leave Northern Ireland because they can not find courses at home .
Most go reluctantly , as they have to pay full fees in Britain , and two-thirds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ students from Britain study in the North , turning the local student cap into a de facto budget cap and preventing universities from expanding .
The resulting brain drain is increasingly recognised as a critical brake on productivity and growth .
Only 40 per cent of young adults in the North are educated to degree level , compared with 60 per cent in the Republic .
Appeals to tribalism may be the only way forward .
The brain drain is perceived as disproportionately harming the unionist population , while also vastly raising the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can understand that University fees are unpopular .
I was the last of the golden age that not only got free fees but also got a grant .
But if there are fees in the rest the UK we should just bite the bullet and harmonise .
I know Scottish students get free fees but not NI students studying in Scotland .
My own nieces and nephews don ’ t consider student loans as ‘ real debt ’ : they don ’ t really care if it ’ s 5k or 9k , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it back for decades .
So I don ’ t expect there to be much impact on students if fees are raised .
Remember you only need to start repaying student loans once your income goes over £18,935 a year , and if you are really unlucky in life they get written off .
Why would Diane Dodds as minister of the department of the Economy preside over such a bonkers system that not only harms her old University financially but also encourages a brain drain ?
I wonder would Diane have still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these rules ?
“ Queen ’ s University of Belfast ” by Iker Merodio | Photography is licensed under CC BY-ND

Many of us have a low opinion of Stormont at the best of times but along comes a story that highlights the utter head-bangingly stupid nature of some of their more crazy decisions. Writing in today’s Irish Times Newton Emerson highlights the issue of the cap on local students. From the article:
This year’s undergraduate entry requirements show Northern Ireland’s universities operating a two-tier system: students from the North need significantly higher grades than applicants from Britain. For example, Northern Ireland students need three As at A-level to do law at Queen’s University Belfast, while applicants from Britain need only three Bs. To keep grants under control, Stormont capped the number of local students Northern Ireland’s universities can admit. However, students from Britain can be recruited without limit, as they pay full fees. This has caused or entrenched a series of disastrous trends. One-quarter of students have to leave Northern Ireland because they cannot find courses at home. Most go reluctantly, as they have to pay full fees in Britain, and two-thirds never return. Only a trickle of students from Britain study in the North, turning the local student cap into a de facto budget cap and preventing universities from expanding. The resulting brain drain is increasingly recognised as a critical brake on productivity and growth. Only 40 per cent of young adults in the North are educated to degree level, compared with 60 per cent in the Republic. Appeals to tribalism may be the only way forward. The brain drain is perceived as disproportionately harming the unionist population, while also vastly raising the cost of a united Ireland.
I can understand that University fees are unpopular. I was the last of the golden age that not only got free fees but also got a grant. But if there are fees in the rest the UK we should just bite the bullet and harmonise. I know Scottish students get free fees but not NI students studying in Scotland. My own nieces and nephews don’t consider student loans as ‘real debt’: they don’t really care if it’s 5k or 9k, they don’t plan to pay it back for decades. So I don’t expect there to be much impact on students if fees are raised. Remember you only need to start repaying student loans once your income goes over £18,935 a year, and if you are really unlucky in life they get written off.
Why would Diane Dodds as minister of the department of the Economy preside over such a bonkers system that not only harms her old University financially but also encourages a brain drain? I wonder would Diane have still gotten into Queen’s now under these rules?
“Queen’s University of Belfast” by Iker Merodio | Photography is licensed under CC BY-ND