During my sabbatical I am trying to make some progress on a couple of writing projects, including a series of poems prompted by places in my home city of Belfast. Many of these focus on pieces of public art. Over the weekend, after joining the large anti-racism rally at City Hall I took a detour via one of our most recently erected, and best curated statues in a seemingly unlikely corner of the city, near the junction of Lombard Street and Rosemary Street. It portrays Frederick Douglass, the black American anti-slavery campaigner, who actually was only able to buy himself out of slavery following his speaking tour of Ireland in 1845-6. As part of that he spoke in the building now known as "First Church" in Rosemary Street, which was then a politically liberal Presbyterian Church. The sculpture was created by Alan Beattie Herriot and Hector Guest and was erected in July 2023. This piece begins with a quotation from Douglass, but whilst Saturday's anti-racism ra...
I'm in London as part of my sabbatical and found myself in a time warp last night and this morning watching the news of the riots in my home city, with a friend and colleague caught up in the midst of them, trying to make a difference. I'll leave it to others back home to comment on things on a deeper level. My prayers are with those involved in the original attack that lit the blue touch paper, and those picking up the pieces including the emergency services and those in East Belfast Mission... But this is my initial, emotional response to the whole mess with credit/apologies to Paul Brady . Four decades ago I sat in a city not my own, listening tearfully to a song that sang about the skies of Lebanon burning, with television pictures of women and children dying in the street, whilst back home we were sacrificing our own children and leaving twisted wreckage on the roads... carving tomorrow from a tombstone. Many tomorrows have come and gone, and too many tombsto...