Virtual Methodist

"A week is a long time in politics," Harold Wilson is reputed to have said 50 years ago... Time seems to have got faster in the subsequent half-century, and this past week has flown past, meaning that after promising further posts in a day or two, here I am not having posted anything in a week... But that week has seen a substantial range of political developments here in Northern Ireland... Including: Last Monday night Belfast City Council voted to extend a welcome to Pope Francis if there is a papal visit in the near future... This to the outsider may at first be seen as a step towards a more inclusive city, but Unionist councillors abstained in the vote, with the UUP's Jim Rodgers speaking out against the visit as he had done in the previous week's Belfast Telegraph, warning of possible trouble on the streets. Then throughout the week there has been a dingdong about Welfare Reform, with the DUP, from various angles( eg. here and here ), accusing Sinn Fein of ...

The first thing I heard as I woke up this morning was that the playwright Sam Thompson was being honoured by naming the new bridge from Victoria Park over to Airport Road after him. This bridge allows access by foot and bike to the Harbour Estate and Titanic Quarter, the erstwhile Shipyard where his most famous play "Over the Bridge" was set...  There is a certain appropriateness to this, but also some irony given that many of the issues that Sam Thompson raised in that play apply directly to the malaise affecting the loyalist community that lies in the shadow of the gantries of the remaining 2 shipyard cranes. To that end I offer this slightly revised reblog of one I produced in the wake of Martin Lynch's revival/revision of the play 3 years ago, looking at why I believe it is a crucially important play : The Physical Context - The Shipyard In a moment of unguarded honesty a few years ago, when Harland and Wolff was teetering on the brink of total closure...

This morning's Thought for the Day... For those who missed it and prefer to listen rather than read, you can find it here 25 minutes and 85 minutes in, and in the second case just after an interview with Linda Ervine, about the Irish language classes in East Belfast Mission, proving the power of education in all its forms to help us to understand one another and find a new way of relating to each other. It was encouraging to read over the weekend that a stand-off at Hazelwood College in North Belfast , between their management and the Belfast Education and Library Board is heading towards a resolution [although to later hear of the issue being dragged into the High Court didn't exactly fill me with joy.. . recourse to law rarely produces reconciliation...] I don’t know all the rights and wrongs, but it was not good to see children padlocked out of classrooms… Much worse however, were the threats supposedly made on Friday, by the so called Red Hand Defenders , ag...

Well, I'm back in harness this week after a short period of aestivation, both in the real and virtual realms. This morning saw me start the day at BBC Radio Ulster doing Thought for the Day (if you didn't catch it you can find it approximately 26 and 86 minutes into Good Morning Ulster on the iPlayer for the next week) and this is that thought, more or less in written form... I’m not very athletic… I can’t play a musical instrument… I’m useless at arts and crafts… and I’m never going to be offered a modelling contract… But I am supposed to be moderately intelligent, if IQ tests and exam results are to be believed… So I was interested to read a report last week suggesting that religious people, tend to be less intelligent than self-professed atheists . This led to some crowing by atheists on social networks, although the study emphasised that it probably wasn’t a simple case of cause and effect. Rather, as well as asking more searching questions than those who are less in...

There has been a lot of fuss (and a fair amount of humour) at the news that many cheap burgers in various supermarket chains have a large percentage of horse in them. Not only would many Europeans be surprised at the furore concerning this, I was flabbergasted a couple of nights ago, when a vox-pop of some shoppers had them saying that they were really appalled because it made them wonder "what were they really feeding to their children." Given that they were already feeding them the lowest-priced meat products available this is perhaps a question they should have been asking earlier. A friend of mine is behind the current health campaign in Northern Ireland pushing for weight loss and a healthier diet. I fear he may be on a beaten docket with me and many others in this province. However, recent weeks and particularly the edifying experience that the Nolan Show on BBCNI was on Wednesday night, made me think that actually there is another dietary problem here in Northern ...

There is a saying that today's news is tomorrow's fish and chip wrapping, and while in these health and hygiene obsessed days the origins of that is a little more obscure, the meaning is totally true... and a danger when you are writing a topical "Thought for the Day" piece for radio. I often go to bed having written one, and hoping that a bigger story doesn't arise during the hours of darkness. Today was a case in point... although the bigger story had arisen before I headed bedwards, and I only became aware of it as I drove into the studio... Anyway, this is the Thought for the Day as broadcast on Good Morning Ulster this morning at 6.55 and 7.55 am. Yesterday I awoke to hear that because of EU equality rules, pupils resident in Northern Ireland holding Irish passports may qualify for free university tuition in Scotland, just like Scottish residents. This may be very good news given that university fees are now rising to a maximum of £9000 per year… As someo...

Normally when I’m doing a review of the week’s news on Downtown Radio's "Dawn Reflections" I’ll use a story that has been grabbing all the headlines or something suitably quirky. This week I focussed on neither… but rather a disturbing piece that I read earlier in the week. It concerned child sacrifice in some areas of Uganda , and there is a suggestion that this problem has developed because of an unholy alliance between emerging capitalist prosperity there and unscrupulous supposed witch doctors willing to kill, mutilate or take blood from a child in order to bring others wealth and good health, by burying the resulting fetishes around the building sites of new developments. According to official police figures, there have been about 25-30 cases of child sacrifice per year recently, but local pastors suggest that the figures are actually in the hundreds, with more than 900 cases yet to be investigated by the police because of corruption and a lack of resources. T...

Well, its 2 weeks today since Sally and I visited the "Book of the Dead" exhibition in the British Museum. It was luxury to spend nearly 3 hours wandering around an exhibition without either of the boys getting bored. That's not to say that they don't enjoy history and museums... they do, but their patience has a limit. I loved history when I was a child, not just Egyptian history, but I am sure that my love of history would have been deepened had "Horrible Histories" existed back then... They started showing them on BBC2 in the morning's recently and I kept getting sucked in... Their "Awful Egyptians" strand is particularly funny, including this musical introduction to the process of mummification. It's not strictly accurate (eg. they didn't use scrolls inside coffins to write the book of the dead during the period of the pyramids, they carved/painted them of the walls of the tomb) but that's just me being pedantic... Another ...

Currently there’s is a lot of tension concerning the future of education in this country… First there's the debacle concerning the local post-primary transfer tests, which condemns kids to up to 5 tests over the next 4 Saturdays in alien surroundings... and asking their parents to pay for the privilege. Then there's the likely threefold increase in third level education tuition fees, resulting in the protests, peaceful and otherwise, in London today. In both, people from poorer backgrounds will undoubtedly be affected more than others… Yes there is provision for those who recieve "free school meals" to have transfer tests waived, and there will, we are told, be no up-front costs for people going to university and graduates will only have to pay back their "loan" when their earnings rise above a certain level, but this ignores some key facts about those from some disadvantaged areas. First, not everyone takes up the option of free school meals because of the ...

Well, I did promise... although with the passage of time and other intervening events I do wonder why... But given that I've recently posted on another play that touches on some of the issues that face working class Northern Ireland, and particularly the protestant part of it, I thought I should return to look at Sam Thompson's "Over the Bridge." I've already foisted an outrageously long post on you, dissecting Martin Lynch's recent adaptation of it, but I thought it might also be useful to look at some of the reasons why it is, in my not so humble opinion, one of the most important modern Irish plays... There are a number of reasons: The Physical Context - The Shipyard In a moment of unguarded honesty a few years ago, when Harland and Wolff was teetering on the brink of total closure, a political representative with responsibilities for trade and industry said that the shipyard was a dreadful place... Full of asbestos and other noxious substances tha...

There's a famous song by Paul Brady called "The Island" which is set against the background of the Northern Ireland troubles... in it he says: "Up here we sacrifice our children; To feed the worn-out dreams of yesterday" With the exception of sporadic spats of sectarian violence like this week at the Short Strand/Mountpottinger interface, in which, as ever, children often become the front-line troops , those days are behind us. But the old tensions remain and the battleground between unionist and republican has simply shifted. One of the most pronounced is the area of education, where Sinn Fein Education Minister Catrina Ruane has pursued a dogmatic approach to non-selective secondary education, which due to an equally dogmatic response by Unionists and stakeholders in the Grammar School sector, has produced a chaotic scenario for those starting the last year of primary school this week. Today all P7 pupils will receive a very helpful leaflet outlining their op...

I’ve got a dictionary with an inscription on the inside cover… It says: “Congratulations David on passing the last ever 11 plus” It was given to me by one of my brothers, I won’t tell you how long ago… But it wasn’t yesterday… What did happen yesterday was that children all over Northern Ireland got their results from, what Catriona Ruane says will be the last ever 11 plus… Except it won’t be… Because of political gamesmanship in which the lives of children are pawns, next year there will be a whole swathe of different 11 pluses being offered by different schools as entrance exams… And a completely chaotic system of transfer from primary to secondary schools. Unless a deal can be done quickly. I did well out of the 11 plus… Because I passed it I was able to get an education that was second to none, opening all sorts of options to me, that were not open to the majority of my primary school pals. The sad thing is that the options that were open to them, which were mainly the Shipyard and...