Category Archives: Opinion

OPINION: Saturday night on the settee

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In deciding to write about television I envisaged myself as a Charlie Brooker-esque figure, ruthlessly cutting through the nonsense to be found on what that stern-faced critic has described as ‘the idiot box’. With this in mind, I scanned the schedules, searching for the most idiotic show I could find, ready like the great man himself to angrily compare that show to as many unpleasant nouns as possible. When I recently read that Brooker had decided to bring his enormously popular Guardian column ‘Screen Burn’ to an end, I assumed the decision had been taken on hearing that I had stumbled upon his winning formula.

BY MATTHEW MISKIMMIN

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OPINION: Conservatives by name or by nature?

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Throughout its history the Conservative Party has taken on the role of the anti-party of British politics. An anti-ideology party based firmly on maintaining the established order, conservatism representing a characteristic inherent in human nature, and whether one supports them or not their electoral success cannot be disputed. However, with the recent spending review and the new direction which leader David Cameron has taken the party, has the Conservative Party become the opposite of what its name suggests and instead become a reformist party?

BY SEAN ASHFORD

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OPINION: Fashionable scepticism of climate change

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In an age when phenomena such as global warming and climate change are taken as scientific orthodoxy, it is almost fashionable to be considered a sceptic. Every age has produced rebels; men and women who ‘oppose the system’ and many of them were indeed scientists; but no age has tolerated them to such an extent as the twenty-first century.

BY BASIL BABU

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OPINION: Shared education is central to reconciliation

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For once in my life I am in agreement with Peter Robinson. The First Minister for Northern Ireland recently claimed the province’s current education system to be a “benign form of apartheid.” Whilst I would certainly not use the South African term, the segregative issue in Northern Ireland, which has sparked controversy over the past week or so, is worth addressing.

BY MARK STEVENSON

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COMMENT: CAS decision spells uncertain future for Northern Ireland football team

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This week The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) turned down a plea from the Irish FA to amend current laws stipulating player eligibility. Whilst this was not an unexpected outcome, the decision has cast a major cloud of uncertainty over the very future of the Northern Ireland international squad. Hard to believe, you might imagine, given the current on-field success of the Northern Ireland team, beating the Englands and Spains of this world in recent years.

BY RYAN SIMPSON

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COMMENT: Violence on the Twelfth – Treat the cause, not the symptoms

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The Orange Order’s Twelfth parades have again been marred by violence. Rioting occurred on Belfast’s Ormeau Road on the twelfth itself and disturbances in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast continued days afterwards. This has rightly been condemned by the police, by Assembly members from both sides of the community, and has been attributed to “dissident republicans” by Sinn Fein. Duncan McCausland, Assistant Chief Constable of the PSNI, has promised that “significant arrests” will be made. Two men, aged sixteen and twenty, have already appeared in court over their involvement in the riots.

BY BEN FINCH
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COMMENT: The Public Assemblies Bill: The quiet drift into witless authoritarianism

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The draft Public Assemblies Bill is, at best, an unforgivably clumsy piece of legislative drafting, implicating all public assemblies, no matter how innocuous, spontaneous or legitimate, in a constrictive and disproportionate new regime ostensibly aimed only at curing recurrent problems involving “contentious parades”. At worst, it is an inexplicably insidious intrusion into the fundamental right of free assembly.

BY LORCAN MULLEN

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