Journalist, author, broadcaster
On Wednesday lunchtime, a bagpiper heralded the arrival of Gordon Brown at a community hall in Glasgow. Once the music faded out, the former prime minister launched into a speech that has already been hailed by some as the oration that saved the union. Amid a cheering crowd waving ‘no thanks’ placards Brown, with a […]
In 1995, George Robertson, Labour shadow secretary for Scotland, predicted that ‘Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead.’ In modern British political history few words have rung so hollow. This year, a decade and a half after a devolved Scottish parliament was established in Edinburgh, Scotland will vote on whether or not to leave Great Britain. […]
The discovery of an error in an academic economics paper – even one authored by a pair of Harvard dons – is hardly most people’s idea of a headline grabbing news story. But that’s exactly what happened, in April, when a professor at the University of Michigan and an undergraduate student published data that revealed […]
On Monday, September 19, 1977, Lykes Corporation of New Orleans announced that, by the end of the week, it would close Campbell Works, the largest mill in the blue collar Ohio city of Youngstown. That day, which became known locally as ‘Black Monday’, was the latest in a long line of body blows for a […]
On 15 August 1998, a car filled with a 500 pounds of fertiliser explosive was left outside S.D. Kells’ clothes shop in Lower Market Street in Omagh. At ten past three on a busy Saturday the bomb detonated. Around 220 people were injured and 29 killed in the blast, the heaviest death toll of any […]
I wrote a long piece on Scotland’s independence referendum, with a particular focus on the Irish community in Scotland, for the Sunday Business Post. Here it is: Standing on the banks of the River Clyde, at the Broomielaw in Glasgow, on a warm summer’s day it is hard to believe that this was once one […]
Later this month, world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron will meet in the picturesque surroundings of the Lough Erne hotel in Fermanagh. Northern Irish politicians are hoping that the G8 summit will encourage tourism in the region, but many local campaigners believe that Fermanagh’s fabled natural beauty could be destroyed by plans for […]
The amount of vacant land in Belfast city centre is equivalent to the size of 265 football pitches, according to the Forum for Alternative Belfast. If this space was used efficiently, at least 50,000 more people could live within 20 minutes walk of central Belfast without the need for high-rise buildings or the destruction of […]
Unstated – an edited collection on the theme of Scottish independence – has already caused what Scots would call a stramash. The uproar began in December, just days before the volume was published, when excerpts of Alasdair Gray’s contribution, ‘Settlers and Colonists’, appeared in the Scottish press. Gray contended that since the 1970s, English men and […]
Belfast is often described as a patchwork quilt of conflicting loyalties. Most residents live on streets that are overwhelmingly nationalist or unionist. Imposing ‘peace walls’ physically divide communities one each another. This has long been the case on the Suffolk estate in West Belfast, where a small Protestant community of less than a thousand people […]