Segregation has shot up in Madrid – due less to property speculation than a lack of affordable housing. Photograph: Alamy “Reclaim your community,” declared the posters. “Hipsters beware.” Pinned around London’s East End last month, they announced Fuck Parade, an anti-gentrification demonstration that culminated in an attack on a café selling bowls of cereal. […]
Will Northern Ireland’s Peacewalls Ever Come Down?
In 1971, a secret report by the Northern Irish government criticised the speed with which walls, gates and fences were being constructed in Belfast to separate Catholics and Protestants. The so-called “peace lines”, it said, were creating an “atmosphere of abnormality” in the city. But the Stormont report writers did “not expect any insurmountable difficulty” […]
Dundee: from black sheep of Scottish cities to ‘living cultural experiment’
Chris Van Der Kuyl set up his first video game company in Dundee in the mid-1990s. “It was an industrial landscape,” he says of the city, which had been bled of heavy industry from the 1970s onwards. “Everything was closing, everyone was leaving.” Van Der Kuyl’s 4J Studios would go on to help develop the […]
Bob Gillespie, the SNP and Labour’s primal scream
It’s a bank holiday Monday afternoon in a Glasgow boozer. Busy tables are littered with discarded yellow raffle tickets and half-empty pints. On the small stage, a heavily pregnant woman belts out Purple Rain. Bob Gillespie stands by the entrance, shoulders filling out a tweed jacket, silently mouthing Prince’s words. The 77-year-old passed his love […]
Glasgow smiles: how the city halved its murders by ‘caring people into change’
In a squat redbrick community hall in the shadow of a pair of vertiginous north Glasgow tower blocks, half a dozen men sit on plastic chairs around a sturdy wooden table. The carpet is threadbare, the overhead lights harsh. Through shatterproof glass windows, dusk has turned to night. “I can’t get a job anywhere, not with […]
Kosovo PM urges Serbs to vote in make-or-break elections
Kosovo‘s prime minister has issued a last-ditch appeal to Kosovan Serbs to vote in critical elections this weekend that are widely seen as a make-or-break moment for the republic. In an interview with the Guardian, Hashim Thaçi said that the abandonment of polling after attacks in northern Kosovo earlier this month was a result of […]
Albania watches as bunkers become bunk-beds
Concrete totems to Communist rule made into hostels and cafes or blown up – but should they be kept as reminder of past? For some, they are an ugly, podlike reminder of Albania‘s paranoid past that should be allowed to disappear unmourned. For others, the communist-era concrete bunkers that litter the small Adriatic state are a […]
Zambia's young people want to work
My article on joblessness among young Zambians, which was commissioned for the Guardian development journalism competition 2011. Dickson Kakoma has been sober for 10 months – ever since the night he almost lost his family, and his life. “I went drinking with a friend. He was driving us home when we started arguing. I grabbed […]
Sellafield will remain a threat to Ireland
This comment piece on the closing of the MOX plant at Sellafield appeared on Guardian.co.uk in August. Sellafield Mox nuclear fuel plant to close. It’s a headline that generations of Irish environmental activists, and government ministers in Leinster House, never thought they would see. After just 10 years of operation – and at the cost […]
So Ireland's back to exporting its best known natural resource – emigrants
Here’s my Comment is Free piece on being an Irish emigrant, which appeared on Guardian.co.uk last week. The same piece also appeared in that week’s Irish Post Mourning can be a protracted business. In the past week, after years spent oscillating between low-level anger and outright denial, I finally graduated to acceptance: having left Ireland […]