The story of free speech in Ireland today has moved on considerably from the past, but the political class believes that they can decide just how the public conversation should be conducted.
Judith Butler pursues a similar path to Hannah Arendt in her
recent book Parting
Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism– making a series of
revised and extended contributions to the debate on Israeli state violence and
settler colonialism, in such a way that a flash of light may shine through the histories
and the memories.
A decision to restrict the flying of the union
flag over Belfast City Hall late last year sparked weeks of protests and riots.
The cause is rooted deep in the legacy of the peace process.
Anyone familiar with the story of language in Elizabethan
Ireland can only feel impatience – if not despair – at the latter-day
triumphalism of works like Melvyn Bragg’s best-selling The
Adventure of English.
Postcolonial nationalism is a strange phenomenon. Brought up to
despise everything British (as Jonathan Swift put it two centuries earlier,
‘burn everything English except their coal’), we were also imbued with a
sneaking suspicion that British was somehow better.
Complexity needs a voice (this
also applies to newer emigrant groups on both islands). Politics and
autobiography, politics and culture, can drift too far apart. Gaps in the
public discourse of the UK and the Irish Republic allow ethnic assertion to punch
above its weight. And then there is poetry. ( 5,000 words)
Given a
choice, most people prefer a decent life to national or ethnic purity. Given a
choice, most people like to get on with their neighbours, to fit in with their
communities, to carry on with the business of going to work and raising a
family and hoping for the best.
In which we are introduced
to excerpts from the transcript of a memorable programme on Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to
Ireland in May 2011, presented by Joseph O'Connor, produced by Rachel Hooper,
for BBC Radio 4.
The latest in a series of official inquiries exposes the extent of corruption in Ireland’s political elite during the long years of rule by the country’s Fianna Fáil party. These tribunals portray a world of moral as well as financial bankruptcy whose roots were planted well before the boom years, says the leading historian Diarmaid Ferriter.
Whitehall has been forced to accept the right of the Scottish people to control their vote on independence. It must not retain a veto over a referendum on Irish unity.