Perspectives on religion & politics
Secretary of State Owen Paterson has published a summary of the responses to the Eames Bradley Report on dealing with Northern Ireland’s past, revealing an overwhelmingly negative reaction to it.
As the unionist newspaper the News Letter puts it, ‘Ulster Rejects Eames Bradley Report on the Troubles.’ So is this just another case of ‘Ulster Says No’?
Recently one of the students on my School’s Master’s in Reconciliation Studies programme told me that the most powerful book he had read during the year was Give a Boy a Gun: One Man’s Journey from Killing to Peace-Making, by Alistair Little (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2009). The book is the autobiography of a former UVF man, co-written with Ruth Scott, detailing his journey from paramilitary activity to conflict transformation and peacebuilding work.
Parts of Little’s story are relatively well-known. It was the basis of a BBC drama featuring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, Five Minutes of Heaven. This film presented a fictionalised account of a proposed meeting between Little and the brother of the man he shot dead.
Continue reading ‘Alistair Little Book Review: Give a Boy a Gun’
People in Northern Ireland woke up this morning to the news that dissident republicans had detonated a car bomb outside Palace Barracks in Holywood, the headquarters of MI5. The Real IRA claims responsibility for the bomb, designed as a protest against the devolution of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont.
An elderly man was injured in the explosion. Police said they received no prior warning about the bomb, although they had begun to evacuate residents before it exploded. The press-ganged taxi driver, whose family had been held hostage, exited his car shouting that there was a bomb.
Continue reading ‘The Dissidents, the Car Bomb, and Policing and Justice’
The story of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his plot to bring terror to the American skies has been playing out over this Christmas period. Almost daily revelations of failures to communicate intelligence information, not to mention the apparent ease with which he passed through airport security, have revealed uncomfortable flaws in our systems.
So much for ‘homeland security.’ A man who was denied entry to the UK because of security concerns, and whose father tried to alert Western governments about his son’s intentions, almost single-handedly brought down an American passenger jet.
Continue reading ‘Terror in the Skies & Richard English Book Review: Terrorism – How to Respond’
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