Theocracy is dead, long live theocracy!

Whither the new technocratic, secular DUP under pragmatic Pentecostalist Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds from the Free Ps liberal wing (ho-hum)? Onward towards a future where extremist clerics do not play a significant leadership role in the party? Or not as the case may be.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

A Return to sense and sanity: a guest post by Dr Phil Larkin

Dr Phil Larkin returns to provide a thoughtful post on the rise of Sinn Fein in the Republic. A RETURN TO SENSE AND SANITY: THE “RISE” OF SINN FEIN IN THE IRISH REPUBLIC Every so often certain sections of the media, Irish and British, seem to “lose the run of themselves” in relation to a particular issue. For a sector of the Irish media (north and south of the border), the current cause for hysteria is the seemingly unstoppable rise of Sinn Fein within the body politic of the Irish Republic, a frenzy fuelled by the recent referendum campaign on the EU Fiscal Reform Treaty. If one were to believe all that has been written over the last few weeks, we would see Gerry Adams as alternatively the next Taoiseach or Irish President, Sinn Fein forming a majority in the Dail at the next election, holding all the cards to Ireland’s political future in their hands. Every utterance that a party figure makes is hailed by some as a piece of profound political wisdom, and there appears to be no ...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more