Tag: the Troubles

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Professor David Betz is an academic whose area of expertise includes civil war. His title is Professor of War in the Modern World, and he teaches at King’s College, London, a highly respected university. He has been doing the rounds on alternative media for the last year or so predicting that civil war, or some variant, is imminent not just in the UK but across Europe. Recently, he made an interesting comment. If civil war or something similar starts in Europe, it will start in Northern Ireland. (more…)

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What is it like to be part of a family as large as a nation? If that family is the city of Belfast and that nation is the Irish, then Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast gives us quite the clue. Effectively, this film is a love letter to the Irish people — and everything in it suggests that “the Irish” refers only to those who share a common ethnicity. Yes, there are a smattering of Asians in the film — which may be realistic, given that the story takes place in 1969 — but these so-called “people of color” are not employed against history as props but as fittingly minor aspects of the Belfast backdrop. This story is about the Irish and the Irish only. (more…)

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Northern Ireland is unique. The Wars of Religion that made seventeenth-century Europe a blood-soaked hellscape never ended there. To describe the situation in Northern Ireland simply, the Republicans — or Nationalists — are nearly all Catholic (or better said, culturally Catholic) and see themselves as Native Irish Gaels. (more…)