United Kingdom
Focuses:
The history and politics of Irish republicanism
The Troubles
Working class history
Social movements
Colonialism
Film and music
Online radio and broadcast audio
To commemorate 50 years since the horror of Bloody Sunday, when the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment killed 14 unarmed civilians in Derry, we speak to writer Daniel Baker about the historical and continuing depravity of British colonialism in Ireland.
This article contains descriptions of torture and paramilitary and state violence On 30th January 1972, in the Bogside area of Derry, twenty six unarmed civilians were shot by the British Army's Parachute Regiment during a march organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.
Review of Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves by Peter Mitchell (Manchester University Press, 2021) On June 13 this year, GB News aired for the first time on British television. The presenter of the channel's first broadcast was former BBC anchor Andrew Neil.
Joe McCann Joe McCann's funeral, 18th April 1972 Deference and British militarismIn May the trial of two former paratroopers accused of the murder of Official IRA volunteer Joe McCann in 1972 collapsed. The news arrived mere months after Brandon Lewis' announcement that there would be no further public inquiry into the 1989 murder of Pat...
Attempts by Irish republicans to materially contextualise the Troubles are routinely met with opposition and derision by a significant section of the political and media establishment, both in Britain and in Ireland.
The following constitues the bones of a mooted journal article. Starting life as a proposal for a piece to be published on the Writing The Troubles blog, it has since mushroomed into something more lengthy and wide ranging, although it still requires much streamlining and an increased clarity of focus.
Based on extensive archival research, Daniel Finn's One Man's Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA explores the relationship between the IRA, a clandestine army described as 'one of the most ruthless and capable insurgent forces in modern history', and the political movement that developed alongside it to challenge British rule.
On 12th February 1989 the human rights lawyer Pat Finucane was murdered. Having forced entry into his north Belfast home, a unit of loyalist paramilitaries made straight for the Finucane's kitchen, where the family was settling down to a Sunday roast. They fired two shots, instantly disabling their target and knocking him from his seat.
Even before he dished out a supremely understated lesson in how to deconstruct a vaguely spirited yet laughably ill equipped England side last Sunday night, watching Andrea Pirlo - the concept as much as the man, the spectacle as much as the footballer - was already my personal highlight of Euro 2012 so far.
There has been a point in every Shackleton set that I have witnessed where I realize that I am becoming increasingly dissociated. Not from the music itself. Not from all the forked percussive intensity, nor from seabed ripple rangoli bass weight. But rather from the event itself, from my own experience of it.
