North Down is a peculiar parliamentary constituency even by Northern Ireland's rather odd standards. It is currently (since 2005) the only seat held by the Ulster Unionist Party, in the shape of Lady Sylvia Hermon; from 1995 to 2001 it was the only seat held by Bob McCartney's UK Unionist Party; and from 1980 to 1995 it was the only seat held by Sir James Kilfedder's Ulster Popular Unionist Party.

( further background )

So, who will win? ( numbers )

On this basis, I think I can make the following set of predictions:

1. If Hermon is endorsed as the UUP candidate, whether or not jointly with the Conservatives, she is very likely to retain the seat.
2. If she stands as an independent, she has a pretty good chance as well. This rises to a near certainty if she is formally or informally endorsed by Alliance and the Greens. Without such an endorsement, she will need to repeat her record of pulling in non-UUP votes and also persuade at least half of the UUP's habitual voters to abandon their party's official candidate and support her, in order to beat the DUP who one assumes will have support in the mid-30s. If the UUP officially supports Ian Parsley, who will then be a Conservative running with UUP support, this will not be too difficult a task.
3. If Lady Hermon decides not to contest the seat at all, then it is more open. However it is pretty clear from the numbers that the DUP are ahead of the field.

This has been much discussed on Slugger O'Toole, especially here. (I see one SDLP supporter thinks that with a sufficiently split Unionist vote, the Stoops might have a chance. Bless.)

This is a fairly slim volume detailing archæological and historical records of the Anglo-Norman Earldom of Ulster, which was set up by a lightning conquest of Downpatrick by the Norman adventurer John De Courcy in 1177, and then gradually subsided out of history in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. I have a personal genealogical interest in the subject, which I will save for another post; but most people who have lived in Northern Ireland will be familiar with the monuments of the Norman period - most notably Carrickfergus Castle, possibly also Inch Abbey and Greyabbey, with their ruined Gothic arches still visible, and Dundrum Castle farther south.

But the Normans did not penetrate very far inland, as this map from the book demonstrates:

( map )

The story of the Earldom is not just a landgrab by adventurers (of the kind the Normans and their kin were engaged in from Newfoundland to Palestine) then eroded by the natives coming back. ( Read more... )

Lots more here about architecture and economics (and far more about pottery than one would have thought possible, given that a) there is very little of it and b) it is very boring), but it is inevitably the politics that grabbed my attention.

This short (180 pages) and readable book tells the story of Belfast up to 1750, using what there is of contemporary records and archæological evidence. I learnt a lot from it (more than from my previous reading). As a schoolchild I had been taught the early history of the city as originating around the River Farset, which now flows under Castle Street, Castle Place and High Street (eating away the foundations of the Albert Clock to make it lean slightly). The truth is more complicated.

( The Truth )

( Why Belfast was not like New York )

Soon after I moved to Brussels in 1999, I was having lunch with John Cushnahan (then a Fine Gael MEP, and a former leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland) in the European Parliament, when he briefly broke off our conversation to greet Robert Ramsay as he passed by. Cushnahan, not a political lightweight in any sense of the word, is a somewhat acerbic personality, so I was struck by the respect he clearly had for our fellow-countryman, a senior European Parliament official, who I frankly had never heard of before.

Well, I know about him now. ( Read more... )

There are some irritating errors with foreign names, including one appalling footnote about NATO which is probably libellous, but in general it is a much more interesting book than the title and rather drab cover would suggest.

The ARK research centre, with which I have the honour to be loosely associated, does an annual opinion survey of all 16-year-olds in Northern Ireland, and this book pulls together expert essays on some of the findings from the poll (along with a prize-winning essay about teenage life from one of the respondents). Topics addressed include perceptions of sectarianism, poverty, mental health and the structure of schooling, but the two standout chapters for me were on bullying, by Ruth Sinclair of the National Children's Bureau, and sex education, by Simon Blake of the Brook Advisory Clinic.

While all schools claim to be committed to preventing bullying, very few have convinced their pupils that they are serious. Sinclair broadens out the discussion into examining the rather weak and inconsistent attitude of most Northern Irish schools to pupil participation. The evidence is thin but compelling: those schools which are able to reassure pupils that something will be done about bullying are also those with an active pupil council - a concept that was simply unthought of in my day, in my religious-controlled grammar school.

Likewise the concept of anything meaningful in the way of sex education - the only practical information that we got at school about contraception was a samizdat sheet of diagrams circulated by one of the more liberal teachers, not much use for those like me who weren't in the relevant class. Of course, like most kids, I had my own sources of information, but my school failed - and I am sure that most Northern Irish schools failed and still fail - to provide much in the way of useful education about sexuality, preferring instead to reflect on the contents of letters of the Conference of Bishops (several of whom, it turns out, also had other sources of information).

Blake's analysis, augmented by observations by one of his Belfast-based colleagues, is slightly weakened by the fact that they are activists as well, but the figures speak for themselves. Indeed, if anything Blake is too kind; he states that there is little to choose between the various schooling systems with regard to sex education, citing figures which make it quite clear that in fact it is Catholic pupils who are most likely to feel underinformed.

Anyway, it's a nice little book which shows how academic research can become a building block in the wider social policy debate.

For as long as I can remember, I have been aware of the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the Reverend Ian Paisley in 1971 and now the largest Unionist party in Northern Ireland.

Now I discover that there is another Democratic Unionist Party (referred to by its members as الحزب الإتحادي الديموقراطي‎) in Sudan, founded in 1967. I doubt very much that Ian Paisley and Desmond Boal were aware of it when they rebranded and slightly expanded the Protestant Unionist Party four years later, but I shall be on the lookout for parallels as I do my weekend reading of African history.

I don't actually follow Northern Irish news all that closely these days, but one of the ways I keep in touch is to read the weekly political update from lobbying firm Chambré Public Affairs (I still feel a bit guilty about nearly putting the author's eye out with an arrow from a toy bow when he was five and I was six). Here's a glorious piece of snark from this week's edition, about the conduct of the successful candidates in this week's election:

( Doing the Hokey Cokey )

I believe subscription is free from the Chambré website.

...turns out to be on-line after all, so no need to expend efforts in getting it to me (but thanks for the offer). I am irritated that I used a double negative ("not unexcited") where I meant a single ("not excited" or "unexcited"). I blame my sore back.

Working through the Hugo nominees is exposing me to a lot more parts of the sf world: it is a surprisingly good educational experience. I was vaguely aware of the Hellboy comics but had no idea that there had been a film version, let alone two.

I'll be honest: the most exciting thing about the film for me was that the climactic segment is set in a steampunk elvish subterranean vault under the Giant's Causeway. Unfortunately the local colour is just some aerial photography of the Antrim coast, before we return to location filming presumably somewhere in California (cloudless sky, wrong sort of vegetation, and crucially no hexagonal basalt pillars in sight) but I appreciated the effort (as I'm sure the Montenegrins appreciate Karlovy Vary and Lake Como in Casino Royale). The Bethmoora demon's Ulster accent was not quite as bogus as I had feared (John Alexander is Scottish). Apparently King Balor's lines are all in "Gaelic", which presumably means Irish; would be interested to know what any gaelgeori thought of this. Also "Nuala" and "Nuada" do not have three syllables. (Maybe two and a half, depending, but the stress is certainly not on the first 'a'.)

The special effects are great: thinking especially of the tooth fairies, the Elemental stomping New York, and the Golden Army reassembling itself; also Dr Kraus's ectoplasm and Liz Sherman's fiery manifestation. The script is OK, some witty lines, some interesting setup for future stories, but a lot of cliches. The plot is pretty straightforward. I will rank WALL-E ahead of this in my ballot.

I wrote a piece for the Newsletter about the elections yesterday - would be interersted to know if they used it for the print edition as it doesn't appear to be on-line.

(I have written for the Tele and Irish News previously, and indeed helped the latter set up their online edition in the dim and distant past, so if the Newsletter did print the piece I now have the hat-trick of Belfast dailies.)

If it is possible to scan and email the article (assuming it exists), I would be very grateful!

Jim Nicholson (UUP) + 37,942 = 132,227
Diane Dodds (DUP) + 24,462 = 115,722
Alban Maginness (SDLP) + 2,614 = 97,428
5,463 non-transferable

Nicholson is over the quota (which was 121,144), so he is elected.

Votes left in the system: the SF surplus of 5,040, and Nicholson's surplus of 11,113. Even in the unlikely event that they all went to Maginness, he would still be more than 3,000 votes short of Dodds, so she is elected.

(pwilkinson - I failed to report the 7,548 untransferred votes from Alliance and Greens, which possibly threw out your calculations.)

So 53% of Allister's votes went to Nicholson, and only 35% to his former party.

On this basis I fancy his chances of winning a seat at the next Westminster election are good, esp in North Antrim which has a history oif maverick election results going back more than a century.

Bairbre De Brun, Sinn Fein - 126,184 (26%)
Diane Dodds, DUP - 88,346 (18.2%)
Jim Nicholson, Ulster Conservative and Unionist - 82,893 (17.1%)
Alban Maginness, SDLP - 78,489 (16.2%)
Jim Allister, Traditional Unionist Voice - 66,197 (13.7%)
Ian Parsley, Alliance - 26,699 (5.5%)
Steven Agnew, Green Party - 15,764 (3.3%)
Quota: 121,144

Looks like my former French teacher will have the largest personal vote of any member of the new European Parliament (because the only other places where there isn't a list system are the Republic and the German-speaking cantons of Belgium, where the number of voters is much fewer).

Glad to see that my gut feeling that SF's vote might have dropped slightly was correct. (SDLP vote share actually up slightly, but won't help them, though I see some eternal optimists still think Alban can make it.)

Best Alliance result in a European election since 1979.

Very cheering I expect for Jim Allister, though he will still lose and see Nicholson and Dodds elected on his transfers.

Conall McDevitt has taken me to task for my back-of-an-envelope calculations about the drop in turnout last night. (Incidentally, Conall, I can spell your name correctly; I would appreciate it if you can return the favour.) We now have the full turnout figures for all 18 constituencies, so here they are, ranked by the fall in turnout between the last Euro-election in 2004 and this year's vote, and coloured as to whether the 2001 census found more Catholics or more Protestants in each:

Newry and Armagh 49.1% (-16.9%)
FST 51.5% (-15.2%)
Mid Ulster 52.8% (-12.6%)
West Tyrone 50.3% (-12.1%)
Foyle 44.3% (12.0%)
West Belfast 46.6% ( -10.5%)
North Antrim 43.2% (-10.1%)
East Derry 42.3% (-9.1%)
South Down 45.0% ( -9.0%)
Upper Bann 41.8% (-8.4%)
Belfast North 41.0% (-7.7%)
South Belfast 42.1% (-7.2%)
Lagan Valley 38.9% (-7.2%)
East Belfast 38.8% (-6.1%)
South Antrim 38.0% (-5.8%)
Strangford 34.2% (-5.7%)
East Antrim 34.5% (-4.8%)
North Down 34.5% (-3.5%)

That is not a difficult table to read, even for SDLP supporters, who are habitually prone to wishful thinking; the average fall in turnout in Catholic majority seats is 12.6%, in Protestant majority seats 6.9%. I expect the gap between combined Unionist candidates and combined Nationalist candidates to widen from 2004 (when it was 48.5 to 43.2). I suspect that the intense rivalry between the three Unionist candidates has decreased the usual differential of turnout (Nationalists have been pulling out more of their potential voters at every election since 1996), and the combined Unionist vote will be comfortably over 50% even though it is split three ways. There is therefore no chance of the SDLP winning the third seat. (Incidentally the above figures suggest that the SF vote share will also be down, though word from the tallies is that this is not the case.)

Provisional unofficial turnout numbers figures from the Northern Ireland constituencies (with the 2007 Assembly turnout in brackets) - from Stratagem:

Mid Ulster 52.83% (73.1%)
West Belfast 46.6% (67.4%)
South Down 44.97% (65.0%)
North Antrim 43.7% (61.3%)*
South Belfast 42.1% (62.4%)
North Belfast 40.98% (60.9%)
Lagan Valley 38.86% (60.0%)
East Belfast 38.82% (60.0%)
South Antrim 38.03% (58.6%)
East Antrim 34.53% (53.5%)
North Down 34.48% (53.8%)
Strangford 34.24% (54.5%)

* Mark Devenport at the BBC has this figure as Newry and Armagh rather than North Antrim, but if so it is very low!)

Looks to me like (very broadly speaking) the Nationalist vote is down 22%, the Unionist vote more like 20%. So I expect the "gap" to be if anything a bit wider than the Assembly elections in 2007, ie combined Unionist total at around 50% and combined Nats some way below that. So while de Brún will retain her seat for SF, looks like Alban Maginness has failed to sneak in for the SDLP.

Rumours rather incredibly have the Unionist vote split three ways, with James Nicholson of the UUP/Conservatives ahead of Diane Dodds of the DUP and Jim Allister (ex-DUP now TUV). The fact that these rumours come from Allister's camp, thus admitting that he will probably lose his seat, make them more credible!

Mildly wishful thinking on my part: the turnout has dropped least in areas where the Alliance Party is strongest...

Naomi Long elected Lord Mayor of Belfast!

BBC Belfast Telegraph

Well, I've done the page for next week's elections on my website.

This is probably the most interesting European election in Northern Ireland since 1979 (though that is not saying much). Given the strength of their respective parties in recent contests, Diane Dodds for the DUP and Bairbre de Brún of Sinn Féin must be considered very likely to retain their parties' seats. The interesting questions are:

1. will Jim Allister erode enough of his former party's vote to allow de Brún to top the poll?
2. will he do well enough to overtake Nicholson for the third seat? And
3. will the Unionist vote be sufficiently splintered or demoralised that Maginness overtakes the second-placed Unionist and wins the third seat for the SDLP?

I order the three questions in decreasing rank of probability - ie I think it's entirely likely that de Brún will top the poll, but rather improbable that Unionists will fail to turn out and also to transfer votes to each other sufficiently to lose the second Unionist seat.

Incidentally this means that Northern Ireland will probably end up with three eurosceptic MEPs. I don't have opinion poll figures to hand re the degree of popular euroscepticism in the province but I doubt that it is anywhere near 75%, let alone 100%.

Those of you voting in any part of the UK may find this site of interest / amusement.

Say what you like about the European Parliament website, it does at least offer some transparency about what your MEPs have been up to over the last five years. This is the public record of the three MEPs from Northern Ireland.

MEP	Jim Allister (Ind) (DUP -> TUV)	Bairbre de Brún (GUE-NGL) (SF)	Jim Nicholson (EPP-ED) (UUP)
Questions asked:	214	41	42
Motions Proposed	0	9	8
Reports drafted	0	1	2
Speeches in plenary	314	118	122
Written Declarations	3	0	4

As a point of comparison, my neighbourhood MEP - who is also our deputy mayor, and national chair of her political party - has asked 70 questions, put her name to 10 motions, authored three reports (on consumer policy), spoken 88 times and signed 1 written declaration.

To explain the categories:

Questions asked - fairly obvious, you can ask a question to the European Commission or the European Council. Allister clearly enjoys this most. De Brún sometimes signs onto questions asked by a group of her GUE-NGL colleagues.

My conclusion

Allister is a classic "outsider", more interested in using his elected position to promote causes that interest him than in playing the institutional game. Both de Brún and Nicholson have tendencies in this direction as well, but both are also at least partly inside the system; and both appear to have similar levels of impact, despite the fact that de Brún is from a much smaller group.

TV version of George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones to be made in Belfast.

Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness making a joint sytatement about GRRM is, well, bizarre, incredible, unreal and just odd. Great news, of course. (Probably.)

Why is anyone even slightly surprised that the DUP a) likes the idea of locking people up for six weeks without telling them why and b) appoints homophobes to ministerial positions?

37) Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka, by Sumantra Bose

Sumantra Bose first hit my radar screen when he wrote the best analysis I have read of post-war Bosnia. Here he combines that research with one other case that I know nearly as well - Cyprus - and three others about which I know much less - indeed I was astonished to realise just how little I knew about Kashmir. Also, although he doesn't give it separate treatment, Northern Ireland is a constant point of reference throughout the book.

I found this a very clear-headed analysis. These are all awful cases of human misery caused by other humans, and great powers meddling irresponsibly (one point he doesn't make, but which struck me, is that the Kashmir and Israel/Palestine situations share the experience of an indecently precipitate British withdrawal in 1947/1948). For all that, there has not been a lot of cross-referencing between them by scholars or practitioners.

The two cases I am more familiar with both essentially have their solutions mapped out - actively in the case of Dayton and Bosnia, potentially in the case of the Annan Plan and Cyprus. Bose does not hesitate to be prescriptive in the other three cases, where a settlement is not currently on the table - the Tamils will not get independence, but must get autonomy, with guarantees for the non-Tamil minorities; there will be no referendum in Kashmir, and the Line of Control will become the permanent boundary, but India has to deliver on autonomy for the area it controls and India and Pakistan must open up the LOC; there must be a Palestinian state, and Hamas must be brought into the political process. He makes the cases compellingly, though my libertarian heart regrets that the Kashmiris will clearly not get the independence that they apparently actually want.

Bose draws two lessons from the five cases. First, that constructive third-party engagement is essential to help move local actors away from zero-sum games. I couldn't agree more. The dog that doesn't bark here, in a way, is Northern Ireland: the 1998 settlement was essentially what was on the table in 1973 (as Seamus Mallon said, "Sunningdale for slow learners"). But it did require an externally appointed chairman of the calibre of George Mitchell to get everyone to agree to what in the end they knew they would have to agree to. Even then, of course, it took another nine years to nail down properly, but (whatever the DUP may say) 1998 is the moment of departure.

Bose's second point is that it is much better to start by aiming for the big picture rather than an incremental approach. This is slightly more controversial, but my instinct is again that he is basically right. The poster child of failure here is the Oslo process in the Middle East, but I've heard it said in the Cyprus context especially as well: in the absence of a big picture agreement (or even the framework of one) within which to operate, negotiating confidence-building measures can be a huge diversion of energy and can actually result in worse rather than better relations between the parties. (Supporters of incrementalism may complain that it was never seriously tried in Cyprus, and never seriously implemented in the Middle East, but perhaps those difficulties illustrate the basic problem.)

One conceptual point which Bose hints at, and I wish he had explored more, is the issue of democracy. In polarised situations, it is almost natural for politicians to try and compete with each other in chauvinism rather than in their willingness to accommodate - Sri Lanka and Israel/Palestine are particularly obvious examples, as indeed is Northern Ireland. This creates difficulties for international peace-builders who (and this is my analysis, not Bose's) will instinctively try to construct "moderates" who are worth engaging with and "hardliners" who are not, essentially judging the standing of the local actors by the extent to which they are prepared to talk pretty for the internationals. Of course, the only criterion for credibility in the end is the level of your popular support; and while it is reasonable to set certain hurdles to participation in formal dialogue, it is stupid to set them in such a way that you prevent the critical mass necessary to consolidate the process from forming. Democracy is a hugely complicating factor in conflict resolution, but also a very necessary one.

So, on to the Third Doctor books, starting with three Dicks efforts of varying quality, and a good one by Malcolm Hulke; all covering stories first broadcast in 1970.

( 6) Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, by Terrance Dicks )
( 7) Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke )
( 8) Doctor Who - the Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks )
( 9) Doctor Who - Inferno, by Terrance Dicks )

( Northern Ireland and Doctor Who )

I've headlined this post by referring to Liz Shaw, but in fact she doesn't come across particularly well on the printed page and, given my childhood memories of the first two of these books, I was surprised by how much I liked Caroline John in the TV role when I watched. I am beginning to spot a pattern where the brainy companions (Zoe and Liz) don't transfer well to the novelisations, whereas the screamy ones (Victoria, Polly and I expect Jo) actually come over rather better.

Jeff Dudgeon alerts me to the Dublin Review of Books, "a free quarterly online journal whose main object is the publication of clear and thoughtful analysis based on recently published books". Various articles to browse through at my leisure, many from the perspective, more visible in intellectual discourse than in election results, of the Irish Left. I particularly enjoyed two pieces from the current issue:

Tony Brown on Irish Euroscepticism. I know Tony as a very nice guy involved with the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin, where I have spoken a couple of times. Here he lets his passion out, exposing the mendacity of the anti-EU cause in Ireland. I recommend it especially to British friends to see how the issue plays out in the neighbouring jurisdiction. However, it should also be noted that the anti-EU forces have lost every time in Ireland, if sometimes only on the second round. (Also I notice that the article, despite being in the Dublin Review of Books, doesn't actually cite any, er, books. But it's still very much worth reading.)

Brendan O'Leary on Paul Bew's Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006. Again, an author I know on a subject I know; I first met Bew at the departmental parties our family would host, long before he got my father's old job in Belfast let alone his recent peerage, and O'Leary has greatly flattered me in print. O'Leary's article here attempts to forensically dissect Bew's new blockbuster on the recent history of Ireland, but ends up making me want to buy and read the book, to see what I think of it myself. O'Leary feels that Bew attaches too much strength to the importance of indigenous factors and not enough to external (ie British) influence on events: I'm not sure all of his points are totally convincing, but he makes them very entertainingly. (A minor irritation is that you have to download O'Leary's footnotes in a standalone Word document; in this day and age, that is simply unprofessional.)

Anyway, a site to keep watching. Lots more that I enjoyed browsing through, but as I said, these were the two articles that particularly grabbed me.

The sole elected representative of the Newtownabbey Ratepayers Association, Billy Webb, has announced that he is joining the Alliance Party. Given that the press officer listed on the Association's website, former councillor John Blair, has also (re)joined Alliance, I reckon that's it for one of Northern Ireland's smaller (and more harmless) political groups. Alliance has not been doing badly for new recruits recently.

I've been musing a bit about Hillary Clinton's recent travails on the question of foreign policy. (The details are of interest only for the truly obsessed, but FactChecker has a good summary and I link below to the Washington Post take on each issue.) I can't speak to the Rwanda or China issues, but I do happen to know a bit about the other three areas where there has been some discussion of her activities: Bosnia, Macedonia and Northern Ireland.

On Macedonia, I find her actually the most convincing of the three. This was just after the start of the NATO bombing in March 1999; there were big problems with the management of the flow of refugees driven out of Kosovo by Serbian forces, and the Macedonian government was balancing the country's own internal stability against the demands being made of it by the international community. Clinton's critics find her guilty of some exaggeration because the border was re-opened for refugees the day before her arrival, rather than as a result of her negotiation with the Macedonian authorities. In my view it's clear that her visit must have been part of the overall US and NATO strategy to keep the Macedonians on board (the extent to which Hillary Clinton herself was involved in shaping that policy is, of course, another matter), and the timing of the opening of the border may well have been explicitly linked to her arrival the next day. In politics, cause does sometimes follow effect.

On Northern Ireland, her "instrumental" role was less relevant to the formal political process, dare I say it, than my own (I was the central campaign manager for one of the political parties in the 1996 elections, and worked as an aide to our party's negotiators from June to December 1996, in the course of which my most substantial contribution was probably a paper on decommissioning which I wrote jointly with Stephen Farry.) She is confused on some of the details, but it's fair to say that she was one of the more prominent among many contributors, and by her own choice concentrated on building up cross-community links among women's groups. Her visits to Northern Ireland are only part of the story here, as the Clinton White House also successfully empowered a wider range of people, pulling them into the wider discourse, and presumably she was involved with that. Her schedule reveals significant preparatory work for the Northern Ireland visits on her own part, which is laudable.

On Bosnia, however, the inaccuracy of her recent statements has been extensively documented; her reminiscences are over-dramatic and simply at variance with the facts. It's a bit unfair to assert, as some have, that there was no physical risk to visitors to Tuzla in March 1996 - we did not know then that the deployment of US troops for ten years in Bosnia would pass without a single combat casualty. And I even have some sympathy with her defence that she is merely human and cannot be expected to get everything right. But I cannot escape the feeling that Clinton was more impressed by the way she was hustled into her plane's armoured cockpit for the landing in Tuzla than about anything else that happened on the visit. Her most unnerving experiences - which clearly made an impression - were actually supplied by the US military rather than by any local factors, and her brief moments of contact with actual Bosnians were completely forgotten.

6) Endgame in Ireland, by Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick

This is basically a chronological account of the peace process, starting really from the Brighton bomb in 1984 and finishing in the depressing summer of 2001 when everything appeared to be stalemated. Mallie and McKittrick have used the archives of the four-part BBC series of the same name, which I haven't seen, but which I imagine covers much the same points in much the same way. I didn't really learn a lot from this, except that (as ever) my perceptions of what was happening through the media at the time were only loosely linked with the reality of behind the scenes; and the tale of the internal wranglings of the Ulster Unionist Party are now an incidental detail of history - the real story is now the shift in the DUP approach over the last few years. It's well-written and thorough but has now been overtaken by events.

I was alerted during the week to the fact that the Northern Ireland Boundary Commission has finalised its recommendations for the new parliamentary constituencies, though it now looks like they will not be needed as soon as they might have been. In fact they have stuck to their recommendations from May last year.

In related news, thamks to Conal Kelly, the 1950-1970 Westminster election results for East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, North Antrim, South Antrim, Armagh, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Londonderry, North Down, South Down, and Mid Ulster are all now on my site.

13) Belfast, c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City, by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle

This only just about counts as a book, but I'll tally it anyway. It's a 19-page pamphlet produced jointly by the Royal Irish Academy and Belfast City Council, attached to a gorgeous multi-coloured map illustrating the developing historical streetscape, with today's map faintly visible in the background. The landscape we live in is a palimpsest; this little publication helps to establish what was there before.

What is most fascinating is that the defensive walls built in 1642 almost precisely map the security zone I remember well from my childhood. There are one or two shifts of a few metres, but on the whole the twentieth century security gates were placed pretty much on top of where the town's defences had been, a third of a millennium earlier. Extraordinary. (If you consider Dublin's history, by contrast, the commercial heart of the city has slipped about a kilometre downriver over the last thousand years.)

( the central bit of the map )

Anyway, I found it fascinating. Though it missed the charming detail from one of the very early maps of Belfast on display in the Ulster Museum, where the surveyors (presumably brought in by Lord Donegall from elsewhere) recorded the name or "Waring Street" as "Wern Street". Even back then, the locals were capable of baffling outsiders with their accents.

Thursday, 21 June 2007 is an initial Day of Private Reflection.

People from Northern Ireland, Great Britain, Republic of Ireland and further a field are invited to reflect, individually and privately, upon the conflict in and about Northern Ireland and the future that is before us.

The Day of Private Reflection is an opportunity for us all:

• To acknowledge the deep hurt and loss caused by the conflict in and about Northern Ireland,
• To remember the men, women and children who on a daily basis live with the consequences of the conflict,
• To reflect on our own attitudes that might have the potential to negatively impact on others and society,
• To reflect on what more each of use might have done or might still do to uphold and enhance all other people's right to life and quality of life, and
• To make a personal commitment that, as we begin to move forward as a society, such loss should never be allowed to happen again.

For more see the Day of Private Reflection and Healing Through Remembering sites. Or you could post this in your livejournal/blog.

19) Troubled Images: Posters and Images of the Northern Ireland Conflict from the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, ed. Yvonne Murphy, Allan Leonard, Gordon Gillespie and Kris Brown

Lots of pictures here, many of them very familiar to me from my own experience of Northern Ireland politics. The explanatory text is best when it explains the roots of some of the images used; the political commentary, however, has dated rather rapidly.

One thing that surprised me was the prominence of Cedric Wilson as a personality in this side of things. I knew him as a rather buffoonish character at the time I was most involved - he was the one who heckled President Clinton at his speech at Mackies in December 1995, and when I was involved with the Mitchell talks he was still hanging around with Bob McCartney, though they split fairly quickly after the 1998 Assembly elections. But according to this book he designed both the "Ulster Say No" logo of the mid-80s, and the "Heart for Ulster" anti-Agreement logo more recently. I have to honestly confess this is the first I'd heard of it, but presumably the editors did their research, which means I seriously underestimated him.

Not all Unionist posters were as memorable as the ones attributed to Cedric Wilson. I was going to illustrate this post with several bad ones, but realised that this would look rather unbalanced, as none of the Nationalist or Republican ones are particularly bad, while the non-sectarian/ centre grouns oned tend to be a bit wince-making. So I will only give you one, but it is the worst one by far, for the short-lived (and as it turned out ironically named) United Ulster Unionist Party:
( bad poster )

Anyway, enough of that. I will have to buy the CD of all of them next time I am in Belfast.