Susan McKay

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Sinead O’Connor Danced on the Edge of the Dark All Her Life

One night, late, during the last years of the Troubles, I was driving from the North into the Republic, along country roads and through dark villages, with “The Lion and the Cobra”, Sinead O’Connor’s debut album, blasting on the car stereo. I was singing, fired up by the thrilling energy of “Mandinka”, when I became aware of flashing blue lights.

I stopped, turned the music off, wound down the window and began to say that I knew I had been speeding and I was sorry. The policeman interrupted. It was not that; I had sped through a checkpoint on the border.…  Seguir leyendo »

Alliance party leader Naomi Long: ‘Confident and progressive leadership.’ Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

The Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, put it politely. It would be “undemocratic” for the Democratic Unionist party to refuse to form an executive in Belfast after the elections, he said. But the DUP will refuse to enter an executive, now that Sinn Féin has massively outpolled it, and a majority of Northern Ireland’s people has voted to have as first minister a republican whose party wants a united Ireland. Sinn Féin gained an astonishing 29% of first preference votes in Thursday’s assembly elections. The DUP got 21.3%, a drop of 6.7% on its last performance.

That refusal, ostensibly a protest over the Northern Ireland protocol, will be even further good news for an already jubilant Sinn Féin, because it proves definitively to its voters that Northern Ireland, set up 101 years ago to be an exclusively unionist state, is incapable of becoming a pluralist one and must therefore be brought to an end.…  Seguir leyendo »

Flags, including that of the Parachute Regiment, flying in Drumahoe, 24 January 2022. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

The road I grew up on in Drumahoe, on the outskirts of Derry, has been on the news lately, and not in a way that makes me proud. Journalists stand at its junction with the main road from Belfast, pointing up at the purple flag of the Parachute Regiment fluttering high on a lamp-post. They explain its significance at this time of year: it was paratroopers who killed 13 unarmed civil rights marchers in the city on Bloody Sunday in January 1972. Family members of those killed have talked about the pain the flying of these flags causes them. Politicians, including some unionists, and even the Parachute Regiment itself have called it “unacceptable”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, met with Boris Johnson, his British counterpart, in Dublin in September. Credit Phil Noble/Reuters

When Boris Johnson visited Ireland’s prime minister, Leo Varadkar, in Dublin last month as part of a last-minute scramble to reach some sort of Brexit deal, the two leaders began their day with a media briefing on the steps of one of Dublin’s grandest buildings. In the Edwardian Baroque style, it was built by the British authorities while the Irish were intensifying their struggle for independence. “Fortuitously”, the Heritage Ireland website snarkily notes, “the complex was completed in 1922 and was available immediately to be occupied by the new Irish Free State government”. Rarely has the word “fortuitously” elided so much.…  Seguir leyendo »

Protesters against clerical sexual child abuse in Ireland, at a rally in Dublin on Sunday. Credit Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times

On Sunday, while the faithful gathered for mass with Pope Francis in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, a large group gathered in the city’s Garden of Remembrance at an event called Stand for Truth. The railings had been hung with dozens of tiny pairs of baby shoes.

Colm O’Gorman, who runs the Irish office of Amnesty International, organized the event. He told the crowd that he had been 13 years old, and deeply religious, when Pope John Paul II visited in 1979 — the last time a pope visited Ireland. “I was in a liturgical group,” he said. “The church was in every part of my life.…  Seguir leyendo »

Marching in Dublin last year for more liberal Irish abortion laws. Credit Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

In 1983 the Irish people voted to give a fertilized egg the same right to life as the woman who carries it. Feminists tried to stop it. We argued that crisis pregnancies were a reality of women’s lives and that we needed the right to choose how to deal with them. We said that the constitutional amendment on the ballot, which made abortion illegal unless the mother’s life is in danger, would harm women. We marched and chanted “Get your rosaries off our ovaries”. A Catholic bishop pronounced that the most dangerous place for a baby was in a woman’s womb.…  Seguir leyendo »