“One function of poetry [and art] is to write [and paint] a place into existence.” – Seamus Heaney It’s only with age and distance…
Author: Brian Spencer
Brian Spencer
Brian is a writer, artist and law graduate.
In September 2013 I asked: why did unionism turn away from the passing of Seamus Heaney? In October 2015 I asked why unionism turned its face…
Where is Ulster without the Scots? Where are unionists without soft nationalists and cosmopolitan Protestants? These are the gaps that have widened since June 23 2016.…
Easter, 1916 – a terrible beauty was born. It had a dark and little seen twin; a terrible ignorance of the people of the North. South…
George Bernard Shaw portended Northern Ireland as “an autonomous political lunatic asylum”. How right he was. I’m not sure that was the creator’s intention, however. The…
In the 1960s Gerry Fitt, the icon of Northern nationalism, identified the Achilles heel of unionism – its professed devotion to ‘British standards’. These ‘British…
A torrent of letters, books and articles have discussed the Easter Rising and Ireland at the one hundred year milestone. As a northern protestant* I welcome…
A twelve year old Dublin boy has asked Queen Elizabeth to return Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland. This is the kind of blunt thinking,…
The rebels of 1916 came from all ranks of society, but a majority were lower-middle-class. In a time of high unemployment, the vast majority of the…
How can unionists condemn a rebellion when they threatened rebellion? During a recent discussion on BBC Spotlight on the Easter Rising, Jim Allister of the TUV…
In 2011 a study at Harvard and Tufts found that white people in America, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black…
We’re all unionists now. Being a member of a group of nations that pools power and decision-making is all the vogue. For unionists, having a partition…
General John Maxwell On Monday May 1 1916 Dublin is at peace, but it is a ruin of life and property. Grown men stand in…
Countess Markievicz By Sunday the rebels of the GPO and Four Courts are in British hands. The others in the five garrisons on the south side…
Edward ‘Ned’ Daly The weather on Saturday, like the events of that week, remain remarkably unseasonal. “It is astonishing that, thus early in the Spring, the weather…