New nationalism now needed

What is obvious about Sinn Fein’s current woes and the SDLP’s stagnation is that a new nationalism is needed on the island of Ireland. You could of course argue a similar case to modernise British nationalism (unionism) here but ill dedicate this blog to the former. .

No major political party is seeking to recast the old nationalism’s which have shaped 20th century Irish politics into relevant expressions of identity and ambition fit for the 21st century.

As Belfast academic Richard English notes in his recent tome, nationalism remains one of the most succesful forms of political expression around the globe for good reason. It transcends, class and generation. It has the capacity to bridge creed and often provides a shared space for those of differing (left-right) ideological outlooks. Whilst Connolly said the cause of Labour is the Cause of Ireland,  it is also true for the very many of a ‘nationalist’ outlook on this island the cause of business or indeed the cause of science are also the cause of Ireland.

Unity is the central objective of Irish nationalism. The lack of agreement between the large nationalist parties on this island about what a united Ireland might look like is arguably the greatest threat to it ever achieving its central objective.  Because of the absence of an agreed vision of unity, it has become a party political issue with different nationalist parties seeking to ‘out green’ each other on an issue which should really unite them.

There is a constituency looking for a new Ireland.

Younger generations are disinterested in re-running the old battles of the past. Old ideologues are looking increasingly out of touch and old ideologies feel more and more irrelevant to the lives and challenges facing ordinary working people and families across this island.

The time has come for some positive and progressive nationalism. Credible on unity but not solely defined by it. Capable of speaking to working families, business people and international investors in language they understand. Strong on conversation and not confrontation, with sustainability at its heart and innovation in its DNA. A modern politics for a 21st century Ireland. in short a politics that can ignite conversations and unlock ambition in every county at the same time as being respectful and credible to unionism.

Before we can develop a stratgy fro unity we need a vision for this island not just in 2016 but in 2026 and beyond.

This is the great opportunity for a new generation of Irish politicians ansd civic leaders.

500 ACRES OF INNER BELFAST LIES IDLE

Current idle land surrounding city centre

More than two square kilometres of land in Belfast, much of it publicly owned, could be used to regenerate and reconnect communities within the inner and central city.

According to the newly-launched Forum for an Alternative Belfast, a ‘think tank’ which is aiming to create a strong vision for a new Belfast, the land is still lying idle after more than a decade of a construction boom which saw a lot of hastily-planned, profit-focussed development.

“Years of bad or mediocre redevelopment have continued to isolate large swathes of the city, creating ugly dead facades and leaving it largely empty at night,” said Belfast Forum co-director Mark Hackett.

The idle land would fill up the city centre

“It’s hard to believe that an area the size of 500 football pitches is not being more productively used given that it is all located within a two kilometre walk of the city centre. This important, valuable land could be better-used to make Belfast a more vibrant, cosmopolitan city that isn’t disjointed by ad-hoc development.”

“We want to find out exactly how many people could be living within one and a half miles of the City Hall, however, our preliminary study indicates in excess of 20,000 extra people would comfortably be housed in the fractured inner city. With that comes the challenge of making new schools, parks and connecting with existing communities in an equitable manner – and doing so with development of enduring built quality” he added.

The Forum is bringing more than 70 of Belfast’s leading architects, engineers, urban planners, arts experts, community leaders together in a four-day ‘summer school’ to develop workable ideas to transform the city.

The ‘Fill Up Belfast’ Project runs from 10am to 10pm, Monday 17 August until Friday 21 August at the David Keir Building in Queen’s University, with evening discussion sessions open from 5.30pm for those attending after work.

“This is an intensive, voluntary effort by over 70 members to show civic leadership in the city,” said Mark. “The five-day ‘think tank’ will examine what would happen if we stopped leaving the development of our city to chance and instead started to plan a common vision for how we see ourselves in 2020. We want everyone to take part in the wider discussions.”

“Belfast is our city; it’s our environment, and it’s essential that we create and develop a place that’s accessible, connected and safe. It should be a good place to live in and a good place to invest in. This is your chance to affect the future of your city.”

Weber Shandwick is helping the project out on a pro-bono basis. Drop me a line if you would like more info.

Let’s get creative about the economy

Can Northern Ireland become a creative economy and what is a creative economy anyway?

My boss and Weber Shandwick CEO in Europe, Colin Byrne, often refers to a great book by John Howkins in which he considers the contribution ‘creative industries’ make to the economy. He defines a creative industry as one which make money from ideas. Other economists have also written on this subject, most notably Richard Florida whose books include the Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class.

The interesting thing about these thinkers’ approach to creativity is that they define a creative economy is a much broader sense then you would think. Its not just writers, designers, actors and artists. It also includes lawyers, scientists and dare I say it PR consultants. Anyone who (should) thinks for a living. Creative economies are magnets for ’talented’ people from all over the world, they are places people will move to for work.  The Republic of Ireland has become according to a number of matrix one of the most creative economies on the globe. For centuries a place of artistic creativity it is now also a a major IT and scientific research centre, something that will grow its wealth as well as culture. Even in the face of this savage recession FDI by creative industries has proved resilient in the South. 

Florida identifies three common characteristics of creative economies:

1. Talent – they attract the smartest and most gifted to move their to work;
2. Technology – they have the infrastructure to allow people to work, and;
3. Tolerance – they must be able to accommodate many different types from the IT wizard, the research scientist and the radical artist and make them fell equally at home.

The south has come a long way in the past decade to meet the three T test. The North has the talent and the technology.

But will it transform itself into a tolerant place?

On that note Silicon Republic has a good interview with Cisco Ireland Vice-President, Barry O’Sullivan who says Ireland needs two univeristies in the Global top 50 to maintain its attractiveness for FDI.

“I have a 2:20:200 vision for this country. JFK declared in the Sixties how America would put a man on the moon. Ireland too needs targets that focus on deliverables. I don’t think it could be impossible that we could have two universities in the top 50 universities in the world. We could aim to have 20 companies listed on the NASDAQ and I think we could aim to have 200,000 people working in indigenous Irish innovation companies that include ICT and bio-pharma businesses.”

Is Sinn Fein really serious about Unity?

The word on O’Conall Street is that the Irish government does want a border poll this side of 2020.

Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams is trailing all over the United States outlining their ‘Strategy for Unity’. Can’t tell you what the strategy is because they don’t let the press attend these public meetings and they have never published a policy paper on the matter, unlike the SDLP did in 2005.

The Shinners have also launched into a period of reflection following their poor showing in the recent local and European elections in the South. Yesterday Eoin O’Broin managed 600 words about the party’s need to regroup and renew. I respect his opinion but found it fascinating that the economy or the role of business had no part in his plan to rebuild our island and bring the people of Ireland closer together.

Maurice Hayes, also writing yesterday in the Irish Independent noted;

Oddly, in all of this, Mr Adams, whose leadership was central to the transformation of the party and its role in the North, increasingly appears to be surplus to requirements. Foreign trips to promote reunification are reminiscent of deValera when he lost office in 1948, and with the same purpose of talking to people abroad rather than the unionists at home.

Sinn Fein is a party badly needing to develop social and economic policies which will attack the problems in the South and attract support there, and also needing to manage the transfer of leadership from one generation to another.

I agree with Hayes, this is a debate which extends well beyond nationalism. For a United Ireland to become a reality, Irish nationalists will need to have convinced a significant part of the unionist community that a yes vote is not such a bad thing and that their identity, rights and economic status will not be affected in an Irish State. In other words unity will only be true when it unites people and their representatives have a lot of talking to do before they can claim to be united. The divisions are not just in Northern Ireland. There is a fault line between North and South built on seventy years of jurisdictional disparity. In the South church and state coexist in a way which has worked well for the 26 counties but would be unsustainable in a united Ireland and several generations have ignored the North, wishing it away with the coarse remark that ‘you are all the same up there’. Southerners do not understand northern nationalists and despite a constitutional claim over the territory which lasted until ‘98, bizarrely see unionists as foreigners.

Stephen King, the former UUP advisor, tells the story of when Bertie Ahern apologised to the UUP delegation after they were asked to remove their poppies before a meeting with him. That was back in the run up to 1998. Ahern was right. The poppy is precious to very many people on this island and that is something we simply need to accept. It is also means something to tens of thousands of Irish nationalists who lost their ancestors in the First World War.  To describe it as offensive is to stand there waiting to be offended. There are very many symbols, British and Irish, which will not survive in the new Ireland. I think the poppy will and so it should. But poppies won’t put money in your pocket no more than you can eat a flag.

When communities prosper they have the opportunity move on. When people’s standard of living goes up their insecurities go down. The south maybe be more postnationalist today then twenty years ago and that is partly down to its recent prosperity. The north will prosper too and with increased wealth, spread across the whole community, attitudes will change and priorities will shift. A stakeholder society will replace and dependency one.

The great opportunity for nationalism is to recognise this and move from protest to positive politics. IN the immortal words of Bill Clinton: It’s the Economy Stupid!

America’s loving Cuba….

It was the U.S. government’s version of the ticker in New York’s Times Square, blasting Havana’s main seaside strip with anti-Cuba slogans in 5-foot high crimson letters. It symbolized the tit-for-tat diplomatic row between Washington and Havana.

But the ticker at the top of the U.S. interests section in Cuba has gone blank, yet another signal the past half-century of animosity between the two countries is easing.

CNN reports this morning that State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the ticker was turned off in June because it was not considered “effective” as a means of delivering information to the Cuban people.

The scrolling electronic sign, fitted across 25 windows of the U.S. interests section, ran quotes from American heroes, such as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up,” and Abraham Lincoln’s “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

It also streamed news and political messages that blamed Cuba’s everyday problems on the communist regime led by Fidel Castro and the island’s socialist economy. The island’s transportation woes, for example, were the topics of jabs such as, “Some go around in Mercedes, some in (Russian-built) Ladas, but the system forces almost everyone to hitch rides.”

The sign — erected in 2006 by the Bush administration and billed as a way to circumvent censorship and, the administration said, offer hope and freedom to Cubans oppressed by a brutal regime — fueled a propaganda war with Fidel Castro, who referred to the U.S. interests section as “the headquarters of the counterrevolution.”

Dublin v Kerry 2009

So here we go again.

Like Guinness and oysters, bacon and cabbage and a Big Mac and fries, no matter what your class or creed, no Irish summer is complete without Dublin and Kerry.

Its come all to early for many of us. There are still eight teams battling for Sam and by Monday next, one of the finest will be gone.

Am I confident?

Ehhhh…….

Yeah, No.

Five time Leinster champs v a team which has been dogged by problems all summer. Never mind their league win I have to keep telling myself, or the fact that this lion only ever shakes his chains when August comes. Can we do it? Yes we can!

So here goes the scramble for tickets and my prediction.

More people will be at Croker to see this show down then at all the other quarter finals put together.

Surfing Donegal

Off for a days surfing lessons in Donegal with the kids. We will be in the expert hands of the Bundoran Surf Co, who themselves blog a bit. 15ft waves forecast this afternoon at 10 sec intervals – they will seem like fifty footers to us beginners.

Its all part of our 2009 staycation with jaunts down south and loads of day trips around the North to do new things. So far so good….

Out of this World News: Something big has hit Jupiter

There is a new large hole on the surface of Jupiter this week. First spotted by an amateur in Australia the New Hubble telescope snapped this shot.

NASA and the ESA are investigating. The New Scientist reports;

Fifteen years after Jupiter was pummelled by fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the planet has been struck again, this time by an unseen object estimated to span several football fields….

Irish American gets Presidential blast

James Crowley, a Cambridge Massachusetts police sergeant (and one would presume an Irish American) is in the Presidential firing line this morning after arresting one of America’s most influential academics.

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jnr was arrested inside his own home on July 16th after a white woman reported spotting two black men trying to break into a house in an affluent neighbourhood close to Harvard University.

Even after being shown ID and proof of address, Sergeant Crowley handcuffed the academic, who has mobility problems, and detained him in a local police station. The Professor’s black driver was also arrested.

In today’s Irish Times,  Wil Haygood of the Washington Post writes about being a black man in the Boston area.  Yesterday in DC, President Obama reacted:

Edwin Dorn, a former dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and author of Rules and Racial Equality, said the magnitude of the Gates arrest can be understood through the reactions from blacks and whites.

“If one conducts a survey, one will find that overwhelmingly blacks feel that this was an example of something that is part of their DNA — police discrimination, oppression, racial profiling. It’s likely that you’ll find a much larger percentage of whites believing, just instantly, that it was Gates who behaved intemperately,” Dorn said. “It’s an example of how the races still view things very differently.”

He said whites are far more likely than blacks to believe that police officers arriving at their doorstep are likely to do the right thing. Far from the case, Dorn said, for blacks.

“From an African-American perspective, what it says is, ‘If it happens to a guy like … Gates, just imagine what happens on darkened streets with people who are not prominent,” Dorn said.

What’s EBITDA?

Here’s one for all the serious business types on O’Conall St. If you ever want to calculate the value of a company, particularly one trading in the professional services sector you need to understand EBITDA.

CNN have prepared a little master class for us all. If you work in the private sector – WATCH IT!