Léargas

  Build Casement Now The delay in building the new Casement Park is totally unacceptable. Like many Gaels of my age I grew up with Casement. I played there for our school teams and enjoyed sports days as well. I have watched umpteen games over the decades. Until 2013. That was the last time Casement Park hosted a game. On 10 June 2013.  That was the  Ulster Senior Football Championship  quarter-final between   Antrim  and  Monaghan .  Since then the site has been derelict. A sullen lump of waste ground. Antrim Gaels have been denied the use of our county ground and a generation of young athletes are being denied the right to play there. It is a disgrace.  The history of failure to build the new Casement and all the twists and turns, of mistakes and upsets and set-backs, would take too long to record here. But what is for sure is that the delay now rests with the Minister of Communities Gordon Lyons,the DUP ...

  Protect the Assembly Rooms   The North began, the North held on, The strife for native land; When Ireland rose to smite her foes God bless the Northern land Thomas Davis In the 1790s Belfast was the centre of an Irish political movement which linked Antrim and Down with the Republics of France and America, and Belfast citizens celebrated the Fall of the Bastille, drank toasts to Mirabeau and Lafayette and studied Payne’s great book,  The Rights of Man . Presbyterians formed the Society of United Irishmen and declared for Catholic emancipation, for the abolition of church establishments and tithes, for resistance to rack rents and for sweeping agrarian reforms. They gave a cordial welcome to Mary Wollstonecraft’s  Vindication of the Rights of Women  and joined with their Catholic neigbours in the struggle for national independence and political democracy. It was a time of change, of great ideas and of hope for a new future free from England’s cl...