Robin has been with the Andersonstown News and subsequently the Belfast Media Group for over 30 years. He began his career in journalism with the company writing cinema and TV reviews as a freelance before becoming a staff reporter and going on to be appointed editor of the Andersonstown News in 1993. He became Group Editor of the Belfast Media Group with responsibility for all titles in 2016. He's the author of The Road, a memoir about growing up in Belfast.
WITH Remembrance Week over for another year…
LET’s remind ourselves of why it was that Stormont lone wolf Jim Allister was so utterly irresistible to the Loyal Ulster media. To that end, a checklist may help.
“I HAVE repeatedly stated that the levels of criminality in our community attributable to loyalism is (sic) dwarfed by that which is controlled by the republican movement and leadership.”
A MONARCH in an electric wheelchair wearing a Burger King cardboard crown. The Wars of the Roses fought with pikes and pepper spray, swords and perspex riot shields. Bodies dumped in a wheelie bin, royal ladies in Doc Martens.
YOU ask yourself why it was that DUP Minister for Communities Gordon Lyons met with the LCC after Education Minister Paul Givan came under fire just a few days earlier and the answer comes back: Why wouldn’t he?
THE case of the Sinn Féin references (Agatha Christie could do better, I feel) has seen BBC Ulster pour its considerable resources into a working week-long dive under the Arctic swell to examine what lies beneath the iceberg’s tip. Culpability, we’re told, is to be apportioned way beyond the two press officers who retired to the library together with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver.
YOU may have noted as I did that DUP Education Minister Paul Givan’s meeting with the Loyalist Communities Council – the umbrella group for the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando – didn’t have a photo opp afterwards.
I WAS intrigued to see the UVF being represented at a 'cross-community' event in Belfast this week. And we’re talking here not about the 1912, top hats, waxed moustaches and tweed jackets UVF; we’re talking here about the bad murals, good coke, sledgehammers and AK47s UVF.
‘WHAT about all the other victims?’ That’s the unionist consensus on the news that an independent public inquiry has been ordered into the murder of Pat Finucane.
CHIEF Constable Jon Boutcher wants Catholics to head on over to Shaftesbury Square next July 12th and enjoy watching a parade they're not allowed to take part in.
BALLYMENA and Loughgall don’t want to play Sunday soccer, which has nothing to do, you understand, with the former being the prong on the buckle of the Bible Belt and the latter being just round the corner from where the Orange Order was founded.
IS there a victim of the IRA that the Loyal Ulster media hasn’t asked to comment on that Olympics ‘Ooh, ah, up the Ra’ clip? At times it seems like there isn’t.
I’M not sure if Pat Cullen is going to ask Ofcom to condemn BBC Ulster for handing the Fermanagh and South Tyrone seat to the UUP’s Diana Armstrong five minutes after the polls closed, but, all things considered, I think she should.
WE’RE in the midst of the most boring Westminster election campaign in living memory. Or at least, a BBC Loyal Ulster feature this week invited us to believe that this is the case.
HAD Brian Friel lived to update his play Translations, I fear the story about the intersection of language and colonialism would have been a lot more complicated – and a lot less enjoyable.