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.
Feelings,Nothing more than feelings;Trying to forget myFeelings of love.Teardrops,Rolling down on my face,Trying to forget my,Feelings of love...
ONE of the DUP’s many cunning plans to oppose the 2012 decision to stop flying the union jack at City Hall 24/7 was to try and get the flag up permanently at the nearby Cenotaph. The thinking was, I imagine, that at least there would be a union jack visible at City Hall all day long, even it if was a bit less prominent.
COMETH the hour cometh the apology. And the corrections. And the clarifications.I checked out of the Nolan Show some years ago because of the relentless negativity. I didn’t do it for the sake of my mental health, but I was gratified to find that mornings that began without that gulp-inducingly portentous intro and without the screeching of cats being thrown over a clothes line with their tails tied together are more pleasant and mind-kind by a factor of Jesus-how- tf-did-I-ever-stick-that?
I HAVE no idea if the DUP is going to collapse the Stormont Executive over First Minister Michelle O’Neill linking arms with the people of the Garvaghy Road on… the Garvaghy Road. More importantly, I don’t care. At all.
I’M not easily shocked. How could I be? I’ve been at this job for all these decades and I’m still here. If I was easily shocked I’d be in a secure facility or shearing sheep in Donegal.
I THINK the following is a reasonable and accurate statement: I know more about loyalist parades than most non-loyalists.
“STAY calm,” UUP leader Jon Burrows told us on Monday morning as Loyal Ulster struggled to come to terms with The Great Betrayal.
THE question that needs to be asked of Portadown District is a simple one: Why Jamie?Jamie Bryson has walked into so many lampposts in his relatively short and hilariously colourful career that the Department of Infrastructure would probably have billed him for repairs by now were it not headed up by the DUP. Everyone has their favourite Jamie moment and the quotes and the clips are rolled out with savage predictability by his online detractors every time he declaims squeakily in the public square. To be fair to him, he seems relatively unfazed by the negative attention. If I took a battering like that every time I opened my mouth I’d have abandoned Twitter years ago.
IT wasn’t demographics that lost Drumcree for Loyal Ulster. It wasn’t two-tier policing or the Good Friday Agreement. It was good old-fashioned hubris.
SEISMIC is the word du jour after lawyers for the Orange Order managed to overturn the Parades Commission determination that the Brethren can’t walk down the Garvaghy Road.
DERRY has fallen out with me. Or at least some of its most vocal boosters have after I had my say over the weekend about the Feast of the Assumption again being marked this year by the city pretending to be East Belfast on the Eleventh Night.
IN the end, everything is political. While it might be nice to think that the turf-scented notes from a box accordion or the other-worldly strains of the uileann pipes are immune to infection from the diurnal and the dreary, the fact is that Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann was never going to be beyond the reach of those addicted to confrontation.
OUR two morning phone-in hosts were of one mind this week as Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann got under way in Belfast. Like most of us, Stephen Nolan and Frank Mitchell probably have a range of opinions on what’s lining up to be the biggest event to have taken place in the city of Belfast for 400 years.
robin livingstone
DUTCH is a tough language to master. Not as tough as Portuguese, which I’ve been trying to get my head round without a great deal of success for some years now as a mark of respect for my Portuguese son-in-law and my Portuguese-Irish granddaughter.