2016 Commemoration - how was it for you?

Betsy,

Back in 1968 ,the issue was Civil Rights.There was an undercurrent of United Ireland.
The N Ire Government made an utter mess of handling of Civil Rights,
This left the door open(,to use old war cries from 1916 period) ie for Paisley to use the old Ulster says No and the IRA to use Paddy Pearses blood lust on united Ireland to have a nasty conflict until GFA.
In no way is the sectarianism as bad as it was , what you now see is minor and hopefully will die out in time.

I think our Commemoration was measured and fair.
 
In no way is the sectarianism as bad as it was , what you now see is minor and hopefully will die out in time.

But sure what about poor Micheala??, wasn't she run out of Belfast.....

Good to hear things improving, anything I'd heard in recent years was of no great change (& I read recently about GAA club burnings and people putting paint on civilian memorials....but I guess there will always be some element on both sides). A pity that schools and sport (some of them anyway) have that segregation aspect built into them, we'll give it a few more generations I guess (long memories up there though...1690 & all that..)
 
On Michaela , sometimes Belfast was right to evict ????
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What about graveyards vandalised in Dublin, twits burning clubhouses in Wexford.
News media pick up the negatives.
From where N Ire was the changes are largely positive and (bigots) are being unceremoniously told to grow up and shut up.
100% agree that schooling in N Ire being segregated, is such an ongoing entrenched bad idea..
 
cremeegg success depends on who's making the judgement, a 26 county theocracy you judge to be a success, I don't.

How can you say that the rising lead to a 26 county theocracy. That makes no sense. You don't even make an argument that someone could disagree with. Not even wrong.

Many people would accept that the 26 county state and the 6 county state ("a protestant state for a protestant people") were both excessively dominated by religious interests.

I have to admit I have no clear understanding how this came about in relation to the 26 counties. Maybe it was due to the efforts of the Catholic church, maybe it was due to John A Costello, maybe it was the will of the people. But to lay it at the door of the rising ?
 
cremeegg all prospects of a pluralist 32 county settlement were scuppered by the Rising.
If despite the lack of the counterbalance of Protestant liberal influence the Free State had behaved as a secular republic ala James Connolly then that would have been a different story.
 

Are you really suggesting that the Northern Presbyterian influence would have been liberal!?

There was no prospect of a pluralist 32 county settlement, with or without the Rising, not short of an India/Pakistan or Israel/Jordan type partition where vast numbers of people were forcefully relocated to Britain.
 
There was no prospect of a pluralist 32 county settlement, with or without the Rising, not short of an India/Pakistan or Israel/Jordan type partition where vast numbers of people were forcefully relocated to Britain.

He is right Duke.

And furthermore, the well intentioned, liberal, Anglo-Irish ascendancy, Yeats' "no petty people" had influence if not control of the country in the preceding century and despite their good intentions this was the situation we were in.

100 plus years earlier, Wolfe Tone wanted to "unite Catholic Protestant and Dissenter in the common name of Irishman"

By 1916, the majority in Ulster had come to see their identity in terms of their Protestant religion and not their Irish nationality.