iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ability, yes. Not sure that would be the wisest thing though.

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Reposted by Mick Fealty

7/ We shouldn't mistake old nightmares resurfacing for the real thing. The field where the Irish Army set up a hospital for Derry's injured in '69 is now a private estate of €350k houses. Our ghosts still visit, but they needn't run the place. Slugger piece here: sluggerotoole.com/2026/10/06/g...

Still our ghosts visit: Garvaghy Road, founding myths and the dangerous fantasy of victory

The Garvaghy Road estates were formed in a few short years by families fleeing intimidation, and that founding story is still being renewed. The law may be clear on the Orange Order's right to walk, b...

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It’s a flaw to think we can have an infallible legal process that can reliably replace political good sense.

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Mark O’Neill 🐻 @radiobeartime.com · 07/10/2026

Those are set pieces, with little implication for public order.

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Reposted by Mick Fealty

A very good thread from Mick on how too many politicians are afraid to face today’s reality and instead cling to the old shibboleths. NI deserves better, the residents of Garvaghy Road deserve better.

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Find information, resources and relevant links for maybe.it. This domain may be for sale.

If judged purely in the moment, maybe.it won’t be though. Many will see previously stated ambitions to represent all the people of NI as hollow.

maybe.it

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Still our ghosts visit: Garvaghy Road, founding myths and the dangerous fantasy of victory

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6/ Nationalist politicians should have backed residents, then urged calm and compromise. Instead, afraid of being outflanked, they rushed to Portadown to stoke tribal feeling. Tribal feeling is the enemy of unity, and their vote has barely moved in thirty years.

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5/ This isn't something courts can fix. Rights without relationships become a war of all against all, refereed by judges. Lack of engagement brought us here, along with the pretence that we aren't one society sharing the same roads, schools and hospitals.

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4/ The law looks clear: the Order has a right to walk home from Drumcree church. But a ruling isn't an entry ticket to boundless entitlement. Its own tradition always tied rights to civic responsibility, and it has its own past and myths to face.

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3/ That flight became a founding story, handed down: today's residents are the children and grandchildren of those who fled. So 35 Orangemen, members of a Protestant marching order kept off that road for a generation, walking down it is never just 35 men walking.

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2/ Others weren't so lucky. In Portadown, Catholic families intimidated out of mixed areas moved into the Garvaghy Road estates as Protestant families left. Within a few years a mixed neighbourhood was almost entirely Catholic, settled by people many of whom came for the same reason.

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Mick Fealty @mickfealty.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

1/ In August 1969 a gang of loyalists, fresh from burning Catholic-owned pubs in Belfast, walked into my mum's bar and asked if the town had any. Her Protestant customers said no. Eight in ten were, ours included. They called the men a taxi. 🧵

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Apropos of very little, it’s interesting to see the UK and Ireland momentary singing off a similar hymn book on current affairs…

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Mick Fealty @mickfealty.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The equivocatingJury currently sitting on the question of whether Trump is an uncommon genius or a gifted fool is expected issue a verdict soon…

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Reposted by Mick Fealty

Edgar Morgenroth @morgenrothedgar.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

And it shows yet again that the extreme left and extreme right are essentially the same.

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Good if true. The story of C21 media is the epistemic crisis that has followed the hollowing out of PSB standard journalism, which itself comes on foot of political pressure from the private sector whose own business model has suffered a disastrous and catastrophic collapse…

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8/ You can't build resilience on fear and silence. You need politicians who are willing to decide and a media thats willing to measure what actually matters. Just now, Northern Ireland has neither. My fuller argument on @sluggerotoolepols.bsky.social: sluggerotoole.com/2026/09/09/r...

Health Reform: Do we have the right patient at the right place and the right time?

Emergency general surgery left Enniskillen in December 2022, weeks after Stormont fell and with no minister in post to answer for it. Nearly four years on, the Trust says outcomes improved, its own co...

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7/ Our politicians hide from this because it's complex. The Media ignores it because parades get clicks. And yet people die while nobody watches. That's institutional cowardice. It’s a governance issue our politicians have neither the experience nor the courage to face with confidence.

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6/ Nobody asks them to explain for two reasons. One, because Northern Ireland has become a consequence free zone. And two, the media likes to cover cheap culture war issues that look backwards rather than asking hard (and expensive) questions about the resilience of the system through drive times.

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5/ The local Western Trust publishes figures that suggest a 24% improvement in mortality. However their own emergency doctors reject it. The regulator questions whether they deleted the sickest patients from the numbers. In other words the data doesn't add up: sluggerotoole.com/2026/04/28/w...

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4/ The new SWAH cost £270 million, opened in 2012, built for emergency surgery on things like appendicitis, bowel obstruction, perforation. Not major, but still life or death cases that need immediate care. It provided ten years of service then quietly closed down.

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3/ This isn't an accident. It's a flaw in Northern Ireland’s peculiar power sharing system that affords political populism an out from ministerial duties: leaving the hard calls during a crisis when there's no politician to blame. Bury it under "operational grounds." Hope nobody notices.

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2/ December 2022. Emergency surgery vanishes from Enniskillen's SWAH. Moved to Altnagelvin an hour away. Timed perfectly: Stormont suspended, no minister, no accountability. A decision nobody made but everyone has to accept.

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1/ How do you build a resilient health system when local politicians are terrified of hard decisions on a complex policy while the local media is only interested in easy to cover, easy to sell culture war stories. That's what undergirds Northern Ireland's health crisis.

Still not read to the bottom of the thread?

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Read the whole thread and come back to me?

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When someone is bold enough to tell you they will declare themselves a dictator and end Parliamentary democracy and human rights on day one of taking power, believe them…

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Read the rest of the thread and come back to me Ben?

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You haven’t read the whole thread.

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Thanks “David”. Off point, but thanks.

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7/ What nationalism (40%) misses is that a united Ireland needs at least some “non nationalists” (60%) to vote for it. Every colour party at an IRA grave, tells the people you have to win over exactly how much their dead would count in a new Ireland. The stalled engine is self-inflicted.

6/ In the end it comes down to one word, culture, and who gets to claim it. For one tradition it's broad and honourable. For the other it's a police matter.

5/ We shouldn’t don't lose sight of who was on the receiving end. Séamus McElwain, the man the tribute board in Ballinamore honours, murdered Aubrey Abercrombie, a Protestant farmer shot in the head on his own tractor. A father of four. That is what the colour party is parading on.

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4/ Gerry Kelly was in the IRA. Now he calls flags and emblems at loyalist events "sectarian hate crimes," not real culture. But if you run that same test over a colour party at an IRA graveside commemorative event it fails just as badly. That one just gets called remembrance.

3/ On the other hand a single UDA flag on a band at an Orange parade turns into a running scandal. Flags and election posters on bonfires get logged as hate crimes and investigated. The press scrutiny is relentless and granular, and nothing remotely like it ever falls on a republican commemoration.

2/ Nearly 2,000 went to Bobby Storey's funeral during lockdown, Sinn Féin ministers included, and nobody was prosecuted. A Newry playground still bears the name of an IRA man linked to Kingsmills, kept twenty years despite the courts and the Equality Commission.