TWO of West Belfast’s best-known and hardest working community figures will share this year’s prestigious Aisling Awards Role of Honour accolade at the upcoming gala night in the Europa Hotel.
THE Aisling Awards are back for their 26th year and Foras na Gaeilge are once again sponsors of the Outstanding Contribution to the Irish Language Award.
AT a time of great global uncertainty, fear and confusion little rays of sunshine are all the more warming and welcome. Last week on TV there appeared a lovely little story from County Antrim – a story in which Squinter has had a modest and fleeting hand. Wildlife lover Ciarán Walsh moved some years ago to the countryside near Crumlin where he has been able to devote incredible amounts of time and energy to pursuing his passion for saving the barn owl. The number of mating pairs of the magnificent native Irish bird has dropped alarmingly over the years thanks mainly to changes in farming practices which have decimated both their habitat and their food source. And so Ciarán, possessed of all the necessary official permissions and licences required to interact with the barn owl, has been erecting nest boxes in areas where the bird formerly thrived, and he has been laying out seed to swell the numbers of the various rodents which are the mainstay of the barn owl diet. In 2018 Squint
IT feels like we are at a tipping point, or at least a crunch point – again. It is often said that the Johnson government has no real policies but just an agenda based on culture wars and issues that are simply designed to polarise opinion, so-called “wedge issues”: selling Channel 4, promoting imperial units and the union flag, denying racism, protecting statues, routine attacks on the BBC, “lefty lawyers” and judges – note the defamation proceedings issued in the wake of Brandon Lewis’ latest attack – and generally purging institutions of the ideologically “unsound”.