Shelter in a good book

This Boston Globe story about a book club set up by the homeless in Boston is beautiful.

You can read it all via the link but here's the hook:

"For two lively hours every Tuesday morning, in a church meeting room with old oil portraits, they are book club members first and homeless people second.

"The story of the book club, now in its 10th month, is a tale of ordinary city life upended. It began with a stunningly unlikely friendship, between two men from different worlds: Peter Resnik, a high-powered lawyer on his way to work, and Rob, a homeless man guarding a friend’s shopping cart on Boston Common. Through months of daily conversations, that began with jokes and sports talk and gradually delved deeper, they found a common interest: literature. And when they saw the bridge that they had built, they recognized its potential for others."

Café without a cause

Enjoyed a visit on Tuesday 7 July to the renovated Ulster Hall. Believe Belfast city ratepayers paid out around £12m for the Ulster Hall facelift, and money well-spent it was too.

Not only in the jobs created but also in the restoration of this magnificent Irish building.

No flag flies from the roof thank God and the first musical symbol in a relief above the hall door is a collage of harp, pipes and fiddle.

The new-look theatre has a little café attached but I'm not sure that's such a good idea. Still, let's hope the Grand Dame Café is a hit for its owner or franchisee. Contrast this: the Ulster Hall stands as a testament to the use of public monies for the arts while opposite it the Invest NI new headquarters, an award-winning building, costing millions of pounds, has no public art at all outside it.

Our main reason for visiting the Ulster Hall was to view the JW Carey watercolours (commissioned at the start of the 20th century when the hall came into ownership of Belfast Corporation) which are, sadly, stuck in a very tight corridor. However, their restoration after a 100-year war with damp was another coup for the city. One of his works is pictured above as is the Invest hq and the revamped Ulster Hall.

I saw Planxty, Lou Reed and Warren Zevon in the Ulster Hall and while a plaque to Rory Gallagher welcomes visitors, I suspect I saw Rory in concert in the Grosvenor Hall (long-since demolished).

Oh Happy Days or Mór mo Náir'

Here's the judgement from yesterday's High Court decision which stood over a 1737 ban on Irish in the Northern courts.

Seo an breithiúnas as an chás cúirte, ni féidir Domhnall O'Cathain a mholadh de bharraíocht as theacht an bealach uilig as Meiriceá le bheith mar fhinné ar an tséanadh cirt seo. Sin an cineál tacaíochta a athróidh cúrsaí.

Dead space and sick buildings

At a discussion in the Golden Thread Gallery on Tuesday night, the conversation turned to bad buildings.

These include many of our new apartment blocks but also some of our new hotels.

Take, for example, the new Ramada Encore, opposite the Golden Thread Gallery in the Cathedral Quarter. (Inside the self-styled 'funky' Ramada has some of the worst 'Belfast' kitsch paintings I've ever seen.)

The Ramada is on the corner of Dargan Crescent and yet two thirds of the space it occupies is given over to a car park (in case you haven't noticed there's a big sign saying car park hanging from its side). This means the ground floor space is 'dead'. There are no doors or windows, simply a wall hiding the cars parked on the other side.

What was promised and needed was a busy ground floor in active use which would have linked the two sides of the Cathedral Quarter across the ugly, four lane (with footpath in middle of road) Dargan Crescent. Instead we have another bad building. Nothing new there, says you, look at the GEM offices facing St George's Market. Again the entire ground floor is a wall with no access points.

Architect Ciarán Mackel suggests the cramped private apartment blocks springing up across Belfast are an disaster waiting to happen. A recent survey showed occupancy in this showcase city centre apartment blocks is only at 60 per cent and a majority of those belong to investors.

"Planners could and should have insisted on an extra room per apartment and higher ceilings," says Ciarán. "That would have made them much more liveable." Instead the planners, as is the case in the new block just before Castle Street, allowed the developer to create an apartment block with 'dead' space on the ground floor. There are two retail units and wooden partition hiding car park space and bins. "By refusing to put accommodation on the ground floor, the developer also gets to avoid having to build a generous lobby, an atrium or even a garden space."

(In our picture of the new Ramada Encore, the entire ground floor from the corner back is dead space. In fact, all the space back from the white pillar is car park.)

Europe, here we come

The decision by the High Court in Belfast today to stand over the atrocious 1737 Act banning Irish in the courts clears the way for this landmark legal challenge to go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Plaudits go to Pobal, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Chathain and solicitor Michael Flanigan for taking this case to the highest court 'in the land' and simultaneously taking it into the public domain.

And while the commitments in the Good Friday Agreement, the St Andrew's Agreement and the European Charter on Lesser-Used Languages have all proved to be meaningless in the face of this discriminatory legislation, notice has been served that Irish speakers aren't willing to accept second-class citizenship.

In another breakthrough, Domhnall O'Cathain from the US Brehon Law Society was in the court as an observer. I think his statement captures the sense of outrage at the continuing denial of human rights to Irish speakers in this bleak house.

"The Administration of Justice Language Act (Ireland) 1737 is a relic of the era of the oppressive Penal Laws...Today's decision is another insult to the legal heritage of the Irish language. Any effort to couch the decision in legal entities is misleading. It merely perpetuates the discriminatory effect of the Act.

"A progressive society embraces its cultural differences. As Ireland becomes more pluralistic, we must embrace all our cultural differences...This decision and the recent attacks on ethnic minorities in Belfast are not directly related. Nevertheless, they separately demonstrate institutional and uninformed grounds for intolerance."

Domhnall, a New York attorney, is on the right, Michael Flanigan on the left in our pic outside the Cultúrlann before today's High Court decision.

Jeffrey and those movies

I met Mark Davenport of the BBC in the city centre today and our conversation turned to the weighty matter of Jeffrey Donaldson's viewing tastes.

Mark revealed that colleague Martina Purdy told the newsroom that she believes Jeffrey's contention that all 68 or so movies were of the PG variety. To which Mark suggested: "I don't think that you'll find anyone among your males colleagues who would agree with that."

Stormont sojourn

Courtesy of Frances Lenaghan at the Speaker's Office in Stormont, Conrad Atkinson, his wife the artist Margaret Harrison, and myself got to see the original and controversial Pieter van der Muelen painting of Pope Innocent blessing King Billy today.

A magnificent piece it is too though it badly needs cleaned, according to Conrad. You can clearly see where it was cut and damaged by a fundamentalist Presbyterian minister from Scotland in 1933 and in fact some spots remain of the red paint which he threw over the painting.

Later, we got to see Noel Murphy's portrait of the first Assembly members which hangs in the unused Senate chamber and William Connor's original of the new Northern Ireland parlimant meeting in City Hall in 1921.

Add to that a chance to see Rita Duffy's character-rich but stumpy picture of Seamus Mallon and a Dorian Grey style picture of John Alderdice and you have a full Stormont tour — which ended in regal style as we stood on the balcony above the front entrance.

Isn't it weird that while Murphy (another great West Belfast artist) painted the Assembly members when David Trimble was First Minister, he gave pride of place to the DUP, including Dr Ian, and gives Ian Jr. a hand coming forward like Lord Carson's...."the hand of God", said Murphy.

Our own 4 July

When 4 July comes, Americans always ask me, "do you have a 4 July". "Not yet" is my answer though it's certainly our ambition and perhaps the latest Unite Ireland push in the US will help us realise the dream.

But anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglas, who travelled Ireland, had an evocative take on what Independence Day meant for the black man in mid-19th century America.

You can read his entire 4 July address here but this excerpt is as powerful a piece of writing you are likely to see which captures the spirit of those of us who are not yet free.


What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Yellow bungalow

I forgot to tell ye that the deputy First Minister has taken advantage of the restoration of the Ulster Museum to move Gerard Dillon’s most famous piece Yellow Bungalow to his Stomont office.

Dillon, famously, refused to have his work exhibited in the North after the 1969 pogroms; he’d be pleased to have his painting in its present location.