Tag Archives: Scotland

nicola sturgeon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjeXJF7S_kg

Nicola Sturgeon (top) and the Scottish Nationalist Party.

What’s all that about?

DubEdinburgh writes:

If you readers want to know why Labour were destroyed in Scotland and/or would like to understand Nicola Sturgeon’s appeal to voters please share this short video [from the Leaders’ Debate]. It wasn’t just about Independence. Labour’s policies weren’t progressive enough. Let that be a lesson…

Fight!

‘This is not the scenario I would have wanted’: Nicola Sturgeon declares war against David Cameron’s Tories (The Daily Mirror)

match programme stub

For the weekend that’s in it.

Saturday, February 2nd, 1980.

Ireland faced Scotland off the back of a whipping from her old master.

Ballerina-footed Ollie Campbell and the greased ferret like elusiveness of Colin Patterson lead the charge, backed by southern musclemen, Donal Spring and first-time in green try scorer Moss Keane.

Niall Kiely wrote in the following Monday’s Irish Times:

Our resident Scotsman in a busy restaurant came from Troon, and named, inevitably one-felt, Brown. He had found problems to transcend the day’s woes, one of which led him to beseech every woman present for a needle and thread – a terrace scrimmage had seen him split his only pair of trousers – yet further tragedy stalked in that he had belatedly discovered that Galway , where he wanted to visit an old flame, was not a suburb of Dublin.

Och!

Previously: Giving It A McLash, 1985

Retro Rugby on Broadsheet

RUTH

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ahead of the referendum on Scotland’s independence.

Dublin-born writer Ruth Dudley Edwards writes:

“These days Scots, however, would do well to learn from the example of the island immediately to their west.
There, the people of the Republic of Ireland have mostly ignored the rest of the Celtic fringe, being obsessed instead with nurturing old grievances towards England (aka the Saxon, perfidious Albion, the old enemy and so on). Anti-Englishness was our identity: the evil country’s role was to take the blame for all our wrongs and accept our immigrants uncomplainingly. Ireland was thus a mean little country that I gladly quit in the Sixties – insular, sectarian and with a political class that allowed itself to be bossed about by a rigid and intolerant Roman Catholic hierarchy and drove out most of its writers and creative minds along with the jobless.
Such narrow-mindedness is a grim warning of what might await an independent Scotland.
In Ireland’s case, the narrowing stemmed from a revolution in 1916 that began the process of taking Ireland out of the United Kingdom, cutting off contact with the British Empire, silencing anyone who retained unionist sympathies and airbrushing out of history the 200,000 or so Irishmen who fought in the First World War. If they chose to stay, Protestants kept their heads down and said nothing about “Rome Rule”.

…For much of the 20th century, in its constitution Ireland claimed ownership of the entire island, ballads were sung about our divided nation and there was hero-worship of various members of the IRA who tried to bring about Irish unity by crossing the border and attacking police. This kind of aggressive, divisive republicanism should serve as another warning to Scotland. There will be a push to undermine institutions with unionist associations, and to foment a kind of class war. If the Scots Nationalists win next Thursday, how long will it be before they morph into republicans and call for a referendum on ditching the monarchy?

Scotland should heed a harsh lesson from across the Irish Sea (Ruth Dudley Edwards, Daily Telegraph)

Ruth Dudley Edwards