Newtownstewart Library

Because of the current political discussions I was unable to get to the offical opening of the newly refurbished library in Newtownstewart, county Tyrone.  The refurbishment took almost a year and the total cost was £535,000.

The library opened in its present location on Main Street in 1979 and the building is a former National School, which was constructed in 1860.  It is a Grade B listed building and retains many of the original features of the 1860 school.  This is a good example of the continuing use of what is an important historic building.

A modern library must meet the needs of people in the 21st century and it should offer a flexible and responsive service.  There is no doubt that a library should also provide a vibrant and dynamic focal point in the community.  It should also be a place where people of all ages and backgrounds can be educated and entertained.  A library should invite users to be enquiring and imaginative, to expand their knowledge and explore their creativity.  That is what we should expect and I know that is what will be delivered.

Libraries NI, the arms-length body that runs our library service, has been in existence now for a year under the chairmanship of Dr David Elliott and the chief executive is Irene Knox.

Ireland's Saturday Night

The newspaper Ireland's Saturday Night was launched on Saturday 17 November 1894 as the Ulster Saturday Night and it described itself as a 'journal of general reading, football, cycling [and] athletics.'  It was published as a sister paper to the Belfast Telegraph because readers of the Telegraph regularly complained that the Saturday edition of the newspaper contained too much sport.

In January 1896 it was renamed Ireland's Saturday Night, because it also circulated in Dublin, but it continued to be popularly known as the Ulster or the Pink because it was originally printed on coloured paper.

The paper covered a wide range of sports and not just the most popular ones.  On 27 August 1898 the front page had a headline Aquatic Sports and it reported an International Acquatic Festival at the Waterworks in North Belfast.  This included a water polo international between Ireland and Wales and the Ladies Swimming Championship of Ulster.

In 2004 the paper became a tabloid but the it ceased publication on 26 July 2008 and part of Ulster's sporting heritage had gone. 

The Newspaper Library in the Belfast Central Library has a compelete set of the newspaper from 1896 to 2008 and this provides a unique record of 112 years of Ulster sporting history.  The library holds a wide range of Ulster and Irish newspapers, with copies of the NewsLetter back to the 18th century, and it is a marvellous resource for anyone interested in or researching in any aspect of local history.

Lord Coe's visit to Belfast

Here I am standing on the steps at Stormont today with Lord Coe, chair of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, and the Speaker, William Hay MLA, before a briefing on the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics.

Nelson McCausland MLA, Lord Coe & Mervyn Storey MLA

Earlier Seb Coe had visited a school at Dundonald and after the Stormont presentation he came to the Grove Health and Wellbeing Centre in North Belfast for the launch of a project called All Our Saturdays.  This has been prepared by Libraries NI and others, and is based around the resources of the old Ireland's Saturday Night newspaper.  The veteran sports writer Malcolm Brodie, who was for many years the editor of the newspaper, also spoke and recalled the affection so many Ulster people had for the paper.

A Book Around the Irish Sea

David Brett,  a historian of architecture and heritage, has written A Book About the Irish Sea, which is a history of the people who live around the coastline of the Irish Sea.  He argues that 19th century concepts of nations and nationalism can get in the wya of the real story of what has happened around the sea in the last 7,500 years.  He concludes that rather than dividing people, the sea has acted as a focus of exchange and interaction, a bridge rather than a barrier.

King of the Wild Frontier

King of the Wild Frontier is the title of a television programme on BBC1 on Wednesday night at 10.45 and it is about an Ulsterman named James Kirker (1793-1852), who was born in a thatched cottage at Carnaghlis in the parish of Killead, county Antrim, on 2 December 1793.  He was the son of Gilbert Kirker and his wife Rose Anderson, who were both Ulster-Scots.

James emigrated from Ulster to America and arrived in New York at the age of seventeen.  He served as a privateer in the War of 1812 and was captured by the British.

By 1817 he had moved west to St Louis, Missouri, where he entered the retail grocery business.  Five years later he went west as a trapper and in 1824 he entered the Southwest as an illegal trapper in Arizona and New Mexico.

He prospected for gold and silver and by 1828 was operating a mine in southern New Mexico.  There was no firm government in the region and so he was able to engage in illegal trade in guns, ammunition and cloth with the Apaches in exchange for mules and other goods stolen from the Mexicans.

During the 1830s and 1840s he traded illegally with the Indians and at the same time served as a leader of mercenary fighters employed by the authorities in Chihuahua and New Mexico to destroy the hostile Apaches.  At one time he was even known as the King of New Mexico.  Eventually in 1850 James Kirker ended up in California and settled in Contra Costa County, where he died at the end of 1852.

Presenter Gerry Anderson said, 'King of the Wild Frontier was the result of assembling a veritable historical jigsaw of the life of one of the most interesting and controversial Ulster-Scots who ever scalped an Indian for money.'

In his day he was regarded as a man of enterprise and vision but afterwards in 1851 he was portrayed unfavourably by the Ulster writer Thomas Mayne Reid in The Scalp Hunters: or Romantic Adventures in Northern Mexico.  More recently there have been two studies of Kirker, Savage Scene: The Life and Times of James Kirker by William C McGaw (1972) and Borderlander by Ralph Adam Smith (1999).

Alochol abuse

While reading the newspapers last Friday in Hillsborough Castle, I came across a series of reports about alcohol abuse.

The headline in the Daily Telegraph was ‘Middle aged, middle class and most likely to drink every day’. The Daily Express reported on a similar line that ‘Professionals are drinking the working classes under the table’. It had another report on ‘Children who hit the bottle’, which stated that every day 35 children are admitted to hospital after drinking enough alcohol to make them seriously ill. Meanwhile the Belfast Telegraph reported that ‘Alcohol-related deaths double due to binge drinking’. The number of alcohol-related deaths in Britain has more than doubled since the early 1990s, from 4.023 in 1992 to 9,031 in 2008. 

It is clear that the problem of alcohol abuse is increasing in our society and that the effects of alcohol abuse are increasing, with more deaths and more illness. Such is the power and influence of the drinks industry that governments have been reluctant to address the issue in a comprehensive and coherent way but as the evidence builds up so will the pressure for action.

Launch of Burns' Week

The following photographs were taken at the launch of the Ulster-Scots Agency's celebration of Burns Week.

Hazel Campell (acting ceo, Ulster-Scots Agency), Nelson McCausland, John Hunter (chair, Ulster-Scots Agency)