The Ulster Covenant

No surrender!

Will marching bans impact Ulster?

The central government in London has banned marches in large parts of the city, reportedly with an eye towards banning marches and demonstrations in other cities. There is also ominous talk about the government shutting down social networking sites as it seeks to clamp down on public discontent. Will this draconian action which puts London at odds with the long tradition of British civil liberties be extended to Ulster? As reported by RT:

The UK government has granted police the right to prevent far-right groups from marching through five London boroughs for 30 days, prompting concerns that a dangerous precedent has been set in terms of police power and freedom of expression.

Scotland Yard says it applied for the ban over fears of violence and disorder planned by the English Defence League earlier this month.

The view of workers’ rights activists on the Home Office ban on marching is quite clear. “It is an attack on the basic democratic rights of working people in this country,” says Patrick O’Regan from the Workers’ Revolutionary Party.

Through September, in six areas of London, anyone marching as thousands of people did last winter is liable to be arrested and fined, or even imprisoned.

The ban was prompted by plans by the anti-Muslim English Defence League to repeat their February protest in Luton by marching through Tower Hamlets, the area with the highest concentration of Muslims in the country.

But instead of banning one march on one day, the Home Office banned all marches in six boroughs for an entire month. Activist Richard Seymour sees a wider motive.

Pat Buchanan discusses Ulster ties

US media personality and former presidential candidate Patrick J Buchanan discusses his Ulster roots in an interview on Al Jazeera. He says that his family came from Scotland "all the way over to the plantation in Northern Ireland... and then they left there... and they arrived in North Carolina... around 1790 to 1820... and they went straight there to Mississippi and they immediately began to agitate for secession."

Dalriada connections old and new

The 17th Century migration of Lowland Scots and Border Reivers to Ulster was preceded by many far more ancients connections across the North Channel. One of the most interesting connections was the Kingdom of Dalriada (also known as Dál Riata) in the late 6th and early 7th century which encompassed roughly what is now Argyll and Bute and Lochaber in Scotland and also County Antrim in Ulster.

The name has been adopted by an Ulster-Scots cultural society which is offering piping classes in Ballymoney.