Whatever it is you care about, think before you tweet: Is this too good to be true? Do I have any way of checking this for myself?
Padraig Reidy: How your well-meaning retweet can do more harm than good
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CATEGORY: United Kingdom
Padraig Reidy: When truth is stranger than fiction
Three years ago this week, David Cameron announced that a public inquiry into phone hacking would be set up, under the guidance of Lord Justice Leveson. It may be difficult to imagine now, but this was generally seen as a positive step.
A message for politicians: Don’t complain when reporters report
The narrative of evil newspaper versus innocent, naive, poor little politician is self-pitying and self-defeating, writes Padraig Reidy
Egypt’s Al Jazeera verdict: London journalists stand together in silent protest
The usually bustling entrance of the New Broadcasting House was silent and still for one minute this morning in protest at the sentencing of three Al Jazeera journalists to seven years in Egyptian prison
Padraig Reidy: Public outrage — from radio plays to Twitter mobs
In over 80 years, the mechanisms of public outrage have changed very little.
Padraig Reidy: Jeremy Paxman, poetry Stalin
Poets, we all agree, are terribly misunderstood and undervalued. If it were not for poets, how would we know what things were like other things. How would we live! How would we love! How would we die!
The importance of a loyalist theatre
For the last two decades the stubborn, powerful myth that the creative arts and the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland do not go together has been regularly proclaimed, Connal Parr writes
Padraig Reidy: Free speech at armageddon
Belfast’s Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle is one of those things that makes a soft Southern Irish atheist Catholic like me think I’ll never truly understand Northern Ireland.
Trigger warnings: A sad lack of faith in the power of art
The message and tone of the “trigger warning” suggests a sad lack of faith in the power of art, and, by extension, humanity. We’re capable of better, writes Padraig Reidy
Padraig Reidy: Why does everyone want to be censored?
There is absolutely no one engaged in modern public life at any level at all who has not complained that they’ve been silenced, denied a platform, bullied into submission by a cruel cabal of agents of reaction or “the liberal agenda”, take your pick.
Revealed: The British exports that crush free expression
The Arab Spring has not stopped Britain from helping crush free expression by selling crowd control ammunition to authoritarian states including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Alex Stevenson reports
Northern Ireland: Plays sorting through the fallout from Troubles
Julia Farrington travelled to Northern Ireland to participate in the 2014 Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast. While there she saw four plays that deal with the Troubles as Gerry Adams, head of Sinn FĂ©in, was questioned by police
