Obituary: Peter Copeland

1 April 2010
Alliance News, Biographies
Kieran McCarthy MLA, Charles Kennedy MP, and Peter Copeland, at Alliance Party election fundraiser, 5 November 2003, Culloden Hotel, Co. Down, Northern Ireland

Alliance News
January-March 2010

Peter Copeland (4 July 1939-17 January 2010)

Peter Copeland from Newtownards was born on 4 July 1939 and died suddenly on 17 January 2010 as a result of a severe stroke.

He attended Regent House School and went on to Queen’s University, Belfast, where he studied economics. After graduating, he joined Hugh Smylie and Sons before he entered the family firm — the Ulster Print Works. Following the change in ownership of the firm he found a new career in personnel management and was a lecturer in that subject at the Belfast Institute of Further and Higher education until his retirement in 1999.

Peter had a quiet but engaging manner but this did not mask his capacity for making many lasting friendships nor his loyalty to his family, church, town or his ever present willingness to help others. These traits were amply demonstrated by his service in the eldership of First Presbyterian Church, Newtownards, and in the interest he took in his visitation duties and by his service as a past treasurer of the church.

In the wider community, Peter was currently vice-chair of the Newtownards Citizens Advice Bureau, the honorary treasurer of Ards Historical Society, and in the past honorary treasurer of the Institute of Personnel Management. He was a founder member of Newtownards Round Table and was an active member of the 41 Club. Peter was a staunch supporter of work in improving community relations and for many years gave much of his time and support to the work of the Alliance Party both locally in the Strangford constituency and at the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Peter was a very capable musician. A fine clarinet player, he regularly played with the Ards Choral and Orchestral Society and in recent years he enjoyed making music with the Playing for Pleasure Orchestra where he was a very popular member.

A keen sportsman, he was a fine squash player but particularly hone in the golfing world. He was an enthusiastic member of the Royal Belfast senior cup team and was proud to have been a member of the team which contested the final of the Irish Senior Cup at Killarney against Royal Dublin. He was honoured by the Royal Belfast Golf Club with the captaincy in 2007.

These few facts give little indication of Peter the person: as devoted family man, member of the church, musician, sportsman and one who sought to serve the community in so many ways.

Peter will be remembered by his family as a devoted husband to Margaret, proud father to David, dear father-in-law to Kate and loving grandfather to his grandson Edward. He will also be remembered by the wider community as a wonderful friend and colleague in so many areas of life. He is and will be sadly missed.

Obituary: Anne and Bill Barbour

1 April 2010
Alliance News, Biographies

Alliance News
January-March 2010

Bill Barbour (1920-2009), Anne Barbour (1926-2009)

Alliance members will have been saddened to learn of the deaths of Anne and Bill Barbour in such tragic circumstances late last year. For many years, Bill Barbour was the heart and soul of the Alliance Party in Fermanagh, having joined the party at the beginning, acting as Association Chair for many years as well as being an election agent and council candidate in his own right.

Bill Barbour was raised in Bangor to parents who he often said had one common interest — spending money. Although the family had been reasonably wealthy on both sides, his mother’s profligacy was such that the family lived in occasional bouts of splendour interspersed with long periods of penury.

Bill’s ferocious intelligence earned him a scholarship to study Classics at Trinity College Dublin. After graduating with First Class Honours, he was recruited into code-breaking at Bletchley Park, but by 1944 felt that the code-breaking was largely over, and volunteered for regular military service, serving in Military Intelligence in Egypt. Bill met Anne when they were both working in code-breaking — in making his first approach to her, apparently Bill bounded down flight after flight of stairs to intercept Anne at the door when she left work one day.

After a short spell teaching in England, Bill took up a post teaching Classics at Portora in 1951, and he and Anne were to spend the rest of their lives in Enniskillen.

Neither of them was short of physical courage; Bill spent three different periods of his life as a volunteer soldier, under two different governments: while a student in Dublin in 1940 as part of the Irish home guard when a German invasion threatened, again in Egypt in the latter years of the Second World War, and finally wangling his way as an overaged Private into the UDR in the early years of the troubles. One story of a Liberal Party campaign in Fermanagh in the 1960s recounts Anne remaining in the car while Bill canvassed, in order to prevent it being physically overturned by a gang of Loyalists.

Bill and Anne joined the Alliance Party almost immediately on its formation, and were stalwarts of the party in Fermanagh for almost 40 years, most recently when they allowed their house to be the office for the Enniskillen by-election in 2009. Bill regularly took a respectable vote in council elections in Enniskillen, but never quite enough to take a seat in Fermanagh’s deeply polarised political environment. Bill also regularly acted as election agent for Alliance candidates in Westminster elections in Fermanagh & South Tyrone, most notable (that physical courage again) for Seamus Close in the by-election after Bobby Sands’ death in 1981.

Bill and Anne were deeply involved in community life in Fermanagh. Anne spent many years as a marriage guidance counsellor and a prison visitor. Bill was involved in the Royal British Legion and the integrated education movement. Both gave long years of service to the Citizens Advice Bureau.

The presence at their memorial service of both Fermanagh’s Sinn Fein MP and DUP Investment Minister showed the degree to which the Barbours were held in high regard across the community. Many lives were touched by Anne and Bill Barbour, and many will miss their human qualities — Anne’s honesty and kindness, Bill’s wonderfully laid back sense of humour and sense of proportion.

Homophobia is shameful blight on society: Long

5 November 2009
Press

Alliance Deputy Leader Naomi Long has congratulated the Rainbow Project on its 15th birthday and said that anti-homophobia week is important in helping combat prejudice.. She attended the event to mark the project’s birthday in the Long Gallery at Stormont.

Naomi Long MLA said: “Homophobia is a sickening and shameful blight on our society. For Northern Ireland to have a shared future we need to combat all forms of intolerance. Prejudice breeds prejudice and we won’t be able to create a respectful and welcoming society if we don’t tackle it in all its forms.

“The Rainbow Project have a strong and proud history and I want to wish all involved a happy 15th birthday. Holding an anti-homophobia week provides an extremely important platform from which we can address and battle prejudice.

“Everyone’s the same irrespective of sexual orientation and no one should ever have to experience intimidation or discrimination. I want to hear all parties say this and prove that Northern Ireland is leaving prejudice in the past.”

ENDS

Climate change: Arguments for and no many against (Ian Butler)

1 September 2009
Alliance News

The debate over global warming is over and every scientist, and even Sammy Wilson, accept that as a concrete reality. The debate about global warming being fought now in the arena of the cause of the temperature rises. The majority of scientists now agree that the greenhouse efect is a man made phenomenon, and that unless we attempt to reverse the effects, all of us including Sammy are in a lot of trouble.

According to the David Suzuki Foundation, which since 1990 has worked to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us, the scientific evidence is compelling: “To gain an understanding of the level of scientific consensus on climate change, a recent study examined every article on climate change published in peer reviewed scientific journals over a 10-year period. Of the 928 articles on climate change the authors found, not one of them disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is happening or is human-induced.”

These findings contrast dramatically with the popular media’s reporting of climate change. One recent study analysed coverage of climate change in four influential American newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal) over a 14-year period. It found that more than half of the articles discussing climate change gave equal weight to the scientifically discredited views of the sceptics.

This discrepancy is largely due to the media’s drive for balance in reporting. Journalists are trained to identify one position on any issue, and then seek out a conflicting position, providing both sides with roughly equal attention. Unfortunately, the “balance” of the different views within the media does not always correspond with the actual prevalence of each view within society, and can result in unintended bias. This has been the case with reporting on climate change, and as a result, many people believe that climate change is still being debated by scientists when in fact it is not.

This is clearly not Sammy Wilson’s view. On the Politics Show 9/2/2009, he claimed that 43% of climate change scientists agreed with his view. Where this study was published he did not say, and he again used that figure on Channel Four News later that day. I have looked for this report on the internet for weeks and cannot find it. However, most climate change sceptics will point to the most well know theory of non man made climate change is that of “solar forcing”, and it appears through his two appearances on the TV that Sammy Wilson supports that view.

Of the climate change sceptics not funded by the oil lobby, the most reputable are Knud Lassen of the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen and his colleague Eigil Friis-Christensen. They did some research in 1991, and found a strong correlation between the length of the solar cycle and temperature changes throughout the northern hemisphere. Initially, the used sunspot and temperature measurements from 1861 to 1989, but later found that climate records dating back four centuries supported their finding. This relationship appeared to account for nearly 80% of the measured temperature changes over this period. Two other scientists, Damon and Laut from the US, however, showed that when the graphs are corrected for filtering errors, the sensational agreement with recent global warming which drew worldwide attention, has totally disappeared. Despite this, the well funded sceptic propaganda is still using this discredited data.

So the reality of the debate that is happening within the worldwide scientific community is that there are no credible theories to support the view that the increase in temperature change since 1980 is anything other than a man made phenomenon. Any attempt to do so is intellectually bogus and needs to be backed up by referral to scientific papers that informed that view (quite difficult as there are none which have not been systematically refuted).

For most people this lead on to a larger question. What would induce the Environment Minister to back a thoroughly discredited view? The answer lies in politics rather than science.

Politics for the Alliance Party is about telling the truth, and trying to persuade people to change. Politics for Sammy Wilson is about getting his name in the paper. The DUP gutlessly stood behind him when the Environment Committee and the Executive wanted to call him to account, hiding behind tribalism. That was a disgrace and it shows the failings in a non-accountable system.

However, I believe that we must keep this pressure on and continue to expose the fallacy of the arguments that climate change deniers continually spout. Not for political gain but so our future generations can look us in the eye without scorn or shame.

Alliance first citizens in Belfast and North Down

1 September 2009
Alliance News

Alliance first citizens in Belfast and North Down
Alliance News
September-October 2009

After a day of high drama at Belfast City Hall and low politics from some other parties, Naomi Long was elected Lord Mayor of Belfast and has hit the ground running as a high-profile Lord Mayor who gets things done. Naomi is the fourth Alliance Lord Mayor of the city, after David Cook, David Alderdice and Tom Ekin, and only the second woman to hold the post in 112 years!

Bangor West councillor Tony Hill was elected Mayor of North Down, thanks to the three-party power-sharing arrangement between Alliance, the UUP and DUP on the council. Following Stephen Farry, Tony is the second Alliance first citizen of North Down in this council term.

The Alliance Party: How it began (Brian Eggins)

1 September 2009
Alliance News

The Alliance Party: How it began
Brian Eggins (Alliance News)
September-October 2009

The Civil Rights Association (CRA) was formed in 1967, protesting about discrimination against Catholics. In November 1968, Prime Minister Terence O’Neill proposed reforms intended to meet their grievances. This led to dissension in the Stormont cabinet, with Bill Craig calling for tough action against the CRA, who themselves were not satisfied with O’Neill’s package. On 9 December, O’Neill appealed to the people in his “Ulster at the crossroads” speech, in which he asked, “What kind of Ulster do you want?”

He called an election in February 1969, but ten unionist MPs were against him, so in April he resigned.

In January 1969, the New Ulster Movement emerged, which aimed to develop cross-community politics with moderate and non-sectarian policies involving both Catholics and Protestants. An active organisation was built with thousands of members drawn from all sections of the community. It issued many influential papers. But its more radical members wanted a new political party.

Denis Loretto recalled, “A sixteen-strong group was formed late in 1969, consisting of some NUM members plus representatives of the ‘Parliamentary Associations’, which had formed around pro-O’Neill candidates in the February 1969 election. Behind the scenes it worked on the logistics of forming a political party from the ground up.”

Then on 16th April 1970, there were two by-elections. David Corkey backed by NUM obtained 25% of the votes in South Antrim. So, as Denis Loretto said, “In a hectic weekend we wrote a declaration of intent signed in 19th April by sixteen people, containing the founding principles of the party plus all the supporting documentation for a press launch on Tuesday, 21st April.”

The first Alliance Party conference was held in 4th July 1970, attended by 90 committee members. An acting Executive Committee was formed, with Oliver Napier and Bob Cooper as joint political chairpersons. In October was the first Alliance Party Council. Further Party Conferences were held in the Ulster Hall, attended by about 2,000 people.

Alliance leaders were soon involved in talks with British Government Ministers. In October 1971, Basil Glass, Oliver Napier and Bob Cooper met with Home Secretary Reginald Maulding, and in January 1972, Glass, Napier and Cooper had talks with Prime Minister Edward Heath.

Early in 1972, Alliance acquired a parliamentary party when the Stormont MPs Phelim O’Neill (Unionist), Bertie McConnell (Independent Unionist), and Tom Gormley (Independent Nationalist) joined the party. In April 1972, seventeen Aldermen and Councillors announced that they would be sitting as Alliance Party members henceforth.

A conference was held at Darlington in September 1972, to examine the options for Northern Ireland government. The new Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) refused to go, and only the Faulkner-led Official Unionists, Alliance, and the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) attended.

Phelim O’Neill (now Alliance Party Leader), Oliver Napier and Bob Cooper regularly met Secretary of State Willie Whitelaw for lunch. They convinced him that PR elections were needed. He pushed it through the cabinet against the advice of others. In November, a Green Paper was published which contained most of the ideas put forward at Darlington. The “Irish Dimension” was clearly going to be the most contentious issue.

In 1973, Stratton Mills, Westminster MP for North Belfast, joined the Alliance Party, but did not stand in the next election in 1974. Robin Baillie, Stormont MP for Newtownabbey, also joined.

A Government White Paper, “Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals”, was published in March, which was supported by Alliance and the NILP, but the SDLP gave only qualified support. The UUP refused to reject it. The DUP and William Craig’s new Vanguard Unionist Party were opposed. However, the proposals went ahead and two Bills were published in May.

Alliance was ready to contest its first elections. Expectations were high as 238 candidates stood in the Local Government elections in May and 35 candidates in the Assembly elections in June, both using the Single Transferable Vote system as proposed by Alliance. Alliance obtained 13.7% in the Local Government elections, winning 63 council seats. In the Assembly elections, the vote was 9.2%, yielding eight Assembly seats. This gave Oliver Napier a seat in the power-sharing Executive (as Minister for Law Reform), together with Bob Cooper (as Minister for Labour Relations).

A conference was then held at Sunningdale about the Irish Dimension. Although a Council of Ireland was agreed, different parties had different perceptions of it. The unionists considered it an advisory body, whereas the SDLP thought it was the route to a united Ireland. Oliver Napier asked, “Do you really want a Council of Ireland? The Council of Ireland hangs by a thread … If you do nothing in the next few weeks, history will judge you and its judgment will be harsh and unforgiving.”

Unsung heroes: David Young

1 September 2009
Alliance News, Biographies

Unsung heroes: David Young
Ian Williamson (Alliance News)
September-October 2009

Those of you who have been in touch with the Alliance office at Parliament Buildings will no doubt have been greeted by the cheery tones of David Young, our Press and Policy Assistant. David combines an encyclopaedic knowledge of parliamentary procedure with an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema! Alliance News caught up with him at Stormont.

Tell us about your background?
I am orginally from Portstewart where I went to Coleraine Inst., but I have been living in student digs in Belfast for the past five years. I went to Queens, where I studied history and politics for three years. Then four days after my graduation ceremony, David Ford rang me up to say that I got this job.

You did work experience with Alliance before you started working for the party. Tell us what made you get involved with the party?
I have always supported Alliance, but it is really two family connections that got me involved in the party. Stephen Farry married my aunt a couple of years ago, so you could say I am continuing the family business. He was the General Secretary for the party during the last Assembly election, so I just asked if he needed any help at headquarters, which he gladly said yes to. The other reason why I got involved in the party is that David Ford and his wife are old friends of my parents, so I have known him most of my life.

What type of work does your daily job entail?
I do pretty much everything and anything under the sun up at Stormont. My main press work entails me writing press releases, organising interviews for the media and arranging photo calls. I also do Stormont related policy work, such as research for MLAs for Assembly debates. I am also in charge of drafting questions to Ministers, as well as looking after Assembly plenary business, such as amendments to motions and legislation.

What has been the most stand out experience of your time working for Alliance?
It was probably last May, when the Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai visited Belfast to attend a Liberal International conference. We were only told the day before the conference that he was coming, so Ian Williamson and myself spent several frantic hours trying to get as many journalists as possible to attend. I heard him speak of the unrest that was happening in his country, which I had only previously seen on the news, so to hear it first hand was something else. I got to shake his hand, which I was very proud to do, and I have massive respect for him as someone who worked to bring peace to their country while their life was under threat.

Do you have any ambitions to become an elected representative?
At the minute I would have to say that I probably would not want to become a politician, but I am only 23 years old, so maybe in 10 or 15 years I might have a go.

I know you are into films — what are your top ten all-time favourites?

  1. The Dark Knight
  2. The Departed
  3. Batman Begins
  4. Capote
  5. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
  6. Blades of Glory
  7. The Matrix
  8. Once Upon a Time in America
  9. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
  10. Nochnoy Dozor

What are your other hobbies?
I enjoy running with my housemates. I have to keep fit if I want to be able to chase after MLAs in Stormont! I also play rugby and cricket with my friends. And nothing beats a good book. As well as watching films, I do a lot of computer gaming on the X-Box 360 and Playstation.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.