About Me

Tim McKane

Political and social ramblings…

About

I remember watching Panorama from the age of ten. That was the year that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and Charles Wheeler was reporting on the election, the anti-war movement, and civil rights. Then we got our own civil rights marches and the accompanying civil unrest. I was at my Auntie Noelle’s in Larne in 1969 when she told me that people had been killed in Belfast the night before. I was in a small unionist house, with all the attributes of the middle-class Malone Road family. My friends had been from both religions, but the Troubles put paid to that. Going to school in Belfast City centre from ’69-’76 was living in interesting times, to quote Mao. I had nothing to think or say of my own, following in the family traditions that mark NI politics. Dad flirted with Alliance early on but was never really political. Then I went to Queens and was dealt a dose of reality. The world was not as I had thought, and I had to start thinking for myself. Being of an age, I went hard left, in the context of living and breathing the air of the middle classes. But I got to know people from across this place, in Fermanagh, Derry, Andersonstown and the Ardoyne, as well as the Shankill and East Belfast.

And as a result, I changed my opinions, and changed them again, and then, again. I studied History and Politics and still do. Napoleon is a hero, the history of film and the media, and still a deep interest in US politics. UK politics was sparked with the arrival of Thatcher. Local politics has been the bread and butter of our lives. So I ramble, think, come up with ideas, write them put them out to provoke some debates and think some more.