‘Safeguarding the Union’ Event

Together UK Foundation arranged a ‘Safeguarding the Union’ event in the Emeleus Lecture Theatre, Queen’s University, Belfast on the evening of Thursday 28th November.

I am indebted to Lord Bew who kindly flew back from his work in the House of Lords to introduce the lectures of Lee Reynolds and Professor Peter Shirlow to a very demographically mixed audience of over 140+ people.

Reynolds has his own audience following from his large X (Twitter) following for stats and data on NI and RoI election outcomes and I found it interesting that Professor Shirlow had gone out of his way to personally invite contacts from a predominately ‘Nationalist leaning’ background as well as members of LGBT groups (those Reynolds would describe as being in the ‘Third Tribe’).

Once Reynolds began, the audience was immediately captivated.

The overriding power of these two lectures are the passionate delivery skills and that they are both based purely on facts, of which the source and data are all in the public domain. These facts are the inconvenient truths that are rarely given daylight by the media, but once illuminated, make for uncomfortable listening to those of a more fact free, tone deaf, romantic persuasion.

Such is the impact and education of the lectures, I intend to bring Reynolds and Shirlow to Westminster in the New Year for a presentation to MP’s and Peers, in the hope that the mindset and language of our elected representatives might be amended to a more positive attitude towards Northern Ireland and the political relationship is given a more confident leaning.

Andrew Grocock, CEO of Together UK Foundation