Rachel

[Rachel @rachm40]

@Ryanair @belfastairport struggling to sort assistance for travel on flight RK9605 to @EMA_Airport fractured tabula whilst in Ireland. Could do with a wheelchair to get me round airport then slow walk up the steps. Any help would be appreciated. Have tried websites

[Rachel @rachm40]

@ShelaghFogarty I am prone to infection and go to my pharmacy. They have more time for you. However I did find out they can only prescribe certain antibiotics. Hope bite gets better soon

[Rachel @rachm40]

@TRobinsonNewEra Absolute losers if anyone helps you fund anything!!!!

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

“Quiet anger is good, you can turn quiet anger into a positive, as opposed to rage, which never leads to anything good”

This you, @Nigel_Farage ?

Well this is all a bit awkward, isn’t it?

[Trevor McArdle @McardleTrevor]

Labour is a success:

24 months of continuous growth

6 interest rate cuts

UK stock market outperforming US for 1st time in 13 years

70 000 illegal immigrants deported

40% of Tory hotels closed

456 000 children out of poverty

2 largest increases ever in State Pension

& more

[Chris Hazzard MP @ChrisHazzardSF]

This image of the mass funeral of 165 girls killed by the US / Israel attack on their school should be the front page of every news outlet

If your go-to news source is ignoring it, they aren't reporting the news - they're filtering it

[Sangita Myska @SangitaMyska]

📣 Calling all women raising their voices against the Far Right:

‘A Million Women Rise March’ is happening on 7th March 2026 in London.

Meeting point : Duke Street near Selfridges

Time: 12pm

Please share!

(Other events will be taking place across the U.K. that weekend)

[Rachel @rachm40]

@TRobinsonNewEra Can you tell us where and what these churches are called? TIA

[Duke of Preston @DOPreston]

Not even the top story on the BBC. Yet had this been a deficit, it would’ve been wall to wall coverage.

UK government records £30billion surplus, in January, the best since 1993. https://t.co/zC3jdFhnf6

[Rachel @rachm40]

Stop the cull of Special Needs Assistants - Protect Ireland’s Most Vulnerable Pupils - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/pg4qLMEjWL via @UKChange

[Rachel @rachm40]

@bushontheradio Couldn’t afford perfume so Impulse Gypsy body spray

[Madden & Finucane Solicitors @madden_finucane]

An open letter to Gavin Robinson from Robin Livingstone

Dear Gavin,

Last Wednesday you advised the families of the Bloody Sunday dead to “move on”. You were speaking after the PPS decided not to prosecute members of the Parachute Regiment for perjury. The families should stop, you added, “the endless pursuit of others”.

Although I’ve lost someone close to me in violent and unexpected circumstances, and although I write for a living, I will never if I live to write another billion words come anywhere near to bettering a description of the chest-emptying reality of grief and loss that I heard some years ago. Let me share it with you…

“The only relief I get is when I wake up in the morning. There’s a few seconds when you’re still half-asleep, a few more seconds until you’re properly awake, and a few more seconds while you ease into the new day.

“Then, you remember…”

The woman who spoke those words that I’ve just quoted might like to “move on”, I don’t know. Speaking from my own family’s experience and that of the countless victims I’ve met as I potter towards the end of a long career in journalism, I’d say she would. I don’t know for sure, but why wouldn’t she? Who would choose to start every day with an electric jolt of newly-remembered grief in the heart? Who would choose to sob on hearing a bar of a half-remembered song? Who would choose to be suddenly racked with guilt during a moment of family joy? Who would choose not to open a biscuit tin of old family photos because sorrowful smiles are 99 per cent sorrow and one per cent smile.

Your concept of what the Bloody Sunday families are in pursuit of, with its concomitant imperatives of punishment and incarceration, is not one that I recognise. I can’t and don’t as a bereaved relative speak for every name in Lost Lives, that hefty Book of the Dead that’s still as essential to my desk in work as the notebook, phone and keyboard. I can’t and don’t even speak for every member of my family. But I know that what I feel is common coin in the place where grief lives.

Like the Bloody Sunday family, my family is in pursuit of justice, in our case for Julie. We probably won’t know what justice is until we get it – or until we get something that feels like it. At this point all I know about the British soldier who shot my sister dead at 14 is that he’s Welsh. I don’t know his name or where he lives. I have not the faintest idea of what he looks like. Heck, I don’t even know if he’s alive.

Why don’t I know these things? Simply because the man was never made the subject of the kind of meaningful investigation that would necessitate these things being divulged. What’s more, I don’t particularly want to know his name or where he lives – I don’t know if I have sufficient storage in my emotional hard drive to let him into my life. But if these things are made known as we try to complete the picture of how Julie died and why, then so be it.

What I do know, Gavin, is that I don’t want this anonymous Welshman – if indeed he is still alive – to spend a second in jail, never mind long years. What I do know is that the idea of punishing him has never entered my mind. But it goes deeper than that. The man who fired the plastic bullet is likely my age – probably just a little bit older. If, like me, he has children and grandchildren, I hope he loves and enjoys them as much as I do mine. The idea of pursuing him has not only never occurred to me, it is something that I don’t even understand. He is at this point merely a means to an end; as much a part of the drama of Julie’s death as the armoured vehicle and the plastic bullet gun; with more agency, granted, but not much. If he ends up being interviewed I hope it’s on his sofa in Wales and not in a barracks in Belfast. If he ends up being charged I can’t help that, but if he was convicted I’d step forward to ask the judge that he not be jailed, no doubt while your DUP colleagues queued up to get their pictures taken with him and claim him as one of their own.

It’s no surprise to me that you fail to understand that people can no more move on from doing right by those they have lost than they can move on from breathing. Why would you? What does surprise me is that you think victims of the British state like the Bloody Sunday families are in “pursuit” of human beings – of “others”. That is a venal and catastrophic misunderstanding of the sacred and immutable nature of a commitment made while standing over a coffin.

What they are in pursuit of, Gavin, is not Soldier X, or Y or Z. They are merely old and rusted signposts on the road to their journey’s end. What they are in pursuit of is a time when they can fall asleep at night in the knowledge that they have finally kept a promise they made – spoken or unspoken – to the innocent grey face among the mass cards; to the mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, son or daughter they lost. What they are in pursuit of is a time when they can wake up, and alongside the every-morning shock of that moment of re-remembering, feel for the first time a surge of pride in a promise delivered.

I don’t know what’s happened to you in the last year or so – maybe a little longer. I specify that time scale because December 2024 was when you crossed the city to get a drive-by picture taken on the Falls Road beside some pro-Palestine graffiti. I don’t think I need to remind you about the extent and nature of the wall art that you passed without comment in your East Belfast constituency to get here, so I won’t mention that except to point out that I don’t remember you ever having your picture taken beside any of it. It struck me forcefully then that this didn’t seem like the kind of stunt that a generally mild-mannered bloke like you would pull.

Then last March you again stuck your barrel chest out, thumbed your lapels and issued another stirring message to Loyal Ulster: you were going to instruct your MLAs to “put a marker down” in relation to the Irish language at Grand Central Station. That also didn’t strike me as a Gavin-style move. And in the autumn you got even more in touch with your inner-Jamie by welcoming the Soldier F acquittal on social media not just with the expected comment that it was a “common sense judgement” but with a big old Para flag. And now, in case anyone thought that the Para flag was a slip of your phone thumb, here you are telling the people still trying to get their heads round your Para play to “move on”.

The most recent LucidTalk poll shows your party up 1% to 19%, and the Belfast Telegraph was reliably excited enough to suggest that this statistically negligible figure points suggests your party’s “shift to the right” has won back voters. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a single point to suggest that the DUP is back, whatever the unionist papers say. I’ve no doubt that your Palestine picture, your Irish language way cry and now your “move on” exhortation will bring familiar fish to the top in the pool you’re currently fishing in. But you need to drop your line in deeper waters and you need a bigger catch if you’re to move out of your polling teens. And in that sense, it may be you who most needs to move on.

[Rachel @rachm40]

@sainsburys yet again my potatoes from you are rotten. Delivery yesterday. Just started peeling them and this. Not sure will get any from you again

[Rachel @rachm40]

Disappointed with baking potatoes from you. Just opened them from a delivery yesterday. Other three are fine @sainsburys

[Rachel @rachm40]

@ITV you really need to sort the dubbing out on @emmerdale it really spoils the programme. The delay is massive!

[Irish Unity 🇮🇪🇵🇸 @IrishUnity]

"If anyone on this planet is guilty of terrorism, it's the British state."

- Mo Chara

[Rachel @rachm40]

@SangitaMyska Under God? God would never like your rhetoric @TRobinsonNewEra and please remember ‘your God’ is the same as everyone’s God!

[Sangita Myska @SangitaMyska]

@Jimshelley I’m extremely concerned that Gaza has all but fallen off the news agenda. Israel’s killed 1000 Palestinians since the so-called ceasefire and banned 20 well respected humanitarian orgs. Meanwhile, there’s been flooding and high winds on parts of the territory.

[Rachel @rachm40]

@PetraSchur @KNEECAPCEOL I had to double take that isn’t a real baby is it 🇮🇪 🇵🇸

[Irish Unity 🇮🇪🇵🇸 @IrishUnity]

all children deserve to live