Northern Slant
Northern Slant was an independent, not-for-profit online media organisation covering politics and current affairs in Northern Ireland, based in Belfast. It published analysis, commentary and interviews on Northern Ireland politics and society, presenting work from contributors of diverse backgrounds and political perspectives. Its own description of its mission was that it existed to encourage constructive change in Northern Irish political and civic discourse. At its most active, between the late 2010s and the early 2020s, it organised its content under headings including Politics, Community and Lifestyle, ran a regular interview series and podcast called Northern Slant Hosts, and published a weekly digest of the political week in five points. A former contributor has since described the platform as defunct, and its podcast series ended in January 2022.
Purpose: a different kind of political conversation
Northern Slant's founding idea responded to a familiar criticism of public debate in Northern Ireland: that political discussion was dominated by the constitutional question and by the positions of the traditional parties, leaving less room for policy, evidence and voices from outside party politics. Its stated remedy was constructive and pluralist. It showcased content from creators of diverse backgrounds and political perspectives, and it sought changes in the quality of political and civic discourse rather than the victory of one tradition over another. That positioning set it apart both from party-aligned commentary and from conventional news reporting: it was a commentary platform, publishing argument, analysis and long-form interviews, rather than a breaking-news service.
The not-for-profit, independent character of the organisation was central to how it presented itself. It had no proprietor's political line to advance and no print edition to sell; its currency was the range and quality of its contributors, who included academics, journalists, think-tank researchers, artists and people working in peacebuilding and community development.
Politics coverage and the political week
Politics was the core of the site. Its Northern Ireland politics archive ran to many pages of articles addressing the Assembly and Executive, Westminster policy towards Northern Ireland, elections, Brexit and its consequences for the region, and the frozen and restored phases of the peace process. A recurring feature, The Political Week in 5 Points, summarised the week's developments in a short, accessible digest, giving regular readers a way to follow a political system in which progress was often incremental and procedural. Other pieces took a longer view: whether unionism's right wing had a political future, how Brexit arguments were being framed, and what Northern Ireland could learn from, or teach, politics elsewhere, including one comparison with the American state of Alabama that asked whether there was more hope for Alabama than for Northern Ireland.
Because the site published through the Brexit years and the long suspension and restoration of devolved government, its archive captured a distinctive period in Northern Ireland's history, when the region's constitutional position, its trading arrangements and the functioning of its institutions were all in question at once, and when independent commentary had an unusually important role in explaining developments to readers inside and outside Northern Ireland.
Northern Slant Hosts: interviews and podcast
The site's best-documented strand was Northern Slant Hosts, an interview series with people in public life about key issues affecting Northern Ireland, distributed in video and as a podcast on platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. The podcast began in November 2019 and ran to fifteen episodes, the last released on 18 January 2022. Episodes were presented principally by Roger Greer, with Jenny McCullough among the other interviewers. Guests were drawn from politics, policy and the arts rather than from celebrity culture.
Recorded episodes illustrate the range. Greer interviewed Matthew O'Toole, the SDLP member of the Legislative Assembly for South Belfast and a former journalist and Treasury and Downing Street official, about his party's Make Change Programme and proposals to attract talent into the Northern Ireland Civil Service. He spoke to Ann Watt, director of the Belfast-based independent think tank Pivotal, about the Pivotal Tracker report assessing the Executive's performance against its priorities across health, education, climate change, the economy and infrastructure, and to Pivotal's research manager Ben Harper about educational migration, the question of whether young people should stay in Northern Ireland or leave. Conor Kelly of the Constitution Unit at University College London discussed research on unification referendums on the island of Ireland. Former Ulster Unionist deputy leader John McCallister and special adviser Peter Cardwell were among the other political interviewees, while poet and playwright Nandi Jola spoke about arts and culture during the pandemic, in an interview that showed the series' willingness to treat cultural life as part of civic discourse.
Contributors and community of writers
Northern Slant's content came from a wide contributor base rather than a staff newsroom. Its author pages recorded, among many others, Allan Leonard, an editor, writer and photographer who co-founded Shared Future News, which reports on peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, and whose background included senior roles in charities promoting peace and reconciliation, a bachelor's degree in international relations from Boston University and a master's degree in Irish politics from University College Dublin. Contributors wrote from professional knowledge: academics about their research, think-tank staff about their reports, and journalists about the places and subjects they knew.
Journalist and author Vicky Cosstick contributed from 2018 onwards, writing on the legacy of the Troubles, including British government policy on legacy cases, the decision not to hold an inquiry into the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, the Ballymurphy inquest findings, and government proposals to end Troubles-related prosecutions and investigations. She also interviewed Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow about reporting on Northern Ireland, wrote about the then Prince Charles's contribution to the peace process, and reviewed contemporary art exhibitions in Donegal and Derry. Her 2019 collection of essays on aspects of the legacy of the Troubles, featuring artwork by Rita Duffy, was published in association with Northern Slant, an example of the platform extending its work into book publishing.
Legacy, peacebuilding and divided society
The legacy of the Troubles and the realities of a divided society were recurring subjects. Northern Slant published work on peace walls and interfaces between Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods in Belfast, on parades and protests, and on how social media was changing a society in which opposing groups had historically used new communication tools to address their own supporters rather than each other. An interview with Paul Reilly, then a senior lecturer in social media and digital society at the University of Sheffield, explored his research into loyalist and republican websites after the Good Friday Agreement, and his book Digital Contention in a Divided Society, examining social media, parades and protests in Northern Ireland. Such pieces gave the site an academic depth unusual among small commentary platforms, while keeping the focus on questions, reconciliation, memory and division, that remained live in everyday politics.
Events and public engagement
Northern Slant's work extended beyond its website. During the 2021 Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics, it presented a panel discussion on the future of Northern Ireland's people, asking how, in a world reshaped by Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic and technological change, the region could persuade its young people to stay and attract newcomers instead of serving as a stepping stone to careers elsewhere. The panel brought together a national political journalist, a representative of Ulster University and Northern Slant itself, the chief executive of a major recruitment company and the chair of the Federation of Small Businesses in Northern Ireland, and a representative of the Rural Community Network. The event captured the platform's method: convening people from politics, business, academia and civil society around a policy question, and treating emigration and economic opportunity as civic issues, not merely personal choices.
Community, lifestyle and culture
Although politics dominated, the site's structure included Community and Lifestyle sections, reflecting its view that civic discourse is broader than party politics. Arts interviews, festival coverage, book discussions and writing on everyday life in Northern Ireland appeared alongside constitutional analysis. This breadth was consistent with its mission: a healthier public conversation in Northern Ireland would need to encompass culture, identity and community experience as well as elections and institutions, and a platform that published a poet and a constitutional scholar in the same series was practising the pluralism it advocated.
Closure and record
Northern Slant's podcast ended in January 2022, and the platform subsequently ceased active publication; Vicky Cosstick, writing about her Northern Ireland work, described Northern Slant as a commentary platform that was by then sadly defunct, and republished her articles for it on her own website. The site itself remained accessible as an archive at northernslant.org, preserving hundreds of articles and interviews from a turbulent period in Northern Ireland's politics, spanning the Brexit negotiations, the restoration of the Executive, the coronavirus pandemic and the renewed debate about the region's constitutional future.
As a directory entry, Northern Slant represents a type of online outlet that conventional categories fit awkwardly: not a newspaper, not a broadcaster and not a campaign, but an independent, volunteer-driven commentary institution that used articles, interviews, podcasts, events and a book to pursue a single aim, a more constructive public conversation in Northern Ireland. Its record demonstrates both the possibilities of that model, low costs, expert contributors and genuine pluralism, and its fragility, since platforms sustained by goodwill rarely outlast the energy of the small teams behind them.
