Slugger O'Toole is a weblog started in June 2002 by political analystMick Fealty. It began life as Letter to Slugger O'Toole, focused primarily on news and comment about Northern Ireland. From the beginning it has drawn its readership from a wide spectrum of opinion both inside and outside Northern Ireland. 'Slugger' has developed a reputation as 'the watering hole of the political class in Northern Ireland.' It draws its regular contributors from a wide range of political perspectives including contributors with links to all of the main political parties as well as a number of 'independents'. Research commissioned in the summer of 2008 by Stratagem in association with ComRes revealed that 96% of the members of the Northern Ireland Assembly read the blog "regularly" or "occasionally". The site has a fairly rigorous comments policy in which personal abuse is discouraged and commenters are urged to 'play the ball and not the man' - a refrain that has since been popularised in the wider Irish political discourse. The choice of name was originally a reference to a sockpuppet character invented by Tim Murphy of New York, on an old CNN community called Peace in Northern Ireland. Murphy's "character" was invariably drunk on Bushmills, never listened to reasoned argument, and usually espoused strong loyalist politics, which often caught the unwary or recently arrived off guard. The idea of the Letter was to try to explain the complexities of Northern Ireland, slowly, regularly and in short bite-size pieces over a long, long period of time. Just like trying to explain something complex to a drunk man. The name is originally from the traditional Irish song "The Irish Rover", best known from a version recorded in collaboration by The Pogues and The Dubliners. The relevant line is: There was Slugger O'Toole who was drunk as a rule. However, the Letter part was dropped when the blog moved from its old blogspot venue and radically re-designed and built on a different blog platform.
The Slugger O'Toole Political Awards
In the autumn of 2008, Slugger O'Toole announced a series of political awards. With the stated intention of 'promoting a conversational politics', the awards sought to identify good examples of democratic practice. The inaugural awards were presented in Belfast on 7 October 2008 with comedian Tim McGarry as compere. The 2008 winners were as follows:
