Robin Glendinning

Last updated

Robert James Glendinning
Born (1938-09-01) 1 September 1938 (age 83)
Belfast, Northern Ireland
OccupationPlaywright
NationalityIrish
Alma materCampbell College
Trinity College Dublin

Robert James Glendinning (born 1 September 1938), known as Robin Glendinning, is a Northern Irish playwright and former politician.

Born in Belfast, the brother of Will Glendinning, [1] Robin grew up in County Armagh and studied at Rockport School, Campbell College and Trinity College Dublin. [2] [3] He taught English and history at Omagh Academy for eleven years. [2] [3]

Glendinning was a founder of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, and left teaching in 1973 to become its full-time political organiser. [2] [3] He stood for the party in Mid Ulster at the 1973 Northern Ireland Assembly election and Armagh at the February 1974 general election, but missed election on both occasions. [3] [4] [5]

In 1976, Glendinning returned to teaching, working at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, [3] although he remained politically active, campaigning for the Alliance Party into the 1980s, [1] and presenting a submission to the New Ireland Forum in 1983. [6] He also began writing short stories, some of which were published in the Irish Times , as a result of which he won the Hennessey Award. [1] Following this, he switched to write plays, several of which were produced for BBC Television and Radio. These early works included The Artist, Condemning Violence, Culture Vultures, Faith, Mumbo Jumbo and Stuffing It. [1] [3] In 1991, his Donny Boy won "Best New Play" at the inaugural TMA Awards, [7] and this success inspired him to again quit teaching, this time to become a full-time writer. [3] [8]

Related Research Articles

The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI), or simply Alliance, is a liberal and centrist political party in Northern Ireland. It is Northern Ireland's fifth-largest party, currently holding seven seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly, but has made recent breakthroughs to place third in first preference votes in the 2019 European Parliament election and third highest-polling regionally at the 2019 UK general election. The party won one of the three Northern Ireland seats in the European Parliament, and one seat, North Down, in the House of Commons, the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Arthur Brian Deane Faulkner, Baron Faulkner of Downpatrick,, was the sixth and last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, from March 1971 until his resignation in March 1972. He was also the chief executive of the short-lived Northern Ireland Executive during the first half of 1974.

William McCrea, Baron McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown

Robert Thomas William McCrea, Baron McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown is a retired Free Presbyterian minister from Northern Ireland. A former Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) politician, he represented South Antrim and Mid Ulster as their Member of Parliament (MP), representing Mid Ulster from 1983 to 1997; then South Antrim between 2000 to 2001, and then again from 2005 to 2015.

Jim Nicholson (Northern Ireland politician) British politician (born 1945)

James Frederick Nicholson is a Northern Irish Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician, who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Northern Ireland from 1989 to 2019.

South Antrim (UK Parliament constituency) Parliamentary constituency in the United Kingdom, 1950 onwards

South Antrim is a parliamentary constituency in the United Kingdom House of Commons. The current MP is Paul Girvan of the Democratic Unionist Party.

Northern Ireland Labour Party Political party in Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) was a political party in Northern Ireland which operated from 1924 until 1987.

Oliver Napier

Sir Oliver Napier was the first leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. In 1974 he served as the first and only Legal Minister and head of the Office of Legal Reform in the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive set up by the Sunningdale Agreement.

Seán Neeson is a politician in Northern Ireland who served as leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland between 1998 and 2001.

The August 1981 Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election was the second by-election in the same year, held in Fermanagh and South Tyrone on 20 August 1981. It was seen by many as a rerun of the earlier contest in April. The by-election was caused by the death of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.

The Ulster Independence Movement was an Ulster nationalist political party founded on 17 November 1988. The group emerged from the Ulster Clubs, after a series of 15 public meetings across Northern Ireland. Led by Hugh Ross, a Presbyterian minister from Dungannon, County Tyrone, the UIC sought to end what it saw as the tyranny of rule from London and instead set up an independent Northern Ireland.

Hugh Smyth

Hugh Smyth, OBE was a Northern Irish politician who was leader of the Progressive Unionist Party. He was a former Lord Mayor of Belfast as well as the longest serving member of Belfast City Council, having represented the Upper Shankill Road area since 1973. Smyth was awarded the Order of the British Empire in the 1996 New Year's Honours list.

Denis Haughey is a former Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland.

Will Glendinning is a former politician in Northern Ireland. He was born in Portadown, the brother of Robin, and a great-grandchild of Robert Glendinning.

Tom French (politician) Northern Irish politician (born 1934)

Tom French is a former president of the Workers' Party of Ireland and former member of Craigavon Borough Council.

David Calvert is a Unionist politician in Northern Ireland. He worked as a director of a family shirt manufacturing company. He was a founder member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in County Armagh.

2013 Mid Ulster by-election

A by-election for the UK House of Commons constituency of Mid Ulster in Northern Ireland was held on 7 March 2013. The election was triggered by the resignation of Martin McGuinness, who had been elected to the seat in 1997 as the Sinn Féin candidate. The election was won by Francie Molloy, also of Sinn Féin.

Thomas D. Carson was a unionist politician in Northern Ireland.

Aidan J. Larkin is a former Irish nationalist politician.

Peter Emerson is a political activist in Northern Ireland.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 John Stanley Bull, British and Irish dramatists since World War II, pp.73–74
  2. 1 2 3 Gordon Lucy and Elaine MacClure, Cool Britannia?, p.66
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 John Peacock, Best Radio Plays of 1991, p.1
  4. ↑ "Mid Ulster 1973–1982", Northern Ireland Elections
  5. ↑ "Armagh 1973–1983", Northern Ireland Elections
  6. ↑ "New Ireland Forum Report, 2 May 1984", CAIN Web Service
  7. ↑ "Previous Winners (1991–2004)", UK Theatre
  8. ↑ Some of his later radio dramatizations of real events (the British General Strike, 1926, the Dunkirk Evacuation, 1940, War in the Falklands, 1982) are listed at
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.