A Free Speech Union Speakeasy, in association with the Battle of Ideas Festival.
TIME: Doors and bar open 6.30pm. Panel with Q & A, 7pm until 8.30pm, followed by social. Ends 10pm.
VENUE: Drawing Office One and Pavilion Bar, Titanic Hotel, 8 Queens Road, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT3 9DT.
TICKETS: £6 for FSU members, £10 for non-members, £3 for students. Buy online via Eventbrite.
Join us for the Free Speech Union’s first Northern Ireland Speakeasy. On Friday 26 January, FSU be hosting a stellar panel to consider The State of Free Speech in Northern Ireland, covering everything from hate speech to press freedom, from the attempted silencing of women’s rights campaigners to digital censorship. Organised in association with the Battle of Ideas festival, the evening is your chance to hear from great speakers, to get your voice heard on free speech issues and to meet other free speech enthusiasts.
SPEAKERS
Toby Young general secretary of the Free Speech Union.
Stella O’Malley psychotherapist and writer.
David Quinn journalist and commentator, founder of The Iona Institute.
Jeffrey Dudgeon politician, campaigner and author.
Ella Whelan journalist and author, co-convenor the Battle of Ideas festival.
Toby Young is the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, a non-partisan, mass membership public interest body that stands up for the speech rights of its members. He co-founded the West London Free School and is the author of four books, the best known of which is How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. He is an associate editor of the Spectator, where he’s written a weekly column since 1998. He also runs a blog called DailySceptic.org that has received over 40 million page views.
Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist, writer, public speaker and parent, with many years’ experience working as a mental health professional. She has written several books, including Cotton Wool Kids, Bully-Proof Kids, Fragile and What Your Teen is Trying To Tell You and co-authored the recent When Kids Say They’re Trans. Born in Dublin, Stella now lives in Co. Offaly with her husband and two children where she runs her private clinical practice.
David Quinn has been a newspaper columnist in Ireland since 1994. Currently he writes a weekly column the Sunday Independent. His column has previously appeared in the Sunday Times (Ireland), the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post. He frequently appears on radio and television programmes and has contributed to numerous publications overseas, including the Spectator and UnHerd. He has appeared on Free Speech Nation with Andrew Doyle discussing free speech issues in the Republic of Ireland. He is founder and CEO of The Iona Institute.
Jeffrey Dudgeon has held office in the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA) since its foundation in 1975 and has led landmark campaigns for gay rights and personal freedom. He was awarded an MBE in the 2012 Honours List for ‘services to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Northern Ireland’. Between 2014 and 2019 he served as an Ulster Unionist Councillor to Belfast City Council and was chair of the council’s Diversity Working Group. He has written books on Roger Casement (2002) and H. Montgomery Hyde (2018).
Ella Whelan is a journalist and author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism. She is the co-convenor of the Battle of Ideas festival, a free-speech public forum organised by the Academy of Ideas. She is also the commissioning editor of Letters on Liberty, a radical pamphleteering campaign for the twenty-first century. Ella is a columnist for spiked and writes for a variety of newspapers and regularly appears on TV and radio.
