Did you ever hear the one about the leaders of Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party holding a press conference? It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but yesterday, the UK’s foremost regional separatists came together in Cardiff to pressure Andy Burnham into facilitating the dissolution of the nation. Michelle […]
After a Dublin court awarded Gerry Adams €100,000 (£84,500) in damages, the Belfast Telegraph published a curious column by its crime correspondent, Allison Morris. She argued that a new generation viewed the former Sinn Fein president through a ‘modern lens’ rather than dwelling on the ‘horrors of the past’. Younger members of the jury were, […]
The atmosphere at this week’s British Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC), which involved ministers from London and Dublin, was distinctly chilly. This wasn’t particularly surprising, given that before the meeting even took place, the Republic’s Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, blamed the UK and the Rwanda Act for an influx of asylum seekers to Ireland. The Irish […]
The Stormont Assembly has now completed its first week back at work, amid a giddy, almost celebratory mood in the Parliament Buildings. As the editor of Northern Ireland’s unionist daily newspaper, the News Letter, pointed out in a recent column, it almost felt as if opposition to the Irish Sea border had never existed. Surrounded […]
For people outside Northern Ireland, it takes a crisis to pay attention to what is happening in that corner of the United Kingdom. For too long, those crises tended to be violent, but after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was concluded in 1998, and a measure of uneasy peace was created. The stories now, thankfully, usually […]
It’s fair to say that Northern Ireland’s Parades Commission is not universally loved for its perceived interference in public processions – but it may well be a template for dealing with hate on the streets of Great Britain. Recent weekends have seen tens of thousands of protestors on the streets of London and elsewhere in […]
Throughout the western world, there have been some fairly grim public reactions to the terrorist attacks in Israel. If you are a reasonable person, of course, you were simply shocked and revolted by Hamas slaughtering hundreds of innocent party-goers, dragging vulnerable people from their homes to butcher them in the streets and unleashing a torrent […]
On Sunday morning, the first elements of Rishi Sunak’s ‘Windsor Framework’ Brexit deal came into force. When goods move between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, they must now pass through either a ‘red lane’, that requires the full gamut of customs formalities, or a ‘green lane’, that, in theory at least, involves fewer checks and […]
Despite the Prime Minister’s boast that he has resolved the problems caused by the Northern Ireland Protocol with his Windsor Framework, the reality is that trade between Great Britain and the province is still disrupted, new EU laws are being imposed on NI on a weekly basis, and only this week EU Vice President Maroš […]
The Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland is under increasing pressure to resign, after a High Court judge found that two junior officers were unlawfully disciplined to placate Sinn Fein. It is the latest controversy in a disastrous summer for Simon Byrne and the PSNI. Previously, it emerged that a high profile data […]
Northern Ireland is a small place. It’s even smaller if you’re one of the 6,625 men and women who police its semi-skimmed peace. Keeping law and order while living and working in a place not much bigger than Yorkshire, and still under a severe terrorist threat, is a risky occupation. That risk has been hugely […]
For some time, political opponents have suggested that the Democratic Unionist Party is divided bitterly about its strategy for opposing the Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework. They imply that many of the DUP’s Stormont MLAs and its leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, are keen to end the boycott of power-sharing in the autumn; while a […]
Under Rishi Sunak’s leadership, the Conservative Party has tried hard to disguise and contain a civil war among its MPs and members. Its efforts have been partly successful, but it is impossible to keep these increasingly messy skirmishes out of public view entirely. The latest dispute to hit the media involved the unglamorous subject of […]
For devolution to work it must be based on the consent of both unionists and nationalists and on respect for all aspects of the Belfast Agreement, which includes relations with the rest of the UK as well as with the Irish Republic. Every proposed solution so far has elevated an open border between Northern Ireland […]
Earlier this month, my organisation, the Counter Extremism Project put on an event to examine how to maintain the momentum of our national counter-radicalisation security strategy ‘Prevent’. The event was a response to an independent government review, which found this strand of our counter-terrorism plan severely wanting. It may surprise readers to know that Prevent […]
Last Thursday’s Northern Ireland local government election has prompted a bout of introspection from pro-Union parties in the province. There was fresh misery, too, for the SDLP, as the moderate nationalist party lost 20 seats after a torrid few years. While it was possible, in some respects, to qualify the result, it was impossible to […]
It’s now a week and a half since the Government published the ‘Windsor Framework’; a deal that it claimed restored Northern Ireland’s ‘full and unfettered’ access to the UK internal market. The province’s biggest unionist party, the DUP, promised to apply ‘seven tests’ to this agreement. They would gauge, among other things, whether it removed […]
The comic Ed Byrne once memorably deconstructed Alanis Morrissette’s song Ironic. He noted that, while the lyric was supposed to provide a series of examples of irony, it actually just recounted unfortunate events, none of which was ironic at all. The only ironic thing about the song, he concluded, was that its writer didn’t know […]
Rishi Sunak believes he can restore order to the Conservative Party and hold together an exceptionally fractious coalition of Tory MPs. There is an issue, though, that his predecessors failed to resolve that could fatally destabilise his premiership almost immediately. Against a backdrop of economic crisis and the war in Ukraine, he may not think […]
Throughout the Northern Ireland Troubles, a large and sometimes overlooked majority of both unionists and nationalists remained firmly opposed to paramilitary violence. Even while some of the most emotive events of the 1970s and 1980s took place in Ulster, people always believed that peaceful routes were available to pursue their political objectives. At the end […]
Yesterday, the whole country waited expectantly to learn whether Boris Johnson would accept that his troubled premiership had finally come to an end. Now that he has decided to resign, no region is likely to be affected more profoundly than Northern Ireland. Right at the start of his time in office, in late 2019, the […]
Well, it has already got further than I and many other unionists probably feared it might. Last night, the bill to unilaterally amend the Northern Ireland Protocol passed its second reading in the House of Commons. It was by no means certain to get this far. At one point, Liz Truss seemed to be suggesting […]
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