One issue which illustrates perfectly the inability or unwillingness of unionist politicians to understand their Irish nationalist neighbours is that of the ongoing whingefest surrounding the ability of Irish citizens born in the Six Counties to represent the Republic of Ireland international soccer team.

Having stoked the flames of this fire for several years now, the DUP have decided that now is the time to call for inter-governmental talks between the British and Irish governments with the sole objective of denying northerners the right to represent the Republic of Ireland.

Why they expect governments to take time out from other pressing engagements to entertain such a notion is perplexing in its own right. But exactly why they’d expect their nationalist partners in the Executive- or indeed Irish government in Dublin- to engage in such talks is beyond comprehension.

Already Sinn Fein have replied in kind, calling for an all-Ireland team to replace the two international sides.

The latest bout of whining has been sparked by the on-field success of Derry-born James McClean, who is expected to be called into Giovanni Trapattoni’s squad on Friday and thereby make his first appearance in the Republic’s squad (the same individual has been the target of some fairly extreme politically motivated and personal abuse via his Twitter account in recent days from Northern Ireland ‘fans.’)

Having spent generations decrying the fact that nationalist Ireland refused to accept and respect their British identity, what is it that makes unionists so incapable of accepting and respecting the all-Ireland identity of their nationalist neighbours?

As Crooked Timber’s Maria Farrell says, “words to live by”, people.  In today’s Irishman’s Diary, Frank McNally offers a “history of Ireland in 100 excuses”.

78. We made those pre-election promises in good faith. It was only in government we realised how bad the country’s finances were.

79. It was a complex but legitimate business arrangement.

80. The money was only resting in my account.

81. You try running three houses on my salary and see how you get on.

82. I regarded it as a loan.

83. I had no bank account at that time.

84. I won it on the horses.

85. But the tent is only a small part of our annual fund-raising operation.

86. The banks were throwing money at us.

87. We were hit by a perfect storm.

88. Don’t blame me – I was only the taoiseach.

Heh. [Yes, but what about the 800 years of oppression!? - Ed]  Numbers 56 & 3, respectively.  Don’t forget to read the whole thing.

Audio – UU Peace Walls 01 – Dr Jonny Byrne: http://mrulster.podomatic.com/player/web/2012-02-08T08_59_57-08_00

At a seminar hosted by the Institute for Research in Social Sciences and the Inter-Institute Peace and Conflict Cluster, Dr Jonny Byrne of the University of Ulster presented his findings of three years of research in regards to public policy on peace walls (interface barriers) in Belfast. His presentation drew upon his 100,000 word PhD thesis and 40 interviews.

In response to intercommunity violence, formal interface barriers were first erected in 1969. There are now 99 identified barriers in Belfast. Dr Byrne noted local politicians and community representatives got involved in the process since 1995. Also, since 2010 primary responsibility for policy in this regard lies with the Northern Ireland Executive.

Back in 1971, an official Working Group on Peace Walls expressed its concern at the erection of interface barriers, that if they remained then the “abnormal becomes the normal”.

Yet the barriers were not going to come down, and policy changed to one of pragmaticism, namely how best to create and manage them. Dr Bryne remarked that current policy, 40 years later, uses the same language.

His main thesis is that these physical barriers are not going to disappear on their own, so policy will need to be created and decisions made to bring them down.

This, of course, depends upon whether you deem peace walls as a problem, or a condition to be endured.

He said that there is a danger of the establishment of a hierarchy of segregation, as Loyalist and Republican communities are influenced by different factors in the discussion of how to progress this issue. To simplify, both start with a desire to improve community safety. But Loyalists express a concern of encroachment, with Republicans demanding more physical space to accommodate an expanding population:

One can see how this contrasting perspective reflects wider Unionist-Nationalist political dynamics — one community hesitant to give what they would see as too much too soon to another community that is ever more confident with their agenda and demands.

And this was inferred in Dr Byrne’s statement, “Segregation is more than the peace walls.”

One slide showed the variety of agencies involved in peace wall policy (sic). Dr Byrne described the paradox of the roles of the Northern Ireland Executive and local communities, whereby local projects improve community relations and add to good practice, but local participants and community leaders look to the Northern Ireland Executive to provide a framework and guidance/leadership for further progress. Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Executive’s current position is that further progress will be determined by the local communities, not as targeted or seen to be driven by the Executive itself.

Dr Byrne concluded that the way forward was for a concurrent top-down and bottom-up approach. For Belfast, his specific recommendation was that Belfast City Council be the primary agent to coordinate the rest. This elicited a response later from David Robinson (Good Relations Officer, Belfast City Council), who explained that its Good Relations Committee unanimously endorsed its municipal investment strategy that sets out a vision with codified aim of removing all interface barriers in Belfast.

Dr Byrne suggested that having dealt with interface barriers for over 40 years, Belfast is in a good position to work with other cities/areas that have them, some only joining this club relatively recently. In the subsequent Q&A session, I described my organisation’s work for the Forum for Cities in Transition, which includes Nicosia, one of the cities listed on his slide.

I was intrigued by the paradox of roles that Dr Byrne described, and by a previous questioner who talked about diminishing returns of community based projects.

I suggested that Nicosia’s experience — who’s had its wall for just five years less than our first — may be useful. There, in the 1980s, the respective mayors of the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot sections of the city came together to deal with practical matters, namely cross-border water treatement. Success here led to other, ever more ambitious projects. Sufficient trust was established and a Nicosia Master Plan was created, which has as its aim the unification of the city. The mayors knew this plan would take decades to realise, but it is the plan that is being implemented today.

I am encouraged by Belfast City Council’s vision and Good Relations work, mainly because the structural composition of its Good Relations Committee is the right one — a combination of elected councillors and representatives from the voluntary, community, and minority ethnic group sectors.

This should be replicated at the Northern Ireland Assembly, with non-MLAs incorporated into a committee’s work (or if that’s not allowed, into an ad hoc working group).

I recall this approach during the discussions of establishing what became the Strategic Investment Board, when an Assembly committee recommended the inclusion of the voluntary and community sectors, on a basis that these sectors would be the delivery agents for aspects of its decisions. In the subsequent suspension of the Assembly, direct rule Minister Ian Pearson swiftly quashed this thought (and also told me so in a June 2003 meeting!).

This multi-agency approach is growing in popularity in community development work (e.g. Scotland; UU course on Civic Leadership and Community Development (declaration of interest)). Whereas many (if not most) organisations treat Government Department consultation exercises with cyncism, projects that include various sectoral interests encourage trust. Whether this develops to a greater, Nicosia-style master plan is another matter.

Indeed, even Nicosia isn’t immune to wider Cypriot politics, especially vis-a-vis Turkey and the European Union. Nicosia’s municipal politicians know they aren’t going to solve the Cyprus Question. Yet they all work in preparation for those higher developments.

So, the paradox remains between the local and the national. But at least leadership at the municipal level, at a cross-sectoral basis, demonstrates a best practice model for progress.

Audio – UU Peace Walls  02 – Q&A: http://mrulster.podomatic.com/player/web/2012-02-08T09_36_18-08_00

Original posting: http://mrulster.org/belfast-peace-walls-a-paradox-of-leadership

Since the closure of the Laganside Corporation on 31 March 2007, the Department for Social Development has given out grants for events and community activities in the Laganside area of Belfast. The area includes the Cathedral Quarter as well as stretching our towards York Street, Corporation Street, the Sydenham bypass (but not including Titanic Quarter), Sirocco, Lanyon Place, St George’s Market, the Markets, the Gasworks and the banks of the Lagan.

Back in 2007, the then minister Margaret Ritchie pointed to the Laganside Events Grant Scheme making “an important contribution in terms of encouraging the arts, cultural and community based events in the Laganside area” and said that “these events play a key role in sustaining life and vitality within this area and indeed Belfast City Centre”.

Last week, DSD informed organisations that normally apply for and benefit from the Laganside Events Grant that it would not be reopened for 2012/13, giving them just a few month’s notice to seek alternative funding sources for events being planned for the spring and summer. The smaller Laganside Community Activity Grant will continue.

In the letter, the department explains that “the decision to withdraw the scheme is due to pressures on the Department’s budget within the current difficulty funding climate for public expenditure”.

In the last week, DSD has issued a large number of press releases and announcements about other funding streams and development, but until now, there has until now been no public comment about the Laganside Events grant.

Asked for a statement, a DSD spokesperson said:

Due to funding pressures within the Department’s budget we have had to close the Laganside Events Grant from 31 March 2012. We have notified those organisations which usually apply for this grant in order to provide time for them to identify other potential funders for events planned for later this year.

The Department remains committed to promoting the Laganside area and has earmarked £530,000 to support the initial operations of the new MAC when it opens in April 2012. We also have a funding commitment of £100,000 to support the work of the Cathedral Quarter Steering Group.

The Department will also continue to accept applications for the Laganside Community Activity Grant during the 2012/13 financial year. This grant enables local communities to use the amenities in the area.

Over the weekend, I asked the DSD Press Office for a list of organisations that benefited from the Laganside funds along with the value of the grants awarded, as well as the total value of the Laganside grants over the last years.

This information was not made available and is being treated as an FOI!

The clunky Government Funding Database only seems to hold details of a single grant for the 2011/12 Laganside Events: the 13th Open House Festival received £9,000. But there must be more.

Many organisations – including Ethnic minority festivals, CAQF, Festival of Fools, Culture Night and Belfast Pride – have benefited over the years from funding to help organise well-attended events in this often-overlooked area of Belfast which includes public spaces in Custom House Square, Writers Square, Cotton Court Piazza and Lagan Weir.

Has the larger bricks and concrete MAC – which announced its opening programme last week – eaten up the funding that DSD would otherwise have made available to smaller, more organic groups that deliver low-cost, family friendly events to brighten up the city and encourage public participation and cultural awareness?

The relatively small DSD grants helped organisations leverage other funding and sponsorship, creating visitor spend in the Laganside area as well as across the wider city.

While every scheme has a season and public funding of events in specific communities cannot necessarily continue for ever, eliminating the Laganside Events grant in a single year – rather than winding down its level of funding over a couple of years – is a blunt measure.

Within the arts sector, the removal of the Laganside Events Grant has been described as “devastating news” and is being seen as a ministerial decision by Nelson McCausland, rather than one coming out of existing department strategy.

In the year that Belfast ‘bigs it up’ for the Titanic, the overspill area right next to Titanic Quarter will be culturally poorer with the elimination of around £250,000 of events funding.

Map taken from DSDNI funding documentation.

Update – The Cathedral Quarter Steering Group released a statement this afternoon calling the cutting of the fund a “serious blow to Cathedral Quarter” with “serious implications for the continued viability of these highly popular events in Cathedral Quarter”.

The Steering Group has representation from local businesses, venues, arts groups, the university and St Anne’s Cathedral. The group’s chair, Paul Mc Erlean said:

I’ve been in touch with a number of arts groups who have received letters without any prior consultation or indication that the funding would go. This cut will seriously undermine many of the great events that have given Cathedral Quarter and Belfast such an improved image and helped to make the Quarter a shared space in the city centre for the people of Belfast and its visitors. We call on the Minister, Nelson McCausland to reinstate the Fund as soon as possible.

Events and festivals are important for tourism as well as providing jobs in the hospitality sector, with thousands of extra people in the area making use of cafes and pubs. With cheap drinks promotions over the Odyssey still in the news, Bill Wolsey from the Merchant Hotel added:

… unlike other popular night spots in Belfast, the Cathedral Quarter, at least in part because of the diversity of the people that these very popular events attract, is also a very safe and welcoming place to socialise.

Black Box Belfast’s venue manager Neil Jacques said

The lateness of this decision has compounded its impact, with arts organisations being left little or no time to seek alternative avenues of funding.

This year’s Out to Lunch Festival finished a fortnight ago. It’s director Sean Kelly – also responsible for the larger Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in a few month’s time – said that the Laganside Events funding helped “ensure both festivals could be accessible and affordable to all the people of the city and beyond”.

There’s an argument that the success of The MAC (which opens shortly) will depend on continuing to develop a cultural ecosystem in the Cathedral Quarter. Many of the free festivals have been strategically working close to the MAC building site in preparation for the time when they can also use it’s spaces. And to carve out a place on the map as a cultural centre, Cathedral Quarter needs a range of events, and a range of prices, to develop a broad spectrum of appeal.

The Steering Group suggest that the following events are threatened by the cutting of the DSD fund: Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Festival of Fools, Black Box Events, Open House Festival, Belfast Children’s Festival, Out to Lunch Festival, Summer Sundays and Culture Night.

On Monday I was at a conference on Media Diversity run and funded by Labour MEP Nessa Childers. It was probably one of the best roster of speakers I’ve heard on the subject on that side of the Irish Sea, even if there was barely time to talk, or ask questions.

Then yesterday, Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, gave something of a masterclass on the ills of the mainstream media in front of Lord Leveson in London. Not least the closeness between lobby journalists and politicians:

Political reporting on a day to day basis is conducted in the main via the Westminster Lobby system. This is an unhealthy and closed system lacking in transparency conducted behind closed doors. The implicit rules of this club – “Lobby terms” – discourage Lobby journalists from rocking the boat too much, the system also encourages a trade in favours. A client media has developed whereby journalists who recycle the party line are encouraged and rewarded with titbits and exclusives, with interviews granted to journalists who please party spin doctors. The Lobby system is effectively an obedience school where the political class brings journalists to heel.

The failings of the Lobby system were well illustrated during the expenses scandal, a story which exploded because of the catalytic efforts of a Freedom of Information campaigner, Heather Brooke, in the courts. Lobby journalists who were embedded in the Westminster system would later claim to well know about the ongoing abuse of expenses over decades, yet they did nothing to expose the scandal.

That was a monumental failure by those journalists specifically charged with the responsibility of holding those in power to account. They failed to report on an issue that fundamentally exposed the lack of integrity of our political class. The natural venality of the political class was unchecked by their client media until an outsider rocked the boat and sunk the duck houses.

In my experience newspapers will do favours for their political allies far beyond just slanting favourable coverage, they will suppress the truth, rubbish political opponents and buy up stories, never to be printed, which might embarrass their political allies.

Now I should declare a slight interest, in that Staines owns MessageSpace, one of Slugger’s few regular sources of income. And I have a lot of time for the some of the arguments he makes, though considering how closely he still works with some newspaper groups I’d been wary of buying too many millenarian arguments about the end times for papers.

But it must also be fairly clear that both politically and in approach, Guido and I have a very different approach to politics, journalists and politicians. For instance, I heard what Alan Crosbie – Chairman of Thomas Crosbie Holdings Ltd. said on Monday about new media and the context in which he said it. I even questioned him about it afterwards. What’s important about the case Mr Crosbie makes is: 1, that it outlines the value big media can bring; but 2, fails to offer thoughts on how that value can be repackaged and transfered to an audience that is rapidly changing the habits of generations.

And he made a substantial proposition:

My first proposition, even before I get to the consolidation in the title of this talk, is this. That we as a society acknowledge that public service is not something RTE owns. It is a public service for any organisation to devote professional people to finding out, fact checking, and publishing information in the public good.

Therefore, there’s an opportunity for Pat Rabbitte to step away from tradition and if he’s going to have a tax to provide public service broadcasting, widen it so it acknowledges the contribution to public service of newspapers too. That would reduce this dangerous dependence on advertising.

Now when challenged to say how he would do that from the floor, by John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute as it happens, about what he might do to mediate any future political influence in his news gathering techniques, he retrenched slightly by suggesting that he would start with something as simple as getting a zero rate on VAT, something that’s pertains in the UK but not Ireland.

Later in his speech, he launched the attack that got him his headlines:

We need to address the threat to humanity posed by the tsunami of unverifiable data, opinion, libel and vulgar abuse in new media. I know all the stuff about it being a tool of freedom and democracy, and I also know it has the capacity to destroy civil society and cause unimaginable suffering.

Governments have a regulatory function in this regard, and they’re walking away from it because they’re afraid of appearing to be repressive.

Well, maybe. But, as Guido notes, it’s a tough climate for regulators too:

Any future regulatory regime has to consider technological convergence. My daughters watch Children’s BBC on my mobile telephone, they watch the US Public Broadcasting Service’s children’s television shows on my laptop at our French holiday home.

The reality of convergence and cross-border broadcasting via the internet of all forms of content will mean that any regulatory regime will be porous. In the future there will be a regulated sector and an unregulated sector, with the latter prospering all the more if privacy restrictions inhibit the regulated media from covering more and more stories. The readers will go where the news is, the advertisers and the money will follow the readers, the regulators however will not be able to cross borders.

It would be in my commercial interest and to my competitive advantage to see the British media heavily regulated, draconian privacy laws enacted and politically correct “media standards” enforced. All of which would be cheerfully ignored by the Guido Fawkes bIog. It would however be a sad day for press freedom.

In the US (where formal media regulation is deeply problematic for constitutional reasons) Matthew Yglesias argues that the increasing partisanship in newspapers, television and blogs is little more than a function of the changing nature of the marketplace:

A person living in Baltimore was either going to subscribe to the Sun or else not subscribe to the Sun, so the important thing was to try not to put anything in the Sun that would unduly alienate and embitter readers or advertisers.

An ideology of journalistic “objectivity” grew up around this that by design did not suit the needs or agendas of political activists of various stripes. At the same time, over in the United Kingdom a much more competitive newspaper market existed in which the headlines were much more sensationalistic and different papers would cater to different ideological or sociological niches to try to generate reader enthusiasm.

What’s happened to the United States over the past 30 years is that cable, talk radio, and the Internet have created a more competitive media market that’s much less dominated by geographically segmented quasi-monopolies. In this new environment, the kind of rah-rah go-team-go cheerleading exhibited by Continetti’s piece makes a lot of sense as a business strategy.

If the US constitution is losing its provenance amongst other country’s constitutional law makers, the 21st century intellectual by-products of that 18th Century constitution is clearly capable of considerable disruption in other jurisdictions. It’s a genii that is going to be almost impossible to put back in the box.

Lobbying government is one perfectly valid point of progress. But the nature of this consolidation process is that it is now longer about having pointless arguments about journalists versus bloggers or tweeters, but about finding solutions that commercially assert the value of the work done.

Last night, the PSNI riot squad took part in a dress rehearsal in advance of any trouble in the university/Holylands area over the St Patrick’s Day long weekend.

One officer privately expressed concern that the new protective clothing “wouldn’t be taken seriously by tipsy students”. Another added that the pockets weren’t very accessible and there was no where to store his phone or his “emergency doughnut”.

A spokesperson explained that enhanced scrutiny of PSNI spending together with the reduction of budgets meant that “difficult procurement decisions had to be made”.

And in an alternative universe, fans queued up outside Dublin Road Movie House to view the 3D version of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

May the force be with you …

A couple of weeks ago, on the sidelines of the newly revitalised Scottish Question, Carwyn Jones, the Labour leader in the Welsh Assembly made some remarks that have created some ripples in his own back yard:

Asked how Wales would fare if Scotland voted for independence, he said: “I think we need to start thinking about this now.

“It appears at the moment from the opinion polls that Scotland wouldn’t leave the UK, but how do we make the UK fit for purpose in the 21st Century?

“We have a political structure that’s from the 18th and 19th Centuries.”

He suggested there was scope to reform the Lords so its members are elected on the basis of equal representation between the UK nations.

David Jones in today’s South Wales Echo says that by co-opting nationalist ideas, the Labour leader is playing with nationalist fire:

Carwyn’s logic sees the Welsh, English and Northern Irish as very different peoples whose interests are so distinct they must have equally strong voices in an upper chamber. It is a way of thinking that, at the very least, you have to say has a nationalist flavour.

As a Welsh Labour leader he would almost certainly dispute my argument, and it may be he has positioned himself as a critic of the current structure of the UK simply to park his tanks on a prime bit of political real estate – rather than out of any personal belief.

It’s certainly true that his positioning has left Plaid Cymru in a mess. With the “more devolution … let’s shake up the UK” position firmly taken by Welsh Labour, Plaid’s leadership contenders have been left in a destructive argument about independence that, polls clearly show, few people in Wales want.

And yet whatever the reason, Carwyn’s logic is divisive because it leads to a dead end – an upper chamber with equal numbers of Welsh, English and Northern Irish representatives could not work as it would not represent the rump of the UK as a whole, and would be unacceptable to the largest part of it, England.

Wales and Northern Ireland (with a combined population of fewer than 5m) would together have twice as many representatives as England’s 50m people. It would skew politics. A party of the left would dominate, the interests of the bulk of people in the UK would not be represented.

Very good column from Fionnuala O’Connor on Tuesday re what what’s happening to two parties in continuing decline. She starts with the semi public spat between Margaret Ritchie and her chosen successor, the retired school head, Sean Rogers:

Surely between them a keen new player and a former leader could have avoided such a petty row, or at least kept the daylight from it. It’s as if they don’t realise the SDLP image has taken a battering. The old rules do not only not work, it sounds as though few remember what they are.

She goes on to mine the rich fields of the UUP for further evidence that small parties tear each other apart. It may not of course be that it is the size that matters.

The lack of ambition expressed by both party leaders is more likely the problem. What else there to do with all that competitive instinct than fall on each other, if you are not on a long journey.

I’ve argued in the past that Sinn Fein does not have a credible strategy for achieving a united Ireland, but it enables its followers to believe it has through the creation of iterative targets; almost all it’s political ambition is centered on a southward push for power.

The DUP has less of a pallet to play with, but it is busy ripping all the good stuff it can conveniently lay its hands on from the Ulster Unionists, even to the extent of taking the high ground over Unionism’s previous cack-handed dealing with the GAA.

The narrative is clear, it’s ‘we are for ALL the people in Northern Ireland’. Like Sinn Fein, the goal may be a very long way off, occasionally disrupted by their own senior colleagues, but the story’s a enough to keep people interested and listening.

In the cases of the two larger junior parties there is a sense of a journey being undertaken that people can buy into that’s almost entirely missing in the case of the UUs and the SDLP. That’s bolstered by the understated but nevertheless harsh reality that these two parties currently have a monopoly power under the St Andrews Agreement.

Whatever the merits or demerits of ‘going into opposition’, it is also hard for the junior parties to lay out a credible alternative to what passes for mainstream politics in Northern Ireland whilst they are inside government.

It’s perhaps one reason why some very senior political correspondents seem to resent any time they are forced to spend reporting on what they view as junior dogsbodies. Bluntly, it’s pretty thin gruel to sup on, and much of it of little account within the larger picture of Northern Irish politics.

About four years ago, on the BBC Analysis programme, Danny Fickelstein reflected on his time as an advisor to William Hague in the wake of the Tories’ 1997 spanking at the polls by New Labour:

….one of the reasons the media weren’t interested in us is that we were literally boring. We were what would be boring on the screen. We were what would be boring in a book and naturally it was also boring in a newspaper article.

And William Hague was saying, “Do we want to have a ballot on whether the Conservative Party supports the Euro? It’s a bit of a risk.”

And I said, “If you take the storybook seriously, yes you should have a ballot because the only way that people will know who you are is through the transformation that takes place in your character through a real narrative, going from a situation where the party is disunited, going through the challenge of an election, and ending with a united party, with the party being transformed in between.”

Obviously you don’t decide serious matters of national policy purely because they represent a film script, but you do have to have a sense of a character being transformed by the things that he does as well as an explanation of what you stand for through theories and things like that.[emphasis added]

Allison Morris made a number of contributions to this morning’s Irish News. As well as the front page article about the alleged security breach when a police officer’s personal mobile fell into the hands of dissident republicans (and its contents were subsequently passed to the Irish News), she also writes a curious opinion piece on page 19.

Trapped behind a paywall, it only seems fair that her column gets a wider reading.

Rambling online twits prejudice trials at will

Kicking off with premiership footballer Joey Barton who “risked making legal history as the first person to be charged with contempt of court in relation to a comment posted on Twitter” Allison Morris moves on to mention the “Guardian newspaper journalist who tweeted the name of a juror during the Harry Redknapp tax-evasion trial”.

A modern thirst for instant information means we can no longer wait more than five seconds for news updates, even if it means a dilution in quality – the vast majority of tweets being irrelevant snippets of useless information.

For the record, Allison tweets and like many of us contributes “irrelevant snippets of useless information”.

The column’s laugh out loud moment comes when she tackles Eamonn Mallie.

The indefatigable journalists Eamonn Mallie holds the unchallenged title of king of Twitter in Northern Ireland. Last week he tweeted 140 characters that included the words ‘discombobulating’ and ‘deleterious’. Just reading it pushed other useful information from my head. I can no longer remember my Pin number as a result.

However at this point the pendulum swings without warning from Twitter users to bloggers.

Bloggers or ‘citizen journalists’ as some like to be known are a mixed bunch, their writing ranging in quality from humorous and informative to crazy and dangerous. There are, unfortunately, people who believe that a high-speed wireless connection coupled with too much time on their hands makes their rambling thoughts and conspiracy theories somehow relevant.

People with no legal or libel training regularly pass off misinformation as fact, prejudicing trials and defaming others at will, while the rest of us set out to write and publish correctly, subject to the laws of the land.

I’ve had one blogger, a person I’d never heard of in my life, email me a list of questions in relation to some half-baked tin-foil hat conspiracy theory they’d cooked up, giving me a ‘deadline’ to respond or else they would publish.

[Ed - Anyone’s ears burning? Can think of a couple of candidates!]

Meanwhile back in the real world I hit the delete button and carried on working for a living.

I don’t see the local evidence to support Allison’s claim that bloggers “regularly pass off misinformation as fact, prejudicing trials and defaming others at will”. My experience is that libel and defamation most often occur in the comments under blogs – an ever-present risk on Slugger – but rarely in the actual posts written by the bloggers.

It takes time to write a blog post. The act of having to form and edit a series of sentences allows your brain to mull over the content. Just because people don’t have formal legal or libel training doesn’t preclude them from understanding the concepts and applying them to what they write. Shuffling words around a screen – much like Allison Morris’ daily occupation – means that there is an interval in which to have second thoughts and to ponder the wisdom of putting your name to what you’ve written.

Still, all this doesn’t prevent badly written and ill thought out blog posts from being published online. But then, formal legal and libel training doesn’t always help the newspaper editorial chain from spotting libellous content. At least a blog post can be corrected as soon as a mistake is spotted. It takes longer for newspapers to put right their wrongs.

Allison’s column then reverts back to social networking, asking how a juror could be prevented from “checking out an accused’s Facebook profile” or how a witness could be prevented from “tweeting details of a crime … in direct breach of due process”.

She finishes:

As the use of platforms such as Twitter becomes the norm, can the flow of information be monitored to prevent the derailing of legal cases or in this information-driven society is it already too late to prevent the twits from taking over?

Some interesting issues raised about the contemporaneous and throw-away nature of modern communications as well as some less justified jibes at bloggers. Though as a humorous/informative/crazy/dangerous* blogger, I’m not sure I’m qualified to respond. (* delete as applicable)

And just in case Allison ever Googles herself, I should also mention her fear:

I’m sure that somewhere out there in cyberspace a blog accusing me of eating small babies for breakfast exists but I just can’t be bothered wading through pages of verbal excrement in order to find it.

It does now!

That was the Professor’s not entirely inaccurate comment this time last year, when a Russian team came up just short in their attempt to reach Lake Vostok - the largest sub-glacial freshwater lake on Earth.

The project to drill down to the lake, which covers 16 square kilometres and has been sealed under approximately 3,750m of ice in the Antarctic for around 15 million years, began over 20 years ago.

The Russian team returned to the drill site during the recent Antartic summer and, as the update to the NewScientist report notes

Russian scientists have now confirmed that they have indeed breached Lake Vostok. It is the first time one of Antarctica’s subglacial lakes has been penetrated. According to an official statement [in Russian], the drill entered the lake at 20.25 Moscow time on 5 February. Thirty to forty metres of water rose into the borehole, confirming that the drill had reached the lake itself and not a small pocket of liquid water above the lake surface.

The BBC’s spaceman Jonathan Amos has a quote from the Russian team leader

“This fills my soul with joy,” said Valery Lukin, from Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which has been overseeing the project,

“This will give us the possibility to biologically evaluate the evolution of living organisms… because those organisms spent a long time without contact with the atmosphere, without sunlight,” he was quoted as saying in a translation of national media reports by BBC Monitoring.

And he adds

The British Antarctic Survey (Bas) is hoping to begin its effort to drill into Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica later this year. An American crew is targeting Lake Whillans, also in the West.

“It is an important milestone that has been completed and a major achievement for the Russians because they’ve been working on this for years,” Professor Martin Siegert, the principal investigator on the Bas-Ellsworth project said.

“The Russian team share our mission to understand subglacial lake environments and we look forward to developing collaborations with their scientists and also those from the US and other nations, as we all embark on a quest to comprehend these pristine, extreme environments,” he told AP.

The projects are of particular fascination to astrobiologists, who study the origins and likely distribution of life across the Universe.

And from a Huffington Post report

“There is no other place on Earth that has been in isolation for more than 20 million years,” said Lev Savatyugin, a researcher with the AARI. “It’s a meeting with the unknown.”

Savatyugin said scientists hope to find primeval bacteria that could expand the human knowledge of the origins of life.

“We need to see what we have here before we send missions to ice-crusted moons, like Jupiter’s moon Europa,” he said.

Lake Vostok is 160 miles (250 kilometers) long and 30 miles (50 kilometers) across at its widest point, similar in area to Lake Ontario. It lies about 3.8 kilometers (2.4 miles) beneath the surface and is the largest in a web of nearly 400 known subglacial lakes in Antarctica. The lake is warmed underneath by geothermal energy.

The project, however, has drawn strong fears that 60 metric tons (66 tons) of lubricants and antifreeze used in the drilling may contaminate the pristine lake. The Russian researchers have insisted the bore would only slightly touch the lake’s surface and that a surge in pressure will send the water rushing up the shaft where it will freeze, immediately sealing out the toxic chemicals.

Lukin said about 1.5 cubic meters (50 cubic feet) of kerosene and freon poured up to the surface from the boreshaft, proof that the lake water streamed up from beneath, froze, and blocked the hole.

The scientists will later remove the frozen sample for analysis in December when the next Antarctic summer comes.

Scientists believe that microbial life may exist in the dark depths of the lake despite its high pressure and constant cold — conditions similar to those expected to be found under the ice crust on Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s move Enceladus.

“In the simplest sense, it can transform the way we think about life,” NASA’s chief scientist Waleed Abdalati told the AP by email.

That’s assuming there is life there…  And that it’s not just like a thousand horror-movie setups…  ANYhoo…  Here’s part 1/4 of the 2000 Horizon documentary – The Lost World of Lake Vostok.  Via Top Documentary Films. 

Stephen Moss in the Guardian adopts the least analytical approach imaginable to the identity thing, a random journey. It’s like an intro to a report that that doesn’t actually appear. A bit like Britishness itself maybe? Quite unlike our own passions. Might  uncertainty and toleration be its saving graces?

 As I stood in freezing temperatures in Bradford’s Centenary Square trying unsuccessfully to get twentysomething Muslim women to tell me how they lived their lives, I started to have doubts about the exercise. Belfast was even colder, and with security concerns still a worry – there were two bombs in Derry the day I arrived – some people were wary of talking about Britishness. For that reason, two of the identities of my Northern Irish interviewees are not disclosed: a sixtysomething Catholic who served in the army and was proud to be British, and a young Catholic in his 30s who thought Sinn Féin had sold out and still saw the country as being occupied by the British. Those two are the only ones whose names and photographs are suppressed.

There aren’t four Britains. There are 40.

Then came Northern Ireland, probably the most eye-opening part of the journey.

For my money, the Irish Independent’s editorial somewhat scales up the current German influence within the EU for effect, but it warns Fianna Fail it is currently playing the wrong game in calling for a referendum:

It is a measure of how the European dream has soured that having joined with the clear intent of severing our provincial ties with Britain we are now little more than a part of Greater Germany. But, unless we want to return to the repressive sterility of Mr de Valera’s ‘frugal comfort’, Ireland’s future is irredeemably connected to the EU. The blunt truth is that only Europe has the capacity to resolve the banking debacle or an unemployment crisis that is creating fertile soil for fascism.

We are becoming far too fond of a Fifties-style language of elegiac, self-indulgent despair. Germany may be engaged in a vast historical error similar to the fearful embrace of protectionism in the Thirties. But times change, and when they do, a country that, economically, has always been a cork bobbing on an ocean would be better off in than out.

If that end is to be met, Fianna Fail needs to stop playing stupid patriot games. The Coalition, meanwhile, should leave religion alone and heed better the gnomic advice of Patrick Honohan about the virtues of putting our own fiscal house in order.

Romney isn’t closing this out. Yesterday saw a primary in Missouri (well a non binding beauty contest really) and two caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota.

From RealClearPolitics:

Santorum has taken Minnesota and Missouri comfortably. Romney was banking on Colorado. Here Nate compares his 2008 and 2012 performances. Broadly he’s at 60% of his 2008 level and things are looking close there.

Fox News is reporting Colorado in real time. At 5.30am our time, with 46% of precincts reporting Santorum and Romney were in a virtual tie, 37% to 36% in Santorum’s favour.

However that finally pans out it’s Santorum’s night. From the New York Times

With his unexpected victories, Mr. Santorum was also suddenly presenting new competition to Newt Gingrich as the chief alternative to Mr. Romney, the front-runner.
His performance added another twist to an unruly nominating contest that has seen Republican voters veering among candidates and refusing to coalesce behind anyone. It came just three days after Mr. Romney scored back-to-back victories in Florida and Nevada that had led to predictions that he was finally on a straight march to the nomination.

Newt Gingrich the King maker? Hmmm I don’t think he’s a quitter.
On a process issue the increasing tendency for states to award delegates proportionally makes winning early difficult. With the kind of results we are seeing the late August Tampa convention itself could determine the outcome.
Any observations from the US?
P.S. At 6.00am our time Colorado is trending toward Santorum.
P.P.S. At 6.21am Santorum wins Colorado.

As the BBC reports

Former US president Bill Clinton is to host an “Invest in Ireland” discussion in New York on Thursday.

Well, he’ll ”attend for the beginning of the event where he will make some opening remarks”.  You get the point.  *sniff*  He used to have such big [economic] ideas for here…

The Merrion Street press release adds

Following on from a commitment given by him at the Global Irish Economic Forum, President Bill Clinton will host an “Invest in Ireland” roundtable discussion in New York on Thursday, February 9^th. The purpose of the event is to engage with key business and economic leaders, with a view to encouraging those who haven’t already invested in Ireland’s economic recovery to do so.

The roundtable discussion will be attended by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore and Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton as well as an influential group of global business and economic leaders. The discussion will be moderated by the Governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley.

The principal message to potential investors will be that Ireland is open for business and that now is the time to invest in our economic recovery.

Although they might want to wait and see how events elsewhere develop…

It will be followed by the “Invest in Ireland Forum” to be attended by Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore and Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton.

[Will the Northern Ireland First or deputy First Ministers be attending? - Ed]  Did either of them attend the Global Irish Economic Forum?

Something of a return to form for Eoghan Harris:

Right now Sinn Fein rules the opposition roost. Like a rooster it makes a lot of noise. Fianna Fail has failed to point out it neither lays policy hens or economic eggs.

Given these two gormless groups and a grim recession, Fianna Fail should be flying. But rather than rise to the challenge of change it is following Sinn Fein into a nationalist cul-de-sac. Mostly this is Micheal Martin’s fault.

After the 2011 Armageddon, Martin should have worked out what had to be done, and done it, no matter how many sacred cows he had to slaughter. And it’s all about slaying sacred cows. As I learned in the Workers Party.

Back in the 1970s Official Sinn Fein had no TDs, was lumbered by nationalism, anti-EU policies, and hostility to foreign investment. Eamon Smullen set out to kill all these sacred cows. By the 1980s the Workers Party had dumped naff nationalism, supported the EU, fully backed the IDA — and won six seats in Dublin.

Looking at the link between radical change and radical success I wrote: “If there is one iron law in Irish politics it is this. The more sacred cows you slay, the more somersaults you perform, the higher your standing with the general public. As Sinn Fein found out when it gave up the gun. As the GAA found out when it opened up Croke Park.”

And here’s the medicine he prescribes:

Fianna Fail has long been a stranger to reality. It lived on two myths: the myths of an ever-expanding State sector and the myth of a united Ireland. It claims to have changed. But it still seems tempted to drink from the poisoned chalices.

Lord Birkenhead said Michael Collins’s great strength was that he was loyal to the facts. As soon as the smoke cleared after the last General Election, Micheal Martin should have studied the facts. The four facts demanding his loyalty were the following.

First, there was only one space left on the political shelf. Fine Gael had a grip on the middle class. Labour had a grip on the professional and public sector class. But no party was looking after the coping class, which mostly works in the private sector.

Second, Fianna Fail should have finished off Sinn Fein nationalism. The success of the Queen’s visit and the failure of Martin McGuinness’s presidential bid showed that middle Ireland has no time for tribal tom-toms. Fianna Fail failed to cash that cheque.

Third, Fianna Fail should have carved out a new constituency in the coping class by (a) challenging the Croke Park Agreement (b) pledging to protect the pay of the two-thirds of public sector workers earning €60,000 or less (c) waging all-out war on the fat cats in the padded parts of the public sector — starting with the exorbitant expenses of TDs and senators. Finally, it should have slain the sacred cow of blanket opposition in favour of selective opposition. Oppose the Government on Croke Park. Support the Government on the European Fiscal Treaty. And so on.

And:

An internal battle about dumping deadbeat policies is the fastest way to convince the public and the media that Fianna Fail wants to change. That is why Martin is making a major mistake in mirroring Sinn Fein. Far better for Fianna Fail to take up a PD- type position on Croke Park, ESB bonuses and wasteful referenda.

Mirroring Sinn Fein also has no attraction for the media. Why would a mawkish Martin be more interesting than a full-blooded Mary Lou McDonald? Why feature Fianna Fail’s version of Sinn Fein Lite when you can get the full red bull from Pearse Doherty? Go figure.

But instead of separating from Sinn Fein, Martin moves closer every day. Last week he was drooling in the Dail about the “moral imperative” of giving the people a say in the European Treaty. This populist faffing signals a party ready to be rolled up by Sinn Fein.

It might be offered in defence of Martin that he’s actually following the Enda Kenny pattern of how to rebuild a broken party and spending time re-building the party in the country. By Harris’s own analogy, change for a party so ‘long parted from reality’ does not come back to match fitness in less than a quarter of a political season.

But he’s starting to get stuck with the epithet the quiet man in Dublin. A somersault would be handy, if only to allow them to slough off some of the more stupid moves of the Bertie years.

Having watched as yesterday’s ‘deadline’ went whooshing past their heads, Greek party leaders are due to meet later tonight to consider another draft bail-out deal – once it’s been translated into Greek…  You can follow events as they unfold at the Guardian’s live-blog.

Meanwhile, as promised, Frau Bundeskanzlerin has joined Nicolas Sarkozy on the campaign trail in a joint television interview, following a joint French/German cabinet meeting – as the BBC reports

Earlier the two leaders held a joint cabinet meeting, at the Elysee Palace, focused on the debt crisis as well as plans to co-ordinate the two countries’ corporate tax policies.

Nine French ministers and eight German ministers were involved.

[A meeting of the European Government? - Ed]  You might well think that…

And whilst the Greek EU Commissioner Maria Damanaki is openly speculating about “the prospect of Greece being forced out of the single currency if it did not quickly assert control over its finances”, the European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes has told a Dutch newspaper that there would be “absolutely no man overboard” if Greece left the euro.

“What’s a man overboard?” Mrs Kroes told the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant. “It’s always said that if you let one country get out, or ask it to get out, then the whole structure collapses. But that’s simply not true.

“The Greeks have to realise that we Dutch and we Germans can only sell emergency Greek aid to our taxpayers if there’s evidence of good will.”

A similar message was delivered with a more optimistic spin by Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the “eurogroup” of eurozone finance ministers, who said he had no doubt that Greece would remain within the eurozone, provided that it met its obligations to other members.

“The euro will outlive us all,” he said.

But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

And it is serious, as Arthur Beesley explains in the Irish Times

Patience ran out long ago – and many critical issues in the bailout remain to be settled. “We are not fully in control of the sequence of events,” says a well-placed euro zone official. No understatement there.

In question is whether Greek leaders agree to enact binding legislation to execute the bailout programme come what may after the election. Only that will satisfy euro zone finance ministers, who have the power to grant a new €130 billion bailout or not. [added emphasis]

This, in turn, is the essential condition for a complex debt restructuring deal in which Greece’s private creditors are supposed to cut the value of bonds worth €200 billion in half. The bondholders are waiting in the wings to see that the second bailout goes ahead, but the restructuring arrangement will be entirely “voluntary”, meaning it will be open to them not to participate.

The concern is that some will choose instead to trigger credit default swap insurance contracts on their debt holdings, something with potential to further disrupt volatile markets. EU leaders are betting, however, that most of Greece’s investors will decide that their greater interest is served by taking part in the initiative as they are certain to lose more than half their receivables in a default scenario.

So far, so difficult, but that’s not the end of it. Lurking in the backdrop is anxiety that the figures on which the bailout is predicated do not stack up. The basic aim is to reduce Greek debt from some 160 per cent of national output to 120 per cent by 2020, still twice the EU limit but a level which may give the country at least a chance of survival within the euro zone.

By all accounts, the target will be missed. This, in turn, has led to discussion as to whether the European Central Bank might forego its profit on €55 billion in Greek bonds it acquired at knock- down prices in the past two years.

The bank is reluctant, but has not ruled out such a move. No change is likely for as long as Greek leaders hold out.

Read the whole thing.

Update  The Greek party leaders’ meeting has been postponed until tomorrow morning.

Haunted is a good word for the core subject of Robin Wilson’s op ed in the Belfast Telegraph today. The past haunts all the players to one degree or another. He echoes DPP Barra McGrory’s concern that treating all matters via the judicial route is not the most desirable means of moving forward.

As Tim Garton Ash has noted, there has been no catharsis of victory:

…the new anti-Jacobin model of revolution, with its surreal encounters of former prisoners and their former jailers and torturers, requires painful, morally distasteful compromise. There is no great moment of revolutionary catharsis. The line between bad past and good future is necessarily blurred. This is what the anthropologist Ernest Gellner, referring to the velvet revolution in his native Czechoslovakia, called “the price of velvet”.

Because that is so, the problem of the past comes back to haunt you.

Most of the recent headlines around the past have focused on campaigns by relatives to get justice for the killing of their loved ones over Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy and the bombing of McGurk’s Bar. But the focus now may be shifting towards the PSNI’s own investigation of the past.

Wilson notes that there are a number of fairly high profile cases in the pipeline:

The HET is going through each death since the Troubles began in chronological order. It will eventually get to 1986 and the IRA killing of the alleged informer Frank Hegarty in Derry, to 1987 and the Remembrance Day bomb in Enniskillen and to 1990 and the death of the so-called ‘human bomb’ Patsy Gillespie and five soldiers at a checkpoint at Coshquin in Co Londonderry.

The name which links these three cases is McGuinness. Now deputy First Minister at Stormont, and having formed half of the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ with Ian Paisley, he claims to have left the IRA in 1974.

In 1990 as the editor of Fortnight magazine, I interviewed him in his office in Derry for an article on the thinking of the IRA in the aftermath of its assassination of the high-profile Conservative Right-winger Ian Gow.

And he notes that the evidence they unearth (which will be released to families of the victims) may have problematic consequences for those current players:

The implication was that the Government had to negotiate with the IRA, having failed to suppress it and so there was to be official silence on paramilitary crimes.

It might have been hoped in London there could be silence, too, on state violence, but public pressure from the families of those murdered prevented that Bloody Sunday.

To comply with today’s international norms, those guilty of war crimes, from whatever quarter, should have faced prosecution, not been given immunity. And the evidence on Adams and McGuinness, as it emerges, will be explosive.

At the same time, it will be hard for the prime minister to keep resisting an inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane, murdered by the UDA, but with the collusion of the shadowy Force Research Unit (FRU) within the Army.

If the weak link in the 1974 power-sharing experiment was the ill-conceived Council of Ireland, failure to deal with the past is the Achilles’ Heel of the current arrangement at Stormont.

The clock is ticking.

Which may go some way to explain the increasing references to the ‘dark side’ of policing in recent communications from Sinn Fein on their conditional support for ‘policing the past’.

It seems we in Northern Ireland aren’t doing so well when it comes to innovation, at least according to InterTrade Ireland. Simon Hamilton tweeted this announcement from one of his party’s ministers yesterday:

“Arlene Foster reveals only 1 of 18 nominations in InterTradeIreland awards from NI & this is a trend. Does ROI have monopoly on innovation?”

Adds: Matt has a great post here. [H/T Andy]

Perhaps not a monopoly, but the Republic has a scale and a more vibrant private sector. But I should add that in my experience of dealing with Enterprise Ireland and Invest NI is that the former is much more open and creative in its approach and sells itself with a great deal more conviction.

And they have a wider culture of having to compete unmediated in a difficult climate. That’s not to obscure the fact we have innovative risk takers. But perhaps their virtues are not sufficiently in the public domain?

Jamie Smyth the new (to me ) correspondent of the Financial Times has managed to win some space for an interview with Owen Paterson (£ sadly) who takes whatever wind there might have been out of  Martin McGuinness’s kite for a united Ireland referendum. Part of the draught perhaps from the Scottish referendum campaign Graham Walker has drawn attention to, as posted by Mick.

“For people in the north there is a real worry on the economic front. I think there is less interest in big constitutional issues and there is more interest in day-to-day economic issues,” he said.

Mr Paterson said he had no plans to call a referendum, saying the constitutional question was “settled, subject to the majority” view.

Reliance is placed on the Life and Times Survey on political attitudes. While I recognise an apparent inconsistency with  “real” voting  (and dwindling turnout too, mind) no one has explained to me what the survey’s statistical flaws are.

Last year, 73 per cent of respondents to an opinion poll in Northern Ireland said they wanted the region to remain a part of the UK. The Life and Times survey published in June 2011 found 52 per cent of Catholics living in Northern Ireland wanted the union to continue, compared with a third who favoured a united Ireland.

This is an academic question that should be worked on while the matter isn’t pressing. I doubt if Owen Paterson has given it a moment’s serious thought – or if he or others have, we should know about it. The 1998 act indeed kicked for touch and left the question of a referendum to the Secretary of State based on the likelihood of success. This is an impossible political mission for a British minister theoretically acting alone. You can hear the cries of bias from one side or the other depending on which major British party is in power. Leaving it to the Electoral Commission   would also constitute a very heavy burden for a fateful once and forever exercise in Irish self determination involving both governments and the people on both sides of the border that would make the Scottish referendum seem as simple as a random questionnaire. Maybe we should give some thought to the process?