In a reply to a written Assembly question, Mr Robinson and Martin McGuinness stated: “The Coalition on Sexual Orientation (CoSO) contributed to the 2007 and 2008 Belfast Gay Pride Parade, awarding £5,750 and £5,000, from a fund of £230,000 which was awarded by the previous Direct Rule administration.”

Peter doesn’t sound as if he actually enjoyed making the award.  We can take in for granted his junior minister isn’t best pleased either . Iris’s stout defender Jeffrey Donaldson has placed himself at the forefront of opposition to gay rights at every turn, resisting the Order making it illegal to refuse male gay partners a hotel room during that last “stick and carrots” period of Direct Rule.

The DUP jibbed at the time but they should thank Peter Hain for giving them political cover today. The fact is, Peter Robinson had no choice but to make that donation and he’ll find it impossible to refuse similar payments in future. His hands are tied. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s privately happy with that.  He above all politicians has the wit to know that some battles are over and others are not worth fighting. He will bide his time until the penny drops with his backwoodspersons, including the one who shares the master bedroom with him.

This news is a clear case of the legal constitution taking precedence over the political constitution. Thankfully - and in NI especially - we no longer live in a world where everything a politician says, goes.

So, you have 108 to choose from – leaders, ministers, speakers, humble backbenchers, they come in all shapes and sizes, colours and flavours. Who has caught your eye? Now remember you already have been taking advantage of your opportunity to nominate for Stormont Committee Chair of the Year and theoretically there might be other overlaps – Councillor, Participation, Blogger awards spring to mind…

How do we measure the performance of our politicians with any objectivity – that’s the question. Already judges have been taken by those of you big enough to make nominations form your own party of choice and then from another. Mark McGregor’s admirable praise of Jim Allister’s political skills (albeit not his political position) stands as a worthy credit; others have joined in. Let’s have more of that.

Eight parties (Alliance, DUP, Green Party, Independent Health Coalition, PUP, SDLP, SF and UUP, not to forget Independent MLA, Gerry McHugh) are ploughing their furrows with varying degrees of diligence. Attendance matters, but more important to the voter, probably, is delivery… who has changed something, promoted a new idea, challenged an orthodoxy or inspired with their oratory?

If we are to imagine a Belfast or rural omnibus, about whom would the passengers be talking? Who would inspire a transfer at the next Assembly elections across that strong invisible community barrier?

You have all been behaving rather well in recent days on the positivity register – indeed I have had feedback from some ‘lurkers’ about standards on this Slugger Awards site rising, to their obvious pleasure – so don’t hold back from your creative and imaginative ways of giving credit where credit is due, and by implication, less to certain others.

And remember the last Award of all will allow you to elevate some more trenchant and critical analysis of our public and elected servants, so hold your collective breaths a little more yet!

..... because Feeney is not advocating playing the familiar sectarian numbers game, (although it’s easy to distort his point but please don’t), and conclude that is spite of huge Protestant disparities, Catholics would still be the bigger net gainers. So what?

Feeney argues that as ethnic social profiling is employed in English cities, why not the equivalent in NI?

As usual , he makes great play of blaming the British government, but under our local politicians does he seriously believe it would be any better? Without trashing his idea in the least, the problem lies in the political settlement which is creaking so badly at the moment – where instead of the shared future. political behaviour in the new Executive so far seems to work for a shared out future, a carved up one, where inertia rules.. The risk in Feeney’s otherwise perfectly reasonable proposal is that social data would be treated mainly as sectarian data and so reinforce the dreadful old zero sum numbers game.

Those prominent devisers of the Shared Future idea, Robin Wilson and Rick Wilford of Queens’ University commented wryly on how the politicians just don’t get it, in their devolution monitoring report for the Constitution Unit last May: (read the report in full)

“In January, five north Belfast Protestant clergy wrote to the unionist-oriented News Letter, complaining of the failure of the executive to tackle sectarianism. They wrote: ‘We have poor inter-community relationships, effective apartheid in housing across our villages, towns and cities; community division (exemplified in, but not confined to the physical structures of peace walls); slow pace of reconciliation; sectarianism and fractured educational provision. Our real angst is that a suggested programme for government almost totally fails to acknowledge these profoundly difficult issues exist.’ The response from the DUP junior minister in OFMDFM, Mr Donaldson, was that power-sharing was the ‘shared future’31—an interpretation which seemed to confuse politics as means with the ends it aimed to realise.

The draft programme for government had significantly replaced the language of ‘a shared future’ with ‘a better future’, inline with its prioritisation of the economy—a much more convivial focus for members of the political class than the challenge of tackling the communal divisions in which they were so deeply implicated. The revised PfG32 published by Messrs Paisley and McGuinness, introduced the clumsy circumlocution of ‘a shared and better future”.

From a progressive stance, Wilford and Wilson, as well as being among the closest and most expert observers, have long been the most devastating critics around of the present power sharing system. 

.”The Agreement has tended to place these competing constitutional claims side by side, offering unionists the majoritarian ‘consent principle’ and nationalists the egalitarian ‘parity of esteem’. This has allowed the conflict to be pursued—albeit for the most part less violently—if anything with more alacrity than before.

The way ahead is to transcend these counterposed positions by defining a new, sui generis constitution for Northern Ireland which would satisfy seamlessly concerns for accountability and equality. This would replace the ‘either/or’ antagonism of unionism and nationalism by a ‘both-and’ alternative”

This is visionary stuff – far from what we’ve got or are likely to have. What Wilson and Wilford discount is that often in politics when there’s a will there’s a way, however flawed the system. That may seem like Micawberism. But the natural momentum of government, the policy examples that come from the still-definitive Westminster and above all public pressure from inside the tribes, may nudge the politicians into abandoning – painfully slowly and step-by-step – the bankrupt old numbers game. Who was it said that every day would be Groundhog day?

Feeney ‘s idea, rational in itself, is under the circumstances, almost as visionary as Wilson and Wilford’s Shared Future. Sadly, that’s the measure of how far we’ve got to go.

The Irish Times report also has a fuller quote from Taoiseach Brian Cowen

The Taoiseach told reporters in Galway yesterday the question of whether a second referendum would be held “is a matter the Government has to consider in due course, but we are not at that point in our discussions at all yet. The point of discussion we are at at the moment is examining the outcome of the referendum and obviously there will be a lot meetings with EU colleagues between now and the end of the year where it will be discussed further with them. So it’s not just a matter for our own personal consideration or national consideration, it is a matter we have to discuss with colleagues as well.”

Aer Lingus sold just 176 seats on its Belfast Aldergrove to London Heathrow route for the first month of operation of the new route in January. A total of 32,364 seats are available on the return route, with three 174-seat aircraft flying three return trips daily.

A year after its controversial decision to switch Heathrow flights from Shannon to Belfast, Aer Lingus has cornered just 10% of the Belfast/London air market.

Aer Lingus defended the airline’s Belfast/Heathrow performance, saying market share “wasn’t the main consideration” and stressing the route’s improving performance.

But industry figures from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) confirmed that Aer Lingus carried about 87,000 passengers on the Belfast/Heathrow route between January and May, less than 10% of the total Belfast to London market, which came in at 888,000 for the five months.

Aer Lingus’s sole competitor on the Heathrow route, BMI, meanwhile, carried almost 220,000 passengers during the same five months this year..

As of July 2008, Aer Lingus had three Airbus A320 aircraft based at Aldergrove, serving eleven European destinations

Only three weeks ago, Aer Lingus said it had no plans to axe routes or reduce frequency on its services from Belfast despite crippling fuel costs.

Will that pledge survive these awful figures?

Meanwhile, good news in the announcement that the leading department store John Lewis is putting in another bid to open an all Ireland store at Sprucefield, shorn this time of the additional shop units that had caused such a furore with local traders in Belfast and Lisburn.  The over-worked word “iconic” applies to JL even more than to Ikea whose opening at Holywood Exchange was regarded as such a coup. 

For the English ( not the Scots), emotions are a bit lower, though even there in 2000, the anniversary of Cromwell’s return from Ireland, the historian and leading Cromwell authority Professor John Murrill suffered for his interest in Cromwell: 

“I was myself assaulted and received death threats. The depth of
hatred that still exists in Ireland is matched only by unawareness in non-Catholic
English circles of what Cromwell did in Ireland. I am reminded of GK Chesterton’s
remark that the tragedy of the English conquest of Ireland in the 17th century is
that the Irish can never forget it and the English can never remember it.”

Might the reason for all this unpleasantness have something to do with the fact that good professor was President of the Cromwell Association, and may be supposed to have plenty of good words to say on old Ironside’s behalf?  Was he therefore the right man to be reviewing Cromwell’s life and work in BBC History magazine?.  On inquiry, that seems unfair to him.  A summary of the prof’s views suggests a more dispassionate view than the Irish, but very far from a whitewash. This for instance on the Siege of Drogheda which ended with the massacre after surrender of 2,500 immediately and hundreds more later.

“It was in accordance with the laws of war, but it went far beyond what any General had done in England. Cromwell then perpetrated a messier massacre at Wexford. Thereafter most towns surrendered on his approach, and he scrupulously observed surrender articles and spared the lives of soldiers and civilians. It was and is a controversial conquest. But, from the English point of view, it worked’

On the same occasion, Morrill, who is Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge contributed an article entitled ‘Was Cromwell a War Criminal?’
This is a carefully balanced piece “ for” and “against” but “against” contains the conclusion:

“This was ethnic cleansing on a scale undreamt of by Slobodan Milosevic”

I’ve always thought of Cromwell as follows. In the tsunami of religious conflict compared to our own pond ripples that was the 17th century, Cromwell was the epitome of the disciplined fanatic, who became an outstanding military leader out of his status and ability to raise a regiment in Huntingdonshire. He achieved this by the then revolutionary method of showing his fellow men respect as fellow Christians, training them – and paying them. None of that feudal nonsense any more.  Decidedly less favourably, as a Bible Protestant who nonetheless tolerated other Protestants in an intolerant age, he despised the Catholic Irish - and Catholic English - as being beyond the Pale ( even if they were in it if you see what I mean).

At Drogheda he employed usual siege warfare conventions. In those days,besiegers were almost as vulnerable as the besieged because of exposed supply lines and an ever-present threat of disease. So the besiegers warned those cooped up that if they didn’t surrender by XX, they’d be massacred. Which they duly were. And most of them were English. But although Cromwell must be judged mainly by the standards of his time. I’m now convinced he brought an extra edge to the business.

As O’Toole puts it: ( His conduct at Drogheda was) a refusal to distinguish between civilians and combatants and a resort to ethnic cleansing. In his first engagement, at Drogheda, he personally supervised the slaughter of about 2,500 soldiers and an indeterminate number of civilians. The arguments of apologists that this was within the laws of war at the time are contradicted by the evidence in Cromwell’s own account that he himself understood the scale of the massacre to be exceptional. It would, he admitted, have prompted ‘remorse and regret’ were it not intended to have exemplary effect as both collective punishment and a warning for the future.”

In England I see Cromwell as a sort of latter day Musharriff, executing the previous leader, always dissolving parliaments, shooting democrats ( the Levellers at Burford Church) and claiming divine inspiration for the lot. And… so totally failing to create a stable regime that they had to bring back the old one. The TV historian Tristram Hunt likens him to a puritanical ruthless Taliban leader.

Yet you can’t eliminate him from the history of the British constitution, as the unifier of the three kingdoms who still leaves trace elements behind in the DNA of the development of British democracy, even up to today.

Hunt states:
“Reverence for Cromwell was one of the few socialist traditions that survived the transition from old to new Labour. Frank Dobson, a politician whose career symbolises the difficulty of that passage, is a leading light (along with Lady Antonia Fraser) of the Cromwell Association. And Dobson shares the same machine-politics admiration for the Roundheads that Tawney expressed. “For me, it boils down to this,” he responded to a question about Cromwell’s actions at Drogheda. “He was on the right side in the civil war and, because of him, the right side won. He changed the course of English history, and changed it for the better.”

But I found quite the best romantic English revolutionary view of Cromwell in a Communist site – appropriately enough - for I was taught Cromwell by the historian they revere, the very late revisionist Christopher Hill. Cromwell swept away the feudal order, and installed the bourgeoisie in the second stage of the English Revolution. That’s why he remains something of an English hero to the English broad left.

We’re still waiting for the third stage.

P.S. Should you be concerned - yes Cromwell’s Irish record is exposed in the English national curriculum.

FT cont.
“Capt Ivanov and Eduard Kokoity, the pro-Moscow president of South Ossetia, say they held a meeting that day between Marat Kulakhmetov, commander of the Russian peacekeeping forces, and Temur Yakobashvili, the Georgian minister for re­integration, whose job is to deal with the breakaway regions. General Kulakhmetov asked Mr Yakobashvili to telephone Mr Saakashvili and tell him to declare a unilateral ceasefire. At 7.30pm Mr Saakashvili announced the ceasefire: “I would like to address those who are now shooting at Georgian policemen. I want to say with full responsibility that several hours ago, I reached a very difficult decision – not to respond with fire. This was no use, however, and the fighting escalated..”

The New York Times’ Sante E Cornell backs up this line with supporting background:

The truth is that for the past several months, Russia, not Georgia, has been stoking tensions in South Ossetia and another of Georgia’s breakaway areas, Abkhazia. After NATO held a summit in Bucharest, Romania, in April — at which Georgia and Ukraine received positive signs of potential membership — then-President Vladimir Putin of Russia signed a decree effectively treating Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of the Russian Federation. This was a direct violation of Georgia’s territorial integrity.

It came after years of growing Russian efforts to assert control over these regions, for example, by distributing Russian passports to citizens and arranging the appointment of Russians to the territories’ governments. Mr. Putin, who is now Russia’s prime minister, oversaw a build-up of Russian “peacekeeping” forces in Abkhazia, which was clearly intended to provoke Georgia into a military response.

The emphasis from the Guardian’s veteran left-leaning Jonathan Steele is very different, though concentrating on the immediate crisis:

“(Georgian President Sakashvili’s) biggest lie was his attempt to airbrush the fact that he created the crisis by launching an artillery barrage on the South Ossetian capital, which killed scores of civilians and 15 Russian peacekeepers. It was absurd to think Russia would not retaliate. So the next lie was to claim Russia’s leaders had prepared a trap. In fact, they were taken by surprise as much as the Ossetians. Nevertheless, Russia should pull back completely now. It should also have restrained South Ossetian militias from running amok against Georgian villages.”

There are concerns Ukraine could be the next flashpoint. Ukraine’s president says his country is a hostage in a war waged by Russia against states in the old Soviet bloc.  Ukraine said on Wednesday it wanted to discuss charging Russia more for the lease of a Black Sea naval base, a move that could aggravate regional tensions already enflamed by Moscow’s conflict with Georgia.

This could be some flashpoint. The Russian Black Sea and Ukrainian fleets, awkwardly split between the two successor States at the time of the USSR’s collapse, are both stationed in the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. This ancient Russian territory though lying south of Ukraine, was magnanimously handed over from Russia to Ukraine in the glory days of the USSR in the 1950s, by Khrushchev. Crimea is a key instance of the fluid borders and population shifts, often brutally imposed, that had long been a characteristic of the Russian empire. 

Following David Miliband’s trip to Kiev and much other diplomatic scurrying-around, western leaders at a special summit next week will be fumbling for a response to Russian recognition of the breakaway Georgian territories. Will they rapidly try to bind the Russian periphery not already included in the Nato sphere quickly and “ call Russia’s bluff?” Or will they seek to cool Russian passions by doing nothing in particular? Nato is divided, the British with the Americans sounding militant, the Germans temporising.  A Russia contemptuous of western protests yet fearful of western encirclement could start issuing more Russian passports to Russians and minorities in the Russian periphery, such as Ukraine where nearly half the population is Russian or Russian-leaning; or in the Baltics, where there have been repeated clashes and tensions in previous years. The issuing of passports could then spark tensions exactly like those in Georgia/south Ossetia and provide another, even greater casus belli. It is not the same by any means and the Russians would furiously resent the parallel, but the situation bears a certain resemblance to Hitler’s acts of provocation with ethnic Germans in the Czech Sudetenland in 1938 before seizing the whole of Czechoslovakia, and on the Polish frontier on the eve of war in 1939. It is classic destabilisation strategy.

Unionists treated US Special Envoys with suspicion, more so under Clinton than Bush because of the tradition of mainly Democratic Irish-American pressure. But the record shows that when the chips were down, successive envoys put more pressure on Republicans than the British government did, notably over decommissioning. Here are two sharp insights, the first one of special envoy Richard Hass with Gerry Adams on a fateful day.

“In the Observer, Alan Ruddock, begins his account with the morning of September 11, the day of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, as the US special envoy to Ireland, Richard Haas was preparing for a meeting with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Under the heading, “ How America held the IRA over a barrel,” Ruddock writes:

“After a few minutes of talking about ‘inching forward’ towards the peace process, Haas finally snapped. ‘If any American, service personnel or civilian, is killed in Colombia by the technology the IRA supplied then you can f**k off,’ he shouted, finger jabbing towards Adam’s chest. ‘Don’t tell me you know nothing about what’s going on there, we know everything about it,’

His successor Mitchell Reiss was guardedly critical of aspects of the Blair strategy, as recorded by Jonathan Powell in his book; “Great hatred, little room” which Reiss reviewed.

“Yet there were indications that No. 10 had more room for manoeuvre than it realised. In July 2005, the IRA had finally agreed to decommission all its weapons. At the last minute, Adams called No. 10 to demand that some of the weapons not be destroyed so that the IRA could arm itself against possible attacks from dissident members. Unless this was allowed, he threatened, decommissioning would not proceed. The Blair government conceded, but wanted to check with Dublin. Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell refused to acquiesce in the backsliding, despite enormous pressure. Powell told Adams of the problem, and Adams gave way. Decommissioning took place as planned.”

Reiss diplomatically chides Powell for underplaying the US role and thereby, gives his assessment of its importance:

It would be inaccurate to claim too large a role for the United States in the peace process, but it seems a bit churlish for Powell to white out America from the process almost entirely. The “Four Horsemen” (Hugh Carey, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Tip O’Neill and Ted Kennedy), drew international attention early on to the discrimination against the Catholic community in education, employment and housing in Northern Ireland, and they balanced their intervention by also denouncing IRA violence. The Clinton Administration energised the peace process by inviting Adams to the White House and then by devoting time and attention at the highest levels in order to sustain political momentum.

The contribution of George Mitchell, whom Powell barely mentions in his chapter on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, was critical in guiding the political parties to agree on a framework for peacefully resolving the Troubles. My predecessor, Richard Haas, met with Sinn Fein leaders on 9/11 and forcefully explained that terror would no longer be tolerated; just four days later, the IRA agreed to start decommissioning its arsenal. At a St. Patrick’s Day event in 2005, with Adams sitting in the front row, Senator John McCain denounced the IRA as a bunch of “cowards”; back in Belfast three weeks later, Adams called for the IRA to completely decommission its weapons and commit itself to a purely peaceful and political way forward. And over the years, Irish Americans have donated tens of millions of dollars for reconciliation efforts and generously hosted delegations from both traditions when they visited the United States. “

While US interest in our affairs will survive both the uneasy political settlement and the economic turndown, it’s hard not to conclude that John Cain would fail to pick up the torch.  And that the glory days of hobnobbing with the US establishment are over - except to hand over a bowl of shamrock.

Visitors from continental Europe already say that the Irish border is one of the most invisible in the EU. When I cross the border on the main Dublin-Belfast road every Monday morning on my way to work in Armagh, I am driving one of the 14 million cars which cross annually at that point. At least 18,000 people cross the border every day to work, and 1.7 million people cross it annually by bus and train for shopping and other short-term trips. The Centre for Cross Border Studies earlier this year set up the Border People website for the North/South Ministerial Council (www.borderpeople.info) to help such people deal with the practical issues of crossing the border to work, study or retire: job seeking, social and health benefits, taxation, house-hunting, banking, insurance and so on.

Everyone knows about the dense and rich network of cross-border relationships between institutions, organisations and people – economic, social, educational and cultural – that has blossomed since the 1998 Belfast Agreement. But many of these emerged from roots which went back much further.  A quarter of a century ago the distinguished political scientist John Whyte burrowed through reference books from one of the darkest years of the ‘troubles’, 1973, to find that 21 per cent of the more than a thousand private organisations then operating in Ireland were organised on an all-island or all-archipelago basis (with 15% in the former category).

So it’s not just on a North-South basis that we Irish and Northern Irish people are blessed with multiple choices. Looking eastwards, those of us in the North enjoy all the benefits – still considerable, although lessening – of the British welfare state. Those of us in the South enjoy a passport-free zone – although this may now be threatened by new British anti-terrorism measures – and a free trade area with our large neighbour, while Irish citizens ‘over the water’ continue to be treated for most purposes as indistinguishable from their British counterparts.

The recent close relationship between the Irish state and the European Union may also be about to alter radically, since June’s successful campaign against the Lisbon Treaty - spearheaded among others by Sinn Fein – may see Irish links with Europe significantly weakened and links with Britain strengthened as an unintended consequence. A number of Dublin commentators have pointed to this as a real possibility if Ireland fails to pass a second referendum to approve Lisbon, and the Eurosceptic Conservatives take over in London in the next two years.

We should not forget how insignificant we in Ireland are in European terms. Ireland, let alone Northern Ireland, is a pimple on the history of the continent. In Tony Judt’s magisterial history of Europe since World War Two (Postwar, Pimlico, 2007), our 30 year civil conflict merits just two pages out of over 830. During the past decade and more we have availed of the extraordinary generosity of the taxpayers of Europe: in the South through successive EU Structural Funds, in the North through a dedicated Peace Programme. Now that it has helped us to establish peace and prosperity to a very significant degree, such assistance is rightly going instead to the poorer emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.

So let us enjoy our unprecedented ‘united Ireland to some/United Kingdom to others’ dual identity. Friendship alongside interdependence is a far, far better place, after all, than the old ‘antagonism plus dependence’ model which characterised Irish-British relations throughout the last century. The Northern poet John Hewitt rejoiced in having the rich complexity of four elements in his “hierarchy of values” - Ulster, Irish, British and European – and warned that “anyone who omits one step in that sequence of values is falsifying the situation.” We could learn from him.

Andy Pollak

Here’s how it looks, set in the UK context. by the Office of National Statistics.

NORTHERN IRELAND POPULATION GROWTH 000s

2006 2011 2016 2021 2031
1742 1812 1868 1922 1999!

“Trends differ for the four countries of the UK. The population of England is projected to increase by 8 per cent by 2016, that of Northern Ireland by 7 per cent ( big year, that) and Wales by 5 per cent. The projected increase for Scotland, where fertility and life expectancy levels are assumed to remain lower than in the rest of the UK, is 3 per cent. Across the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland recorded the highest rate of growth with a one per cent population rise last year to 1.8 million people. The population of England rose by 0.6 per cent to 51.1 million. Scotland and Wales rose by 0.5 per cent.” (ONS)

Of course many of us won’t be around to see the end of the projections and the ratio of oldies will be far too high.

Do I really believe it all ? For the UK, The Office of National Statistics enter a caveat.
“The UK population reached 60.5 million this year, and the new official figures suggest it will rise to 65 million by 2016 and 71 million by 2031.
The ONS said these were projections, not forecasts, because it was impossible to predict how changing government policies might affect the outcome.
Policies like immigration and welfare.

Overall, is the trend good or bad? Higher immigration of the skilled, retaining our own skills good; big increase in oldies over youngies, bad. Not to mention the environmental costs. Yet if the UK-Germany population balance had been like these in the 1930s would WW2 have happened? 

More detail of that clarification

Rather than accepting republican claims about what was agreed at St Andrews let me quote from the document published by the Government.

“Discussions on the devolution of policing and justice have progressed well in the Preparation for Government Committee.  The Governments have requested the parties to continue these discussions so as to agree the necessary administrative arrangements to create a new policing and justice department.  It is our view (i.e. The view of the two governments) that the implementation of the agreement published today should be sufficient to build the community confidence necessary for the Assembly to request the devolution of criminal justice and policing from the British Government by May 2008.”

The reference to policing and justice in the above statement was aspirational and without any binding timeframe.  However, so that the matter of where the DUP stood on this issue is clear let me also quote from Dr Paisley’s statement agreed by the whole DUP negotiating team and made at St Andrews as soon as the two governments published their agreement.

“There is no definitive date for the devolution of policing and justice powers. We remain of the unshakable view that those powers can only be transferred whenever there is the required community confidence.”

It is clear that Sinn Fein has always known that no agreement was reached and that the DUP were working on the basis of the statement issued by the party at St Andrews.  Moreover the reference in the St Andrews agreement by the two governments expressly acknowledges that any devolution of policing and justice was conditional to the Assembly asking for the functions to be devolved – this is a direct reference to the triple-lock veto.

As so often in the past, national pride was salvaged by those of whom the nation generally feels least proud: young, working class men from marginalised communities. While the horsey set, with all their money and self-regard, were making a show of us yet again, the competitors who demonstrated honesty and discipline, pride and passion, were from the invisible Ireland that is represented only in court reports.

And:

Kenny Egan’s north Clondalkin, for example, is almost literally a non-place. It is the product, not of democratic planning, but of the shenanigans that are the subject of the Mahon tribunal. Its “town centre” is a shopping centre that most locals can’t afford to patronise. The struggle to turn it into a home has been harsh: a decade ago, when Egan was starting to box, an astonishing 57 per cent of those aged between 14 and 23 in north Clondalkin had experienced homelessness.

This is an Ireland largely bypassed by the glossy high-tech economy. Just 6 per cent of its men and 5 per cent of women have a third-level education. Even now, there’s a 30 per cent chance of a child leaving primary school with serious literacy problems and a 50-50 chance of even sitting a Leaving Certificate.

There are no silver medals for north Clondalkin in the deprivation stakes - it scores 10 out of 10 in the economist’s index. Yet, there’s more to this story than deprivation - there’s the struggle against it.

And he believes the dominant narrative in the Irish media about this ‘underclass’ is faintly somatic and comforting to the easy affluence of the chief beneficiaries of the Celtic Tiger years:

It finds it convenient when young men from the working class reservations live up to the stereotypes, when they wear hoodies and white socks and throw shapes and sip cans of Dutch Gold lager on the back seat of the bus. The threatening signals allow for the maintenance of a reassuring distance. These people are stupid and crude and potentially violent, and it’s best to stay out of their way.

But “every four or eight years, Ireland is forced to rally round young men from this class and adopt them as our great national hopes”:

We get to hear them speak in their guttural urban accents - and discover that they have something to say for themselves. We get to meet their families - oddly enough, they’re nice, decent people. The cameras are brought into their homes - which turn out to be strangely clean and bright and comfortably furnished. We find, rather disturbingly, that a place like north Clondalkin is full of people with the same aspirations and ambitions as everybody else and that some of its young men make far better representatives for the country than their supposed social betters.

Boxing matters to these young men because it creates a world in which hard things are expected of them. Violence is controlled, restrained and sublimated. Wildness is the ultimate sin and discipline the ultimate virtue. Bodily power is nothing without intelligence.

Manliness is asserted, not by bullying, but by behaving honourably and respectfully towards an opponent inside the ring and, outside it, by a stoical acceptance of defeat and even of unfairness. Above all, boxing is a fatherly culture. Older men - trainers and mentors - treat younger men like sons, giving them the benefit of their own experiences and receiving, in turn, the gift of being listened to. And the young men learn, in the process, not just how to box, but how to be fathers themselves. They learn about encouragement and discipline, about cajoling and warning, about the ways in which different generations can talk to each other.

Boxing does for these young men, in other words, what education and community and society ought to do but don’t. It treats them as people who can achieve very tough things, not just in sport but in learning to be a man. It gives them respect and demands in return that they respect themselves. It defines them as individuals - in few sports is the competitor quite so nakedly alone - but it also creates its own family and its own community. It has no time for self-indulgent victimhood. It both teaches and recognises the dignity that is won in struggling against unfavourable circumstances

If you had a tune you could sing to that. And yet, ironically, it would not be far from the one nation Tory revivalism of David Cameron. Yet, perhaps, if Irish Labour (or any of the opposition parties) is listening, that might be the route to go in a mixed economy which in its understandable dash towards prosperity has lost track of just who provides the bedrock of the industrious new Republic.

Reconnecting the bottom with the top may be an old Tory tactic, but it’s an obvious counterpunch to the semi-permanent and highly expedient governance of Fianna Fail & Co.