Mick Fealty 
Nationalism risks its own form of “dummymander”: reading the 2021 census as a countdown to unity, much as Texas Republicans redrew their maps on demographic assumptions and lost. The Taoiseach’s new body offers a stronger path, preparing for several futures and engaging every tradition, so that consent is earned rather than assumed.
The Taoiseach’s new constitutional research body will examine three futures for the island: a unitary state, a devolved united Ireland and the status quo. Rather than staking everything on a border poll that may never come, it builds an evidence base, and a set of tools for future taoisigh, that will be useful whatever happens.
Seven months into the year, Stormont still has no budget, and this time there is no collapse to blame. Ministers are sitting and a £1.5bn offer is on the table, but the Finance Minister has made more money from London a precondition. That is a choice, not a crisis.
Carla Lockhart borrows from Paisley and Thatcher, but she isn’t speaking from strength. Pulling the deputy First Minister to remove Michelle O’Neill would freeze budgets at 95%, lose Barnett money from today’s UK Budget, and leave the DUP carrying the blame for a gesture voters would reverse in May.
For a generation, unionist parties competed on who looked toughest. The Garvaghy Road standoff suggests that has changed. Jon Burrows has made restraint look like strength, and the DUP now faces pressure from both sides. A game-theory look at how the three unionist parties responded.
At 105, partition is unlikely to end on a 50%-plus-one border poll. Nationalism’s vote has stalled at 40% while voters drift to “neither”. The path forward runs through governing Northern Ireland well, not waiting it out, and Micheál Martin’s Bodenstown speech shows what that looks like.
The Orange Order’s right to walk the Garvaghy Road was upheld and loyalism stayed calm, but by following a dissident lead, mainstream nationalism hardened tribal lines and alienated the uncommitted voters it needs to reach 50%.
The Garvaghy Road estates were formed in a few short years by families fleeing intimidation, and that founding story is still being renewed. The law may be clear on the Orange Order’s right to walk, but neither a court ruling nor tribal politics can resolve what only engagement will.
Casement Park is demolished and unbuilt, and the SDLP is fighting a sitting MLA in its own ranks. The nationalist vote has barely moved since 1998, even as unionism has declined. Now Jon Burrows is talking up Northern Ireland’s future and challenging Michelle O’Neill to debate it. Nationalism talks up an imminent border poll but has no policy map to get there.
Emergency general surgery left Enniskillen in December 2022, weeks after Stormont fell and with no minister in post to answer for it. Nearly four years on, the Trust says outcomes improved, its own consultants dispute the figures, and the regulator has quietly reversed the recommendation it once called urgent.
Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann came to Belfast for the first time and drew a crowd that may make it the biggest ever held. It also put Ulster Scots music in front of an all-island audience and got a DUP deputy First Minister speaking Irish. Ten things the week told us, and one it didn’t.
The latest LucidTalk poll gets read as unionism in decline. Look at the blocs instead: unionism’s problem is fragmentation, nationalism’s is quieter and harder, and both the DUP and Sinn Féin are both paying for a partnership that delivers nothing.
France’s climate convention implemented 58% of its proposals and reached 78% public awareness, proof a citizens’ assembly can work when a state gives it real authority and resourcing. Sinn Féin’s defeated unity bill had neither, and a wider, patient conversation would serve the question better than a set-piece assembly ever could.
During a week dominated by Jeffrey Donaldson’s conviction, a quieter story slipped past: the Irish Government’s Shared Island Initiative passed €1 billion in commitments to 2030. From a Stormont cricket ground to a sub-two-hour Belfast–Dublin train, it revives a pragmatism that runs from Seán Lemass straight to Micheál Martin: cooperation without precondition, benefit without constitutional strings. The question now is whether Northern ministers will become active partners or passive recipients.
Britain’s productivity flatlined in 2008, eight years before the referendum. Brexit added cost, and serious frictions but the real causes run deeper: weak investment, weak industrial strategy, and an employment model that grew jobs while output per hour stalled. Even Northern Ireland, the one part of the UK with a genuinely distinctive post-Brexit settlement, tells the same story.
Fine Gael has chosen Garret FitzGerald’s centenary to launch a blueprint for Irish unity. But preparation is not persuasion — and the unaligned middle who will actually decide remain unmoved by border-poll rhetoric.
The labour market is changing shape — from a pyramid with a broad base of entry-level jobs to a diamond with a glut of experienced middle-tier workers and a radically contracted bottom. Harvard economists warned us what happens when a successor generation can’t find work. Belfast showed us what it looks like in practice. And it isn’t just a problem for the young.
A stabbing attack in north Belfast has triggered a night of serious disorder across the city and sparked protests in several UK cities. Here is a cautious summary of what has been reported so far.
A major new Policy Exchange report argues that England’s higher education system is broken beyond tinkering: too many students, too much debt, collapsing standards and a funding model that serves nobody well. For Northern Ireland, where one in five of our students cross the water to study, the consequences are closer to home than you might think.
A new survey reveals that 55 per cent of Northern Irish voters would refuse to back any party that collapses Stormont — and that support for institutional reform now cuts across the unionist-nationalist divide. But as public opinion shifts, are the politicians listening?
