From Monday I will be in Ireland for three weeks. Though posting may be less regular, I hope to bring you more direct accounts of political and cultural life in Northern Ireland.

Tim Butcher reports that the First Minister may be blocked from representing Northern Ireland at the World Summit for Sustainable Development. Earlier this year Dermot Nebitt’s private secretary laid out the measures the Minister was taking in preparation for the …

Brian Walker quotes from an essay by Arthur Aughy from a collection called Aspects of the Belfast Agreement, suggesting that unionists need to break out of what Aughy calls “an orgy of self-pity and culture of fatalism”. Meanwhile, despite numerous …

Several reports by BBC, RTE and Irish Times.

Veteran journalist from the BBC and now the Belfast Telegraph Eric Waugh examines the relationship between the Secretary of State and the erstwhile (well this is Northern Ireland) First Minister. He comments on the difficulties of d’Hondt mechanism for deciding …

Ni fhaca me an leithid!! If you want to shortcut years of study and great summers in the Gaeltacht, just to take your neighbour down a peg or two in the ould tongue, try this. Looks like hours of fun!

Ian Paisley Senior had a reasonably polite exchange with John Reid today over figures he’d pulled together on the rise of violence since 1999, the year after the Belfast Agreement was signed which demonstrated some substantial increases. Tom Maguire of …

Sammy Wilson drops his usual penchant for the one-liner and uses a recent IoD report to argue that the NI economy needs a strong vocational element within its educational system, and will suffer, if Martin McGuinness’s educational reforms go through. …

Regarding my piece of the 23rd July, political scientist Michael Hodkinson comments: “The Belfast Agreement is a consociational model. Basically, it requires political elites to reach a consensus about objectives in the hope that the followers will adopt more consensual …