Andy Pollak

I have been listening to a most interesting Irish Times podcast with the Northern Ireland commentator and former Ulster Unionist press officer, Alex Kane, about the political impact of the court judgement last month that found former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson guilty of rape and sexual abuse of two very young girls (and reading a follow-up article by Kane in that newspaper).1 Kane detailed Donaldson’s astonishing list of sins, quite apart from the rape and abuse conviction, calling him “a thoroughgoing hypocrite” …

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I am not a typical Northern Protestant, with a father who was a left-wing Czech refugee. But part of me identifies with my County Antrim Presbyterian mother, her family and community. As a half-Irish boy growing up in London, a lifelong love affair with Ireland started through my close relationship with my devout grandfather, a lovely man who was an evangelical lay preacher with his own gospel hall outside Ballymena. That identification made me deeply ashamed at the latest anti-immigrant …

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I have just come out from two and a half weeks in hospital, which means I haven’t closely followed the anti-immigration riots in Belfast, except to feel – as someone from a Northern Protestant background – horrified and ashamed once again that members of my community were in the forefront of that explosion of racism and violence. I will return to this difficult topic in a forthcoming blog. The 2025 annual report of the Shared Island initiative was launched last …

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When foreign, and especially American, visitors come to Northern Ireland, they are amazed that one of the outcomes of our much-lauded peace process isn’t far more Catholic and Protestant children being educated together. The growth of the integrated education movement, which began with a group of idealistic parents setting up Lagan College in Belfast in 1981, has been slow. In 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement, there were 41 schools (24 primary and 17 post-primary) enrolling around 3 …

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I’m going to return this month to the theme of my last blog on Northern Ireland’s continued existence in a new or united Ireland, as outlined by SDLP leader Clare Hanna in her essay in the recent publication What Northern Ireland Means to Me. She said then: “Fundamentally – and I think this is really important to say – Northern Ireland’s always going to exist. I think there’s a perception that in a new Ireland – whatever that looks like – that this …

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A fortnight ago in Belfast’s Shankill Road I met four impressive young people who were deeply involved in their working-class, loyalist community: Stacey Graham, Adam Watters, Ryan McFarlane and Mark McCleave (ranging in age from 19 to 36). All of them work for Northern Ireland Alternatives, a highly successful restorative justice initiative developed and supported by former UVF and Red Hand Commando members, whose co-director is Debbie Watters, Adam’s mother. It has been estimated that NI Alternatives has prevented over …

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On the eve of Ireland’s presidential election in October Kevin Rafter, professor of political communication at Dublin City University, came up with a good idea. He urged the new president to “convene a forum to examine the positives and negatives of unity for the Irish Republic itself, a debate that has not commenced.” I think it unlikely that President Catherine Connolly will displease her Sinn Fein backers by taking action on such an idea. Sinn Fein don’t want an open …

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I never thought I’d be quoting the state-run China Daily for an accurate picture of the sorry state of the world following the US government’s kidnap of autocratic Venezuelan president Nicholás Maduro. But here I go. “From fabricated charges to military strikes and regime change, the operation follows a familiar and deeply troubling script – one that reflects the logic of state piracy”, it said. “Sovereign governments are first delegitimised, then destroyed by force, after which foreign capital moves in to carve …

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy is my international political leader of 2025. I am amazed and humbled by how this small, slightly-built former actor and comedian has, with immense calm, courage and indefatigability, maintained his morale, and the morale of his embattled country, through a year of merciless battering by the Russian army, public humiliation and near-betrayal by Donald Trump and indecision by the European Union. On Christmas Eve he was unveiling the latest peace plan, featuring a demilitarised zone along frozen battle …

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I should begin this blog with a declaration of interest. My father was a Czech Jew, a political refugee who arrived in Ireland in 1948, and my mother was an Ulster Presbyterian. So I am not a typical Irish person, far from it, and I am not writing on this occasion as an objective observer. Having said that, I have regularly stood behind a ‘Grandfathers for Justice for Palestine’ banner, as part of the Grandfathers against Racism group, protesting US …

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Fintan O’Toole is the nearest thing Ireland gets to a public intellectual: a writer of erudition and intellect who tackles the political and cultural issues of the day and of the nation through a widely read column in a prestigious newspaper, in his case the Irish Times. Similarly, for my money, Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph is the finest journalist currently working in Northern Ireland. Neither of them can be easily pigeon-holed into the two traditional viewpoints of commentators, politicians and so …

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If the opinion polls are right, it looks as though Catherine Connolly will win tomorrow’s Irish presidential election by a distance. I believe Heather Humphreys missed a big opportunity: to take on some of John Hume’s mantle and put herself forward as the person who could begin to unite the Irish people, all the Irish people, including the Protestants of Northern Ireland. Based on her record, Catherine Connolly has little or no interest in the North. She has expressed the …

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As I write, we are waiting for Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be released as part of the first phase of the miraculous peace agreement in Gaza brokered triumphantly by President Donald Trump. And I am reading a New York Times article 10 days ago by Megan K. Stack, a distinguished American journalist who has been a foreign correspondent in China, Russia, Afghanistan and the Middle East, comparing Gaza and Northern Ireland. She begins with her impressions of the Northern Ireland …

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The Mail on Sunday (Irish edition) is not everybody’s idea of a truth-telling newspaper (that’s an understatement). They had a front-page ‘exclusive’ earlier this month entitled ‘Humphreys Husband’s Secret Orange Order Past’ about the Fine Gael presidential candidate Heather Humphreys’ husband Eric’s’s alleged membership of the order some 50 years ago.1 It claimed the candidate, who is a Presbyterian, tried to “evade” questions about when precisely her husband may have been in the order, and “admitted” that she had attended Orange parades in …

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Jennifer Todd is a distinguished academic. She is a former professor in UCD’s School of Politics and International Relations; former director of UCD’s Institute for British-Irish Studies, and currently a fellow at that university’s Geary Institute for Public Policy. She has been researching ethnicity, identity, conflict and Northern Ireland for more than 30 years. 19 years ago my first blog when I was director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies was based on a study of inter-generational attitudes in …

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Much of my summer reading this year has been 20th-century Irish history, and the work of superb historians like Alvin Jackson, Paul Bew, Diarmaid Ferriter, Oliver MacDonagh and others. One thing that has struck me forcibly is how many mistakes were made by successive Irish governments during the fifty years after independence when dealing with the single largest and enduring block to Irish unity: the fierce opposition of Northern unionists.[A separate, even longer article could be written about the abandonment …

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For the past fortnight I have been ashamed to be Irish. The savage beating and humiliation of an Indian IT worker – only three weeks in this country – by a teenage gang in Tallaght provoked a series of messages from other people from the Indian sub-continent who had suffered similar attacks at the hands of young Irish people. As the son of a father who was a political refugee and an Irish mother, perhaps this affects me more deeply …

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Is it totally fanciful to imagine that Donegal might serve as a model for a harmonious united Ireland? I have just returned after a week’s cycling in that beautiful northernmost county, where this unlikely notion was among my passing thoughts as I rode through interminable rain showers and occasional glimpses of sun across its high bogs and mountain passes, past its mighty cliffs and gorgeous beaches. Donegal has a bit of everything from all parts of these islands. We stayed …

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One of the recurring themes of this blog is that the people and politicians of the Republic are utterly unprepared for the arrival of around 800,000 Northern Protestants and unionists into a united Ireland, and must do some hard thinking about what changes to their 26-county nationalist structures and symbols are needed if that eventuality is going to happen relatively harmoniously in the not too distant future. Four years ago I wrote: “Guaranteeing unionists their British ties and identity in …

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Ballymena is my home town. I left it as a small child when my parents took me to London, and I have lived for most of the past 50 years in Dublin. But, for better or worse, it still has a special place in my affections. Like most Irish towns, it has its fair share of lovely, kind people, including some, among them members of my family, who have taken in Ukrainian refugees. But it is also a place of …

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