Andy Pollak

Sir George Quigley died on 3 March after a long and full life of service to Northern Ireland and Ireland. He was as near as a small place like Northern Ireland gets to a Renaissance man: head of four government departments; chairman of Ulster Bank and Bombardier; the tireless chair of numerous public bodies in both parts of Ireland; leader of the campaign for lower corporation tax; author of a mould-breaking report on contentious parades; overseer of loyalist arms decommissioning …

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In a thought-provoking blog on the new 15 Years On site (http://15yearson.wordpress.com) this month, former Community Relations Council director Duncan Morrow lists all the promised reforms in Northern Ireland since 1998 which have not been realised: a Single Equality Bill, a Shared Future, the Review of Public Administration, Dealing with the Past, educational reform, youth work, parades, Irish language, flags, shared housing and cross-community development. He warns that if politicians and people in Northern Ireland ‘can’t muster the energy’ to …

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Nearly two years ago I wrote a ‘Note’ saying that the Centre for Cross Border Studies had 15-18 months funding left, we were starting to feel a little nervous, and were appealing to our readers and supporters for some good new ideas for cross-border cooperation in Ireland. In the event we generated most of those new ideas within the Centre’s four walls in Armagh, with my colleague Ruth Taillon coming up with a disproportionate share of them.  These ideas – …

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After last year’s hugely successful visit by Queen Elizabeth to the Republic and a joint communiqué of extraordinary warmth following last March’s summit between David Cameron and Enda Kenny, British-Irish relations were generally considered to have reached a closeness unprecedented in more than 90 years since Irish independence and partition. In July the Irish ambassador to Britain, Bobby McDonagh, spoke of the elements that went into this successful relationship. The first of these was Britain and Ireland’s shared membership of …

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For the second month running I am unashamedly going to blow the Centre for Cross Border Studies’ trumpet. Because the Centre does not only write about cross-border cooperation in Ireland; it not only researches such cross-border cooperation – it also does practical cooperation between the two parts of this island. Last month I wrote about the cooperation and exchanges it manages between teacher educators and student teachers. This month I am going to write about another unique and innovative cross-border …

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As a rule I try to avoid using this column as a way to blow the Centre for Cross Border Studies’ trumpet. But given the Irish and Northern Irish media’s almost total lack of interest in things cross-border, I sometimes can’t resist the temptation to tell a particular success story that the Centre is involved with. One of these is the rather clumsily titled Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South, or SCoTENS as it is more commonly known. …

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Regular readers of this ‘note’ will know that I have certain obsessions which keep re-surfacing: the need to upgrade the Belfast-Dublin rail line; the exhortation to Northern Irish people to fully enjoy both their identities, Irish and British; the need for more people-to-people cooperation across the border; and the imperative for the public sectors in the two Irish jurisdictions to work more closely together to provide joint services for the benefit of both their peoples. It is to this last …

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A Note from the Next Door Neighbours (72)  August 2012 DOES THE SOUTH REALLY WANT THE NORTH AS PART OF IRELAND? It is difficult to overstate the lack of interest there is among people in the Republic these days in Northern Ireland, and in relations between North and South. As somebody who works in the North and lives in the South, my experience in recent years, as the economic and financial crisis has come to dominate all public discourse, is …

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As we all know, sometimes newspapers overlook or underplay an important story because it doesn’t make sensational headlines. The meeting between Prime Minister David Cameron and Taoiseach Enda Kenny in London last March – and the joint statement which came out of it  – was one such story. We in Northern Ireland, in particular, would do well to study that statement and ponder its implications closely. The statement was unusual in that it set out the parameters of a closer …

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There aren’t many people who get up every workday morning and say to themselves: “What can I do today to advance practical North-South cooperation in Ireland?”  I sometimes think we in the Centre for Cross Border Studies  – along with our neighbours in the North South Ministerial Council Joint Secretariat down the hill in Armagh – are among the very few. This came home to me recently when I was doing some research for the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust into …

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Earlier this month I attended the final teachers conference in Derry of the Education for Reconciliation project, to join them in celebrating what I believe to be one of the most important cross-border education projects of the post Belfast Agreement period. 13 years ago a visionary Dublin educationalist, Aidan Clifford, director of the Curriculum Development Unit of the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee, decided that he wanted to do something to support the then still young and fragile Northern Ireland …

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For those of us who live on this small island – and in this even smaller province of this small island – going to the occasional international conference is a good way of opening the mind to new ideas (and I defy the small-minded begrudgers who mutter about EU ‘gravy trains’ to tell me otherwise). I was at a conference on cross-border cooperation  in Strasbourg 15 months ago when I fell into conversation with a man from Regio Basilensis, the …

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Does being a border writer mean that, by definition, you are going to be marginalised?  That would certainly seem to have been the case with Eugene McCabe, the Clones-based writer of at least one great play, one masterpiece of a novel and some of the most powerful short stories to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century. He deserves to be ranked up there with William Trevor and Frank O’Connor in the canon of great 20th century Irish …

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Four years ago I wrote a ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’ called ‘Can we become the best border region in Europe?’ in which I listed some of  the distinguished people from the Irish border region over the past 20-30 years and appealed to some of them to come together to promote, develop and celebrate this peripheral and often forgotten region. I am now renewing that call, spurred on by a piece of research, a speech in Cavan, and a …

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If I am surprised at Irish university researchers’ lack of interest in North-South cooperation (see last month’s Note), I am utterly baffled by the lack of interest shown in this essential building block of the Belfast Agreement by the party of militant Northern nationalism, Sinn Féin. Nobody is surprised that the DUP want to do as little North-South cooperation as possible: this is in their DNA. When Northern Ireland Economy Minister, Arlene Foster, unleashes a tirade in the Assembly against …

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After more than 12 years of toiling in the field of North-South cooperation in Ireland, one of the real puzzles for me remains the lack of interest shown by our university academics and researchers in this important and innovative aspect of peacemaking and politics, economics and society on this island. In the past two months the Centre for Cross Border Studies has held two significant conferences attended by over 250 people: the first on cross-border training and impact assessment in …

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How many people know what ‘fracking’ is?  I knew little about this controversial new mining practice until a green-minded friend from Leitrim contacted me about it last month. Fracking is short for drilling for natural gas by fracturing rocks to get access to it. I understand that the process goes something like this: holes are drilled into so-called ‘shale rock’ – which is common all over north west Ireland –  and a mixture of water, chemicals and sand is forced …

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There is a wonderful statement in the 1919 Democratic Programme of the First Dail  – which was eventually sidelined by Sinn Fein leaders as being too left-wing – that ‘it shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means …

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Over the past year  three Northern Irish golfers – Graeme McDowell, Rory McIlroy and Darren Clarke  – have put our little region firmly on the global sporting map by winning the world’s  two greatest golf tournaments: the US Open (for two years running) and the  British Open. This extraordinary feat is wonderfully cheering for two reasons  that have little to do with golf: firstly because it is great for regional  morale when our sporting, musical and literary heroes make international  …

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