Andy Pollak – Page 5 – Slugger O'Toole

Learning from a green town on the Irish border

Andy Pollak on September 29, 2010, 12:55 pm

| Readers 9

I’d like to return to the theme of energy cooperation in Ireland. This month’s belated row over the purchase (announced in July) of Northern Ireland Electricity by the Irish government-owned Electricity Supply Board – which, interestingly, saw Peter Robinson and his DUP Minister for Industry Arlene Foster take different positions – is a small storm in a unionist teacup and will pass. The great majority of people in politics and business in Northern Ireland agree that the single electricity market …

The cross-border health report they didn’t want you to see

Andy Pollak on August 31, 2010, 1:30 pm

| Readers 20

As a former journalist, I do relish getting hold of a government report that makes eminently sensible recommendations but which politicians for some obscure reason do not want the public to see. So I was delighted when earlier this month a copy of the North-South Feasibility Study compiled by the Irish Department of Health and Children and the Northern Ireland Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety came across my desk. This was the report, completed 18 months ago, …

Facing future energy challenges on an all-Island basis

Andy Pollak on July 31, 2010, 11:12 am

| Readers 25

It is perhaps a significant pointer for the future that one of the most successful examples of North-South cooperation over the past decade has been in a vital area which is not even covered by the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Energy cooperation has seen the extension of the South’s natural gas pipeline network to the North in 2005, and the establishment of both an all-island (wholesale) electricity market in 2007 and an all-island electricity grid in 2008. The latter came …

A solid statement that North-South cooperation is here to stay

Andy Pollak on June 29, 2010, 10:20 am

| Readers 47

Armagh is now on the Irish diplomatic circuit. Next month the highly regarded Southern Joint Secretary of the North South Ministerial Council (NSMC), Tom Hanney, leaves to become Irish ambassador to Belgium. His successor, Anne Barrington, is finishing her days as ambassador to Tanzania. The man who will fill in over the summer, the current Southern Deputy Joint Secretary, Bill Nolan, used to be ambassador in Zambia and Lesotho. His predecessor, Niall Honohan, is now ambassador to Saudi Arabia. A …

Does the South now have a better welfare state than the North?

Andy Pollak on May 31, 2010, 4:01 pm

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Growing up as a Northern Irish and British boy in the 1950s and 1960s, it was an article of faith that the wealthy United Kingdom had the best welfare state in the world and the Republic of Ireland was a backward and impoverished place that couldn’t afford such a socially advanced system. Even after nearly 40 years of living off and on in Dublin, I find it difficult to rid myself of the notion that – despite all the Republic’s …

What next for our North-South postal and train services?

Andy Pollak on April 30, 2010, 11:09 am

| Readers 24

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] Here is some good news. The postal service between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland works well. A report in February by Consumer Focus Post, the consumer ‘quango’ which looks after the interests of users of the UK postal system, found that nearly four in five Northern Ireland individual users …

Have our parents and leaders screwed up the country?

Andy Pollak on March 31, 2010, 8:24 pm

| Readers 28

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] I have just returned from Malawi in southern Africa where I was with a group of Irish and Northern Irish university academics in health, education and ICT who are working with colleagues in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda on a training programme to help build their capacity to raise the research performance of …

Unity Won’t Solve Ireland’s Two Major Problems

Andy Pollak on February 27, 2010, 9:09 pm

| Readers 116

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] I believe that in the present circumstances of continued deep communal division in Northern Ireland and deep economic crisis in the Republic, Irish unity is not on the political agenda, nor does it make sense to put it on the agenda any time soon. I have not heard advocates of rapid …

A tribute to the amazing Armagh Rhymers

Andy Pollak on January 29, 2010, 11:10 pm

| Readers 213

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] If I ever became Mayor of Armagh, the first thing I would do is to give the freedom of the city to the Vallely family. John B. Vallely is the best known of them, an artist who despite his international reputation has continued to live and work in his home place, …

My Unsung Cooperation Heroes of 2009

Andy Pollak on December 22, 2009, 7:58 pm

| Readers 10

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] Cross-border cooperation in Ireland is not exactly trendy. Much of it involves the painstaking building of trust and relationships, often as a pre-requisite to working on practical joint projects. Almost by definition, such mundane, ‘under the radar’ work rarely gets a mention in the media. It’s probably just as well, since …

Civil Servants and EU Officials are Peacebuilders too

Andy Pollak on November 27, 2009, 7:08 pm

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[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] On 13th December 1999 a long line of black Mercedes snaked across the border into Armagh for the first meeting of the new North/South Ministerial Council set up by the Good Friday Agreement the previous year to oversee the new cross-border ‘Strand Two’ institutions established by that Agreement. There to meet …

The man with the cross-border knowledge in his head

Andy Pollak on October 30, 2009, 7:15 pm

| Readers 44

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] Gary McIntyre is a solicitor who works as an advice worker with Citizens Advice Northern Ireland in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. For the past six years he has been employed by Borderwise, a cross-border partnership between Citizens Advice NI and the Citizens Information Board (Republic of Ireland) which was set up with …

Time to bring in the French to run the Enterprise?

Andy Pollak on October 1, 2009, 2:08 pm

| Readers 33

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] I make no apologies for returning to one of my pet subjects: the woeful state of the Belfast-Dublin rail service. We all know what happened on 20 August when the viaduct carrying the line across the Malahide estuary collapsed, narrowly avoiding a major disaster. We know something of what preceded that: …

Less Irish unity, more Irish cooperation, please

Andy Pollak on August 26, 2009, 12:35 pm

| Readers 6

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] I think it would be fair to say that something like 90% of people in the Republic of Ireland never think about Northern Ireland these days, other than, very occasionally, as a place to go to do some cut-price shopping. The North doesn’t even enter their consciousness. A striking example of …

Turning Orange marches into a tourist event

Andy Pollak on July 15, 2009, 4:42 pm

| Readers 10

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] This is the Orange marching season. It is a traditionally a time of heightened inter-community tensions in Northern Ireland, when tens of thousands of Catholics and middle-class Protestants flee the province in order to avoid the ‘Twelfth’ and its accompanying displays of sectarian triumphalism. In the late-1990s the Portadown Orangemen’s insistence …

Knitting the island’s relationships back together again

Andy Pollak on June 25, 2009, 4:46 pm

| Readers 4

I’ve been thinking about knitting recently. It seems a good image for what those of us in the Centre for Cross Border Studies, Cooperation Ireland and other North-South ‘reconciliation’ bodies are trying to do: knitting damaged relationships between people and communities on this island back together again. Knitting is an activity usually done by women: it is slow, painstaking, meticulous, unglamorous and utterly unthreatening. When done well it produces articles of great beauty, which are at the same time useful, …

WANTED – Idealistic person to work for £45,000 per year

Andy Pollak on May 26, 2009, 9:13 pm

| Readers 38

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] It didn’t come home to me how appallingly uncompetitive the Republic of Ireland has become until the Centre for Cross Border Studies interviewed candidates for the job of Deputy Director (Research) last month. Several youngish residents of the Republic working as middle-ranking officials and researchers with state bodies and earning in …

An unsung hero of cooperation from East Belfast

Andy Pollak on April 29, 2009, 9:26 pm

| Readers 247

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] George Newell is a community worker in a deprived area of East Belfast. He is also well-known in Drogheda, Monaghan and Donegal for the large numbers of working class Belfast Protestants he has brought across the border to experience life in the once feared and hated Irish Republic. He never appears …

The express train which has lost its momentum

Andy Pollak on March 30, 2009, 9:06 pm

| Readers 325

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] For the past 10 years I have been travelling on the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise express up to four times every week. It is with genuine relief at the end of a hard week of cross-border cooperation that I collapse onto the homebound train from Newry to Dublin with a cup of tea …

Better phones, better insurance, bad banks

Andy Pollak on February 27, 2009, 8:31 pm

| Readers 7

[This is taken from A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, the monthly e-bulletin of Andy Pollak, Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin] Nine years ago I wrote an article1 for the Irish Times recounting my travails, having moved from Dublin to Armagh to work for the Centre for Cross Border Studies, when I tried to open a cross-border bank account, buy a mobile phone which I could also use to ring Southern numbers, …