Andy Pollak July is holiday time so this will be a short, sharp column and – for a welcome change – it won’t be about cross-border cooperation. I want to reply to the bloggers who respond to my ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’ when it appears on the excellent and (rightly) award-winning Slugger O’Toole website of Irish and British politics. I have to say I find the relentless flow of negativity from (most of) these people, and their obsession with the …
Regular readers of this column know that I greatly admire those people I call the ‘unsung heroes’ of North-South cooperation as part of the peace process in Ireland. These are the people, most of them unknown outside their immediate area of activity, who do this kind of work because, in the words of the social researcher Brian Harvey, ‘they have a vision of and passion for cross-border work and cross-border development and are prepared to commit considerable time and energy …
‘The week that Anglophobia died’ was the headline on the Irish Times article by that splendid columnist Fintan O’Toole(1) at the end of the Queen’s hugely successful visit to Ireland. Citing Frank O’Connor’s poignant story of Irish volunteers in the war of independence executing captured British soldiers who a few days earlier they had been addressing as ‘chum’, O’Toole said O’Connor’s story suggested that ‘left to themselves, without the interventions of violence and power, Irish people and English people get …
This isn’t a good time to be Irish. After the euphoria of the years of the Northern Ireland peace process and the Celtic Tiger economy, we have the disillusion, and even despair, brought on by the cataclysm of the banking collapse, the resulting slump in the economy and the rottenness of a political system that ignored and often encouraged the greed, recklessness and incompetence that has brought the country to its present sorry state. It is a desperately difficult time …
Every two or three years the Centre for Cross Border Studies comes close to running out of money. The begrudgers on the Slugger O’Toole website may not believe it, but a small ‘stand alone’ research and development centre in an innovative but untrendy area like cross-border cooperation is always between 6 and 36 months from closing down. I’m not complaining about this – only stating it as a fact of life. If I were a government department or an EU …
On 8 March the NI Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness will launch the sixth edition of the Centre’s annual research publication, The Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland. One of the most interesting articles featured in it is by two eminent economists, Dr John Bradley and Professor Michael Best, on the difficulties and opportunities facing those with the onerous task of promoting the revival of the border region economy: that is the economies of the six Southern counties (including Sligo) and the seven Northern local council districts which adjoin the border.
Why is the health system in the Republic of Ireland so poor? One way to begin to answer this extremely complicated question might be to compare it with the health system in Northern Ireland, which, while being very far from perfect, is widely perceived as superior to its Southern counterpart. Certainly many thousands of people in the Southern border region see it like this, judging by the large numbers of Southerners (many of them with Northern accommodation addresses) who regularly …
Because it’s coming up to Christmas, I am going to devote this month’s column to a good news story: Northern Ireland’s internationally recognised leadership in the use of ICT in schools, a story which is almost completely unknown south of the border (where the equivalent performance is poor by comparison). The £500 million C2k (Classroom 2000) programme is now 10 years old. It is a centrally managed service comprising an infrastructure of over 65,000 networked computers to the 323,000 pupils …
Six months ago I wrote in this column about the very generous welfare payments being paid in the Republic of Ireland, sometimes two or nearly three times the equivalent levels paid in the North(1). As the Republic now plumbs new depths of national indebtedness and near-bankruptcy, it is clear that this attempt at a welfare state was constructed on the flimsiest of foundations, a real castle built on sand. During the weeks of Ireland’s financial ‘bail-out’ crisis this month, the …
At least we now know where we are now in Ireland, North and South, in the worst financial crisis to have hit the island in living memory. At time of writing the Irish Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, has said that a significant proportion of the €15 billion which must be slashed from public spending before 2014 to get the Republic’s budget deficit down to the level required by the EU must be cut from the government’s budget in the coming …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
[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 …
[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 …
[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 …
[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, …
[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 …
