Brian Walker 
The phrases “culture wars” and “identity politics ” are comparatively recent imports from America but people are using them as if they’ve been around forever. On the whole they are pejoratives, used by rightwing politicians to denigrate or “gaslight “ the slow march to freedom of women however described, and ethnic and social minorities, by creating “wedge issues” to stir up alarm and so divide and rule. Ireland as a whole was ahead of the game long ago. The rise …
The mouse didn’t roar as the House of Commons sent the Protocol Bill on its way yesterday. “Only if enacted” said an uncharacteristically strident Jeffrey Donaldson, would the DUP go back to Stormont, advancing the curious argument that the Protocol Bill would “give back to the elected representatives in Northern Ireland the power to take the decisions that they have not been able to take.”(It would give them to Westminster not Stormont). Most MPs including the Conservatives who spoke, were …
If ever it needed reminding, the importance of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its court in Strasbourg was underlined by the comments of the former Lord Chief Justice to MPs the other day. As it stands Sir Declan Morgan feared that Westminster’s latest attempt at a Legacy Bill would be struck down by the Court as in basic violation of human rights. But there is an even more fundamental dimension to this. ECHR rights are embedded in …
The former Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan allowed his frustrations to boil over at a hearing of the Commons NI Committee yesterday examining the government’s Legacy bill. The earlier draft Bill dating back 12 years for a with a powerful Historical Investigations Unit at its core which had been finally endorsed by most local parties was abruptly scrapped by the British government and replaced by a radical new version for a de facto amnesty. Not that they admit to …
Photograph Courtesy Channel 4 The Real Derry. Really? The first thing, Brian, is not to get too intense. The second is to resist abandoning all critical faculties. Jamie Lee is a great kid- sorry, young woman, as good a talker as her fictional self Michelle and a little less foul mouthed. That didn’t stop her old teacher greeting her warmly. The third is to admit I know very little about the very different home town of today. In Derry Girls …
From his analysis of the Protocol bill, I want to pull out Rafael Behr’s comments on how little Northern Ireland registers in the wider media as itself, on merit . You can almost hear the groans from TV viewers,” Not Northern Ireland again” in a situation even more incomprehensible to them than the Troubles It isn’t every day that former prime ministers set old party enmities aside to deliver a unified message on a matter of national urgency. When John …
Political gaming has intensified as the Times and the FT report that the UK government will not proceed with the Protocol Bill unless the DUP promises to return to the Assembly. As the bill will at best take a year to pass Parliament are the DUP being invited to buy a pig in a poke? Can this ultimatum over ride the DUP’s demands for “action not words?. Is the briefing to the papers credible anyway except as short term pressure …
This week’s showing on BBC2 of the gripping Our Falklands War: a front line story will have forced comparisons and contrasts with the Troubles. When I reported the Falklands War from afar in Buenos Aires I used to wonder how those spotty youths in ill fitting uniforms would fare against the elite of the British Army like the Parachute Brigade. Not well as we saw when 1000 of them surrendered to less than 100 paras at Goose Green, although the …
What do you suppose Boris Johnson is up to with his on the face of it, kamikaze tactics over the Protocol Bill? By pursuing the most aggressive line he seems determined to court a confrontation with the EU. Can he be serious, even as a survival strategy? As Peston points out, where Johnson is on shaky ground is that within the Protocol there is explicit provision to suspend it, where there are ‘societal difficulties… liable to persist’ via its Article …
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
Is it really 20 years since I was present at the Queen Mother’s funeral in the Abbey and later in the year, looked on open mouthed as Brian May plucked out God Save the Queen from the roof of Buckingham Palace? Access like that went with the job then. This time, it was the street party outside my block of flats in Ealing. Time for an outing of my old Henry VIII costume I rashly thought, anything to liven up …
I think of the 1950s as the last time you didn’t have to be stressed out about identity. Maybe that’s because I was aged from between 3 to 12 at the time but I don’t believe that altogether explains it. Londonderry was a unionist town with a Catholic majority, a statement not only about the gerrymander but the atmosphere of the old walled city where most premises were Protestant owned, like the middle class suburbs. Working people on both sides …
Last week the Bishop of Derry dedicated a garden to the memory of a 15 year old Derry boy Manus Deery, shot dead by the British Army in the Bogside on the 50th anniversary of his death. As the Derry Now website reported: Manus had just started working after leaving St Joseph’s Secondary School and was eating a bag of chips and carrying a comic in his back pocket which he had bought with his first wage packet… At the …
In my last post, I was a lonely outlier when I argued that we had nothing to lose by giving Boris Johnson a chance to see what he can deliver. I did so in full knowledge of his record and reputation. I am unrepentant. At least equally irritating as Boris is the solipsism that assumes Northern Ireland is centre of world attention and reduces outsiders like the prime minister to bit players in what Churchill called “the fearful integrity” of …
Ahead of his day in Northern Ireland, much media comment is focusing on Boris Johnson’s announcement of draft legislation later this week to unilaterally amend parts of the Protocol. This is both inevitable and regrettable. Northern Ireland’s welfare is far more important than the abstruse game of higher politics. Boris Johnson’s article in the Belfast Telegraph deserves to be cautiously welcomed. It suggests a new level of engagement in all level of NI affairs even encroaching on Stormont’s competences. Much …
Is there any hope that Boris Johnson will at last begin to deal straight with all parties on the protocol? He arrives in Belfast on Monday without a coherent position. Without one, what has he got to offer? He has yet to pronounce where he stands. The cabinet is clearly divided on Liz Truss’s vow to go it alone unilaterally. However much he sympathises with their cause , he must oppose the DUP’s deep boycott of the Assembly. No 10 …
To use a well known term from political science, we seem to be in a right bugger’s muddle. Brinkmanship is the order of the day. Wobbling on the cliff edge is Liz Truss the foreign secretary, threatening to bring in legislation to allow business to disregard EU rules on GB-NI trade as early as next week. She argues that existing EU concessions would “ make things worse.” It focuses on the fact that grace periods mean the protocol is not …
The glasses of full and half full Assembly results have been poured and are being eagerly being digested according to whether consumers are convinced they amount to a breakthrough for the nationalist cause or leave things much the same in a slightly different shape. Each according to taste. What matters more immediately now are the bums on seats in Stormont. To allow Executive ministers of the old mandate to continue, MLAs will have to manage to elect a Speaker. …
I’ve just emerged exhausted from reading Fintan O’Toole’s magisterial “personal history” “We don’t know ourselves” on life and times in the Republic from his birth in 1958, a good 10 years after my own. I really should have made copious notes. But my snap reaction is that Northern Protestants were surely dead right to want to have nothing to do with the place. Indeed they didn’t know the half of it. O’Toole describes the political identity of a pure Ireland …
Photo courtesy History Collection Irish passports had special uses long before Brexit. Forty years ago, at the onset of the Falklands War when the Argentines were refusing entry to single passport carrying Brits, I had the original wheeze of using mine to gain accreditation to Buenos Aires for BBC TV News ( ok ,so did others who discovered they had an Irish granny). So with Roisin McAuley joining the Newsnight team and David Capper for Radio News, BBCNI was well …
