Brian Walker – Page 56 – Slugger O'Toole

Stakeknife is in the Police Ombudsman’s frame, but has he the tools to do the job?

Brian Walker on June 2, 2015, 11:39 am

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One of the casualties of the failure to implement the Stormont House Agreement is I presume, the extra £150 million due to have been allocated over five years for dealing with the past. Although I know of no details of how the funding was to be shared out, some of it would have been apportioned to the Police Ombudsman, an office whose reputation has been revived by the redoubtable Dr Michael Maguire. He issued a warning last year of the consequences of budget …

Panorama on collusion: Does Trevor Ringland support coverup?

Brian Walker on May 30, 2015, 8:06 pm

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Trevor Ringland’s criticism of Darragh MacIntyre’s Panorama on collusion for rewriting history with a political slant is misguided. The documentary gave examples of a spectrum of collusion ranging from loose handling of informers to covering up agents who were multiple repeat killers, sometimes with the foreknowledge of their handlers. Much of the material is in the de Silva report, the published Stevens reports and elsewhere in the public domain. As he hinted in the programme, Denis Bradley was given brief privileged access to …

Panorama’s exposure of greater collusion was a fine effort but it will make no difference

Brian Walker on May 29, 2015, 12:00 pm

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The BBC are to be commended for visiting “ boring old Northern Ireland “ in a Panorama special on the legacy issues of collusion, Britain’s Secret Deals, reported by Darragh McIntyre. To those who follow the detail there was little that was entirely new, although there was graphic fresh evidence and it was high time it was presented to the wider audience. The bizarre detail that the rifle used in the murderous attack on Sean Graham’s bookies ended up in …

Not all the zombies are politicians. This is also civil society’s failure

Brian Walker on May 26, 2015, 11:49 am

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Not so long ago, Northern Ireland politics were conducted in a seething cauldron. Today they’re in zombieland. Nobody seems to know what sort of situation is facing Northern Ireland in the forthcoming days, weeks and months. Your starter for 10. Is it bailout, surrender or just staggering on? At home, nobody can be bothered even to do an informed analysis of the costs of continuing denial. Malachi, like myself no economist, is no better informed but is properly uneasy . In …

Qualms about Asher’s Law but none over the gay marriage referendum: spot the difference

Brian Walker on May 21, 2015, 9:09 pm

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Forgive me if I take a new post to reply to Mick on Asher’s Law. I think he stretches the point about law and politics too widely. Let’s unpick this a bit. The sexual orientations order was passed under direct rule, by Peter Hain, not the Assembly. That makes it no less law. But it was one of those measures foisted on our politicians to try to force them to do the deal on restoring the Assembly. The message was, …

The SNP have gone beyond the unionist-nationalist split – a new account of their success.

Brian Walker on May 21, 2015, 11:11 am

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For those of us who can trot out the reasons for the dramatic rise of the SNP and still remain dissatisfied with the explanations, the writer David Torrance moves us closer in the Guardian today. Torrance is an open minded unionist who declares his views but doesn’t let them get in the way, a priceless asset in a discussion of divided politics. For me his key point is that the SNP have reached beyond the basic unionist- nationalist, left right splits …

In Prince Charles’ visit there is richer significance than a handshake with Gerry Adams

Brian Walker on May 20, 2015, 10:59 am

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It was probably inevitable but the UK coverage of Prince Charles’ handshake with Gerry Adams exaggerated its significance. The heavy lifting for reconciliation was done by the royals when the Queen and Prince Philip shook hands with Martin McGuiness in the Lyric Theatre, opening the door to a filmed audience as DFM last year. Prince Philip’s handshake is worth emphasising. Mountbatten supervised his early upbringing when he came to England to be educated when his parents split up, his mother being …

Prince of Wales welcomed the prospect of “a Northern Ireland Prime (sic) Cymru!”

Brian Walker on May 14, 2015, 11:54 am

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So Northern Ireland had a look-in in the Prince of Wales” black spider” letters. This in a bread and butter letter to the then secretary of state Paul Murphy. We discussed the issue of an Action-Learning Pilot Scheme which has remained in abeyance since last year, but which, if implemented, could help perhaps break the mould of housing “ghettoes” in Northern Ireland. You may remember that both Paul Murrain, from my Foundation, and John Thompson are ready to help with …

Over the Welfare Bill impasse, a few points of clarification should do it for anybody with sense

Brian Walker on May 13, 2015, 2:39 pm

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In her first move as finance minister, Arlene Foster is right to echo Theresa Villiers in ramping up pressure to implement the Stormont House Agreement and pass the £ 10 billion budget and the Welfare Bill. Unless Sinn Fein gives way, the budget will have a £500 million gap. Funding for 30,000 public sector redundancies will be withheld and corporation tax will not devolved to Stormont. No doubt before the election the DUP were hoping for a modest improvement in what was …

New British Bill of Rights would alter the Good Friday Agreement

Brian Walker on May 12, 2015, 10:38 am

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The new Conservative government appears to be moving fast to enact a new British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act of 1998 which is one of the cornerstones of the Good Friday Agreement. Tory dislike of the HRA has nothing to do with the Agreement. Indeed as so often happens, Northern Ireland doesn’t figure in their thoughts. The Conservatives are targeting decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg which in their view makes it too …

The election exposed the faint breath of a desire for change within the sectarian camps.

Brian Walker on May 9, 2015, 4:38 pm

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All true democrats should thrilled to have it confirmed that politics is not dominated by the polls. Real people apparently can think for themselves. Locally LucidTalk’s amazingly hairy exercises with opinion panels fared better in the prediction stakes than the UK national pollsters, even though playing percentages is a whole lot easier than making firm predictions. Small shifts in turnout and opinion made all the difference. Looking at it from across the water, your campaign was generally beyond embarrassment. The …

How do we decide who forms the next UK government?

Brian Walker on May 7, 2015, 3:11 pm

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We in the Constitution Unit of University College London have produced guidance on the arrangements for forming the next UK government, assuming there is a hung parliament. The short answer first is: it’s complicated and great fun for anoraks but it shouldn’t mean a constitutional crisis. David Cameron stays in office on a caretaker basis. Under civil service guidance he has to be careful to act even-handedly on the question of civil service support for interparty negotiations. For instance it would …

What the manifestos of the Northern Ireland parties don’t say…

Brian Walker on April 23, 2015, 1:42 pm

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Practically everything of importance, as far as I can make out from the cloudy rhetoric. What unites them? Yes! Abolish air passenger duty! But save us from tough decisions. Blame the Brits or seek their help or possibly both at once. As befits the party’s expected numbers, the DUP’s manifesto is about positioning for after the election. It’s also a rehearsal for next year’s Assembly election that offers no hostages to fortune. Whatever the DUP professes about even handedness between …

The tangled web of history that will greet Prince Charles

Brian Walker on April 23, 2015, 11:24 am

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In the shadow of black Ben Bulben, news of a visit by Prince Charles more than a quarter of a century later to the site of his great uncle Earl Mountbatten’s murder in Mullaghmore harbour, brings back vivid memories. It will fill gaps in his own experience and knowledge of Irish and family history. There is a tangled web of history here, of different classes, politics and outcomes. Uncle Dickie” was the last of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren to be held …

Roy Mason, the last to believe in outright IRA defeat

Brian Walker on April 21, 2015, 10:33 am

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Roy Mason who has died aged 91 was Northern Ireland Secretary of State from 1976 to the end of the Labour government in 1979. He was “short in stature and long in self confidence “ as David McKittrick rightly described him. He even designed his own peculiarly vented and lapelled tight fitting light khaki suits. When I last met him a few years ago at the launch of a Northern Ireland stamp, he was eloquent about his collection. He retained heavy police security at …

An alternative take on Northern Ireland on the networks

Brian Walker on April 17, 2015, 4:55 pm

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Mick who follows these things more closely than I do these days is also keener prospector for nuggets than I am. I’m afraid I can’t see much to attract the uncommitted voter to the election campaign in Northern Ireland, other than those who feel like a flutter on the results in Fermanagh and South Tyrone and East Belfast. It feels like zombies going through the motions in a faint imprint of the bad old days, where the worst lack conviction …

Votes for the SNP bind them closer into the Union

Brian Walker on March 11, 2015, 3:27 pm

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Votes for the SNP in the general election would bind the SNP closer into the Union especially if Labour form the government. This was becoming even clearer from the analysis of the gap between Labour’s and the SNP’s austerity plans by Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies. ( Times £) What is clear is that there is a really quite substantial difference between Labour and the Conservatives. We can put it in the order of £24 billion of spending a …

James Molyneaux, master of Ulster Unionist immobility remembered

Brian Walker on March 9, 2015, 7:55 pm

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Of the newspaper obits of Jim Molyneaux so far Chris Ryder’s ( ex Sunday Times) captures him best. He became leader of the Ulster Unionist party first at Westminster then overall, largely because he was the senior man at Westminster and Stormont flickered into half-life for only a few short months during his time. A shy man with impeccable manners, it could be said that his courtesy often concealed his endless political manoeuvring to hold the chronically divided Ulster Unionist party …

Calm down, Alex Salmond is not Attila the Hun

Brian Walker on March 7, 2015, 6:17 pm

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The appeals to Labour to put the Union first and spurn an SNP deal coming from Tory warhorses John Major and Ken Baker sound very statesmanlike. But what do they really mean, with Labour just ahead of the Tories in the forecasts? First, based on all the predictions of main party scores and an SNP landslide, Labour could not form a minority government without some form of SNP support. The Conservatives are stubbornly behind in the polls even though they’re running …

O’Loan calls Stormont House Agreement ” an insult” as Labour promises a Pat Finucane inquiry

Brian Walker on February 25, 2015, 11:32 am

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Amnesty International are not alone in finding the resources allocated in the Stormont house Agreement inadequate for dealing with the past. At a meeting of RightsWatch in Westminster last night, the first Police Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O’Loan was scathing, describing the allocation of £150 million over 5 years to deal with all the issues of the past, as “a joke and an insult to the people of Northern Ireland.” The Historical Investigations Unit was “totally inadequate”. She also said Attorney …