Brian Walker I doubt if Bel Tel’s latest snapshot poll will stimulate much more than ritual pressure for a referendum on Unity. The parties have got enough to do just hanging in there for a long time to come. Naturally people will take what they like out of it. What stands out for David McKittrick is the finding that 69% of all Catholics would still vote for Unity, despite the developments of equality and powersharing. I find that less surprising. These are …
It has to be a good thing that the Northern political parties aren’t tearing into each other over the paedophile crisis in the Catholic church, as Fionnuala says in her Irish Times column in which she identifies a mood of isolation among northern Catholics. Was Paisley right about the Catholic Church all those years ago? Well of course he was in part, but was he offering instead a better vision of freedom and fulfilment? A way through the crisis won’t …
Speculation is rife about exactly if/when ownership of Independent News and Media UK finally passes to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. Robert Peston believes the deal is imminent later today or tomorrow. But not a word about the implications for stablemate the Belfast Telegraph, which has been the nearest thing the Indy had to a cash cow for years. Media guru Roy Greenslade covers the history of the tortuous negotiations but has no fresh information to add. The whole business is …
“Policing has got to be ruthless” cries the Newsletter, echoing their endless headlines of 30 years ago. In contrast, Henry warns against repeating “the lethal errors of repressive legislation, internment, Bloody Sunday and later the criminalisation programme in the H-Blocks. The mistakes in state policy drove many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young nationalists into the PIRA’s ranks.” Superficially we have been here before. But the response to counter insurgency didn’t start like that. Emerging out of communal violence it began …
I’ve a fond memory of two journalists in the old Stormont pressroom in the days when members of the trade actually took verbatim shorthand notes. One was from the Newsletter, the other from the Irish News. They would do separate “takes” in turn, that is, make notes of proceedings and later at the corner of the big long table, swap notes to piece together the raw account of the debate. Then they would go off and file completely different reports …
Roy Foster’s review of The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott by Tim Fanning, (Collins Press, 240pp, €14.99) takes me back to my earliest memories of sectarian divisions, together with echoes of the Mother and Child controversy. This review in the New York Times of the film of the story seems puzzled by the whole thing, the sort of docu-drama the British make but is seldom made in the US. Not just a love story against the odds, in other words. Do faint traces …
It’s as well to read the papers. Pól Ó Muirí blogs that BBC NI have opened Fios, a new Irish learning site. In English, Suggests (eh?) Any good? Brian WalkerFormer 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
I’m quite surprised to see that the Bel Tel has run a poll, plus an op ed, to test the waters for the much abused idea of a NI Bill of Rights. A slight tilt in editorial policy at work here perhaps? Useful too because it coincides with the latest consultation concluding at the end of the month. I’ve said my piece so I won’t repeat myself. Don’t shout, I know what you think of polls, especially those you disagree …
Here in London, I hadn’t heard of a promising-sounding initiative, Forum for an Alternative Belfast, until I read Fionola Meredith’s piece in the Irish Times. With their outline plan for the Missing City, a group of architects and others are dedicated to filling in the big gaps in the inner city and stopping the rot of Late Troubles Fortress Brutalism that infested the central area of the city over the last 20 years. I hope it’s not too late.The old …
While Eamonn hacks a way through the thickets of unionist electoral politics, I turn back to the aftermath of the P&J debate. Those UU claims of side deals Peter Robinson called “trash,” on parading, new north-south links, the Irish language etc., what’s keeping them or do they exist? Some of them may still remain hidden from the working parties on which the UUs and the SDLP have seats, so such side deals can’t remain secret for much longer. I mean, …
Why did Dubya make his first foreign intervention since retirement over the micro-politics of Northern Ireland? It can’t have been all down to the magic of Shaun Woodward. On the This Week programme last night ( late on), Andrew Neil’s team remained puzzled. This is the same George Bush who favoured a tougher line than Blair against the IRA and who yet would not accept the argument (if he had ever heard it) that transferring Justice powers is merely dancing …
They don’t make MPs for North Down like this anymore. Constitutional expert Vernon Bogadanor warns retired former Defence chief Lord Guthrie against becoming a political general like Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who retired as Army chief in Feb 1922 and became Unionist MP for North Down the following month. Assassins suspected of being agents of Michael Collins cut him down on his doorstep three months later. Bogdanor recalls Before 1914, Major-General Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the …
Good columnists thrive on perversity but this time, Malachi strains his case by claiming Reg Empey was right to “launch a kick at the (DUP’s) groin” in opposing P&J on Tuesday. But even he admits: Empey has made bad calls: appearing some of the time to want to draw closer to the DUP at the instigation of the Orange Order and squandering his only MP by forming an alliance with the Tories. But this call was his and he had …
Rumbles about MI5 accountability or the lack of it featured in yesterday’s P&J debate. It was ironic that I was so absorbed in the debate that I forgot to head off to hear Eliza Manningham-Buller the former head of MI5 last night telling the Mile End Group that she had no knowledge of US torture in the interrogation of the British resident and Guantanamo detaineee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. She gave this naïve sounding answer to a question I had intended …
In the hue and cry over the Jon Venables case, the assumption goes unquestioned that Denise Fergus the mother of murdered toddler Jamie Bolger has “ a right to know” the details of Venables’ alleged reoffending. No one lightly crosses the mother of an infant murder victim, but Simon Jenkins is surely right to conclude that justice is a meal best served cold and as free as possible from public comment during the investigative and judicial process. To bow uncritically …
With the vital passage of the motion this evening to transfer Justice powers from Westminster and new moves afoot to improve the workings of power sharing towards creating a shared future, the Assembly has taken its boldest steps towards creating political stability since the St Andrews Agreement in 2006. The motion was passed by a parallel consent majority of 88% overall, the unionist majority being 67%. In the long debate stretching throughout the day, highmindedness was not always maintained. But …
The person from Mars – or the US congressman actually present – will take a lot of heart form the level of agreement in the Great Debate on transferring Justice powers. No hint of a crisis atmosphere and hardly a sticky point has been raised so far. But are the DUP benches as full as they should be? The UUs provided a useful target of mild abuse to conceal the high level of consensus, even from them – in principle. …
Owen Polley argues in the Bel Tel that “Tories respect our position in the UK”. I’m sure they do, but do they do it in the same way as the UUP? Not over the touchstone issue of devolving Justice they don’t. They want devolution completed to stabilise the Assembly and are embarrassed by the micro-politics of intra-unionist rivalry. UUs risk getting the worst of all possible worlds by confusing voters who stuck with them through the hard times of the …
The Guardian has an inside splash on an historical project that will keep the more obsessive among us in ammunition for years. Ever since 1641 Protestants’ Great Fear that Catholics will suddenly rise up and slaughter them has been part of the psyche. As Jonathan Bardon puts it, the sworn statements were written partly to justify the massive confiscation of land held by Catholics. But the fear has never left Protestants, sometimes with good cause, just as Catholic resentment at …
More evidence of politicians lagging behind public opinion? I know it’s a “government poll” but a poll is a poll, a snapshot of what people say they’re thinking. Significantly, out of those people polled who considered themselves as UUP voters, 73 per cent said they wanted to see the (Justice) powers transferred And on the sacred issue of abortion in the Republic The YouGov opinion poll showed 78 per cent of those questioned support access to abortion in Ireland if …
