Mick Fealty 
Absolutely cracking evening last week in the Black Box. In all the years the review has been running, this was my first time being able to go. Since it is Slugger’s 20th anniversary year I thought it was about time I finally got over for it. It was great to see old friends, and just to turn up and watch the team (Alex Kane, Allison Morris and host for the evening the one and only Alan Meban). It was funny, …
Polling on the state of play of the parties is far less interesting than those which take a subject and plumb it in depth. The Irish Times IPSOS poll released over the weekend really goes for the United Ireland question in some detail. Commissioned by a group of Irish academics including Brendan O’Leary and John Garry, this survey covers both Northern Ireland and the Republic and asks a series of very searching questions around the true extent of support for constitutional …
Interesting take from The Economist on where last week’s Supreme Court judgement leaves Nichola Sturgeon and the SNP, who have vowed to turn the next election into a referendum on independence… Trying to turn an election into a referendum looks like a gambit to hold together a nationalist movement that has been pushing Ms Sturgeon to deliver results and is running out of patience: one more election, one last heave. This is a high-risk strategy. Scotland’s other parties are free …
The UK’s unwritten constitution is tricky, archaic and hard to interpret on occasions without the help of judges. There have been many calls down the ages for a written code like the US’s (and almost everywhere that was once British, including Ireland). Enter the judgement from the UK Supreme Court on whether Scotland had a unilateral right to call a referendum on Scottish independence. The court finds that calling a referendum falls outside “the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament”. More …
A fascinating letter emerged today from a small group of senior consultants working in the Northern Irish health service that puts its finger the key downside of our habit of electing populist political parties that have little ambition to get things done. Although its subject is health, the same analysis could be applied to almost any other area of public policy including education, infrastructure, agriculture and even climate change (a thing some DUP politicians seem to think only happens elsewhere). …
“When you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water.” — Alfred North Whitehead Last week we had the disturbing news that a Belfast academic had received threats through social media. I have to admit though it would be more disturbing if it weren’t so commonplace these days. See my reasons for leaving …
I was asked to kick off the Late Debate last night on RTÉ with a great panel of some of the most committed and informed southern voices on Northern Irish politics, including Kevin Cunningham, Alison O’Connor, Gary Murphy and Derek Mooney. Katie Hannon started on the much talked about but rarely seen ‘joint authority’. Ian Paisley Snr claimed he used it to get his more recalcitrant troops to sign the St Andrews Agreement, but he never described it in any …
“The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.” -George Bernard Shaw One of the oddly comforting things about NI politics is just predicable it is, compared to politics in the south and over the last few years in the rest of the UK which has suddenly taken in the feel of AR in some bizarre shape shifting arcade game. The current nervous breakdown within the Conservative party …
I’ve been down with Covid over the last few days and so reduced to consuming politics without being about to think about it critically or write about it. But, courtesy of John Naughton, I’d like to share an insight how we’re retreating into our own Arks. As our concerns get narrower and narrower our ability to generate reactions to really big, even global issues diminishes says Venkatesh Rao: There is something exhausted about the collective human psyche right now. It’s been …
Miriam Lord is on fire today in the Irish Times. Anyone watching RTÉ yesterday (or indeed Virgin Media One) will have noticed a big flare up over the government’s pensions. He’s the short version of how that changed in less than a day. “The cat is out of the bag,” cried Mary Lou McDonald, enjoying a hey presto! moment in the Dáil. “Let us call it what it is: a Trojan horse.” So the cat is out of the bag and …
If 2001 and 2011 are anything to go by some things are better said before the Northern Ireland Census results are released rather than after, when the parties [Any one in particular? – Ed] have got their talking points memos into the local newsrooms. TPMs are produced mostly for narrow political purposes rather than for establishing useful facts through careful examination of data which a shrinking and impoverished local media are increasingly unable or unwilling to produce. In the past …
For all the obsessive public chatter about a prospective united Ireland, there are two questions that almost never get asked: why do we need one and how would anyone go about making it happen? Neither relate to the one that currently dominates: ie, what would it look like? It is a question that can be too easily parked (pending further progress) to be of much use to anyone serious in the here and now. In fact, it is one of …
Fionnuala O’Connor asks an interesting and usefully realist question in today’s Irish News: Is Michelle O’Neill expected to say IRA violence was unjustified? Fionnuala’s conclusion: history is not that simple. When you join modern Sinn Féin you conjoin with what was at the time an unpopular campaign of violence that to its many thousand victims was out of whack with any supposed provocation. It did, as Fionnuala says, no one any good. But for the purposes of the growth of Sinn …
I’m officially away this week and next but I think this analysis piece from Lee Reynolds on Trimble’s legacy is worth sharing on the fly, in particular this part… “In the negotiations, his approach was shaped by Sunningdale. It was the Council of Ireland that had broken it with Unionist opinion. He knew what shouldn’t be in it and secured it. This focus on past problems perhaps distracted from future ones. It lacked much of what it needed. Poor or …
I don’t have much to add in terms of what the life of David Trimble adds up to. The breadth of generous comment this week (including Brian’s) says more than anything I might write about the life of the man. His times, I do know a little better. In The Irish Times Eoghan Harris was quoted saying: “Everyone talks about the risks that John Hume took, but Hume didn’t run the same risks as Trimble did — with his own …
I’m not sure where nationalism would be these days without the stereotype of the Orange bigot. The bonfire story is now a staple of the commercially problematic silly season, when papers are hard to sell. As Mairia Cahill noted last Sunday, “on Wednesday the PSNI confirmed this year was ‘one of the safest and most peaceful July 12th events in recent memory’.” She goes on to write: You didn’t hear that on Newstalk. For too long south of the Border, the …
Not commenting on a party leadership race that will likely take the rest of the summer to complete, but I want to highlight some questions the new Prime Minister will have to tackle (and any successor). It’s courtesy of Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation who identifies five key metrics that will have to be confronted in order to address the UK’s current economic decline: Lesson 1: Face up to the fact that Great Britain is in relative decline. Having …
The great thing about not being on Twitter is that you can’t react or be emotionally affected by the crass actions of some eejit throwing a compost bin at an Orange parade in Belfast to see how they might react. Or at least not within the nanosecond timeframe of Twitter which “demands” that you take a deeply unserious act of thuggery seriously. In doing so, we reset our standards at the lowest possible level. Clay Shirky theorises these platforms provide …
Six years ago, Nick Cohen penned the best analysis not of Brexit, but rather the public reaction of the ‘reformed’ journalists, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who fronted its clinching arguments: …they gazed at the press with coffin-lid faces and wept over the prime minister they had destroyed. David Cameron was “brave and principled”, intoned Johnson. “A great prime minister”, muttered Gove. Like Goneril and Regan competing to offer false compliments to Lear, they covered the leader they had doomed …
Turns out it was not just Brandon, Mr Johnson is going too, but not until the autumn…. It will bring to an end one of the shortest lived Prime Ministerships in British history (3 out of 8 from the last 20 years)… Your guess is as good anyone’s in the Conservative party as to who will follow him. After winning an 80 seat majority with an unlikely pro Brexit coalition, Johnson is now facing the exit. Phenomenally though, and it’s …
