Mick Fealty – Page 16 – Slugger O'Toole

“…this is not magic, and Trump has no mystical powers. It’s just democracy, coming apart at the seams”

Mick Fealty on August 19, 2021, 3:43 pm

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sand dunes, desert, hills

Good piece in the London Review of Books (I have a gift subscription from an English friend) this week on Michael Wolff’s latest tome on the Trump phenomenon. It’s written by David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends. The book is full of granular detail from the last hours of the Trump presidency dressed with considerable foreboding about the effect he continues to exert on the US Republican Party to get beyond what it hoped would be an aberration. Trump’s …

As long as nationalist parties refuse to allow any compromises for a UI, unionists have little to worry about…

Mick Fealty on August 19, 2021, 7:15 am

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For all the intensity of the debate in some quarters, a united Ireland remains a concept with few ideas to drive it. The Taoiseach’s Shared Island project aims to bring north and south closer but without political preconditions. Some point to increased north south trade since the protocol, but without some amelioration of the restrictions on the east west trade it’s not clear whether the protocol itself is sustainable in the medium to long term. Besides, even if matters do settle …

NI’s Zombie culture war summers are becoming detached from where its youth’s heads are…

Mick Fealty on August 17, 2021, 5:49 pm

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zombie, horror, monster

“Regression is a form of retreat, going back to a time when the person felt safer and where the stresses in question were not known, or where an all-powerful parent would take them away.” -John Kellden Each year we are treated to a series of controversies over loyalist bonfires. Now to be fair they seem to be a falling number, but the three or four transgressive ones do get a fair amount of column inches. When it comes to the …

“Fraying purpose is diminishing Fine Gael’s capacity… [to govern]”

Mick Fealty on August 9, 2021, 11:26 am

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Interesting analysis in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times yesterday from Gerard Howlin on the underlying politics that lead to a climbdown over the ill fated plan to appoint Katherine Zappone as a special envoy… The indiscipline in Fine Gael stems from a suspicion that not all principal figures remain committed to national politics. Entering government for a fourth successive term hasn’t been achieved since 1969. Whatever their private intentions, there is a question mark in colleagues’ minds about …

As Katherine Zappone turns down special envoy offer questions arise over Tanaiste’s judgement

Mick Fealty on August 5, 2021, 5:59 pm

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One of the most idiosyncratic stories to emerge from the coalition in Dublin has concluded with Katherine Zappone’s deciding not to take up the role of special envoy on freedom of expression. It’s subject of a leader in The Irish Times. They comment: Appointing a part-time special envoy at the United Nations ought to be a difficult thing to mess up. Yet through a sequence of basic political errors and a botched response when the controversy ignited, it quickly became clear …

Integrated Education continuing growth suggests its working with the grain of demographic change…

Mick Fealty on August 4, 2021, 11:44 am

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wintertime, clock, time conversion

A piece in yesterday’s Irish News caught my eye, in the sense it claimed that there was now 71% support for Integrated Education (from LucidTalk’s online panel), the same proportion that voted in favour of the Belfast Agreement in 1998. Just 7/8% of NI schools are integrated, but that’s huge compared to the handful that followed Lagan College in the 1980s. It and its North Belfast analogue Hazelwood College fed an aspiration that’s only continued to grow since. There are …

Promoting stability in Northern Ireland is a key national interest for the Republic…

Mick Fealty on August 3, 2021, 7:56 am

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Talking someone who is Catholic and actually cares about the Union (which doesn’t make him a unionist per se but someone of whom unionists should take note), he described Brexit as “a betrayal of the GFA”. Betrayal is an old familiar theme for us regarding matters Northern Ireland. Susan McKay’s new book majors on talking to what she has described in interviews as Lundys, Protestants inclined to stray away from the British cause. It’s also what fuelled the early rage …

NI Protocol: “Pragmatic and flexible leadership needed from Belfast, Dublin, London and Brussels…”

Mick Fealty on July 30, 2021, 3:29 pm

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giraffes, entertainment, discussion

“The beginning [of the new epoch] consists in the recognition of interrelationships. More and more, people will see that there exist no ‘specialised’ questions, to be identified or solved in isolation, since in the end, everything is interconnected, interdependent.” –Wassily Kandinsky With parliaments on both sides of the water in recess we might expect respite from the war of words that has displaced serious consideration of the Northern Irish protocol. However Brexit has eaten every summer since 2016. Just before …

How Ireland Voted 2020: Certainly the end of an era, but the beginning of what?

Mick Fealty on July 23, 2021, 11:30 am

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I must confess, through a combination of not really having understood what happened in February 2020 and the long period of government formation and the onset of Covid I was thoroughly discouraged from delving into the south’s last election. Now, I have my copy of How Ireland Voted 2020. It’s a regular publication edited in previous years by Michael Gallagher and Michael Marsh now joined by UCC academic Theresa Reidy. The biggest talking point in the whole book is Sinn …

Water rates or hosepipe ban: why NI Water funding model needs to change…

Mick Fealty on July 21, 2021, 5:28 pm

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I was on Nolan to discuss a hosepipe ban that’s imminent. In England Severn Trent has asked people to conserve water, but there’s no ban. Water services in England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic have been investing massively in their systems. That’s not only brought leaks down within the system but allows them to keep up with ever rising demand as populations grow across these islands and demands shift up and down with the seasons. Meanwhile NI Water (as it …

Provisional’s war against the NI public cannot provide a moral foundation for new constitutional order

Mick Fealty on July 19, 2021, 11:40 am

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This week’s coverage in The Economist magazine covers the amnesty proposal with just two words, Closure denied. Sarah’s powerful polemic on the forgetting that the government now wants us all to do is already this week’s must read. In the Irish Times however, Liam Kennedy brings another, future angle to the process at a time when Sinn Féin activists are both pushing their movement’s bloody campaign and telling voters that the time for a united Ireland is, now. The President, Michael …

Sinn Féin disowns the amnesty deal it’s been asking for incessantly for over twenty years…

Mick Fealty on July 15, 2021, 4:48 pm

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One advantage of running a blog over a long time having access to the archives. Indeed, the reasons I turned to blogging software all those years ago back in 2002 was I struggled to find an article from just three years earlier in the Irish Times. Initially I used Slugger as a researcher’s pin board on which you could trace not just the day to day pulses in the newsflows (very much a feature when the number of journalists writing …

Amnesty would deny victim’s right to know and underwrite the toxic legacy of paramilitaries

Mick Fealty on July 13, 2021, 12:31 pm

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The Moral Maze programme on BBC Radio Four for last week focused on the perennial question of Northern Ireland’s legacy and gave careful consideration as to what the consequences of declaring an amnesty for past crimes might be. The legacy processes don’t really work largely because it’s a hodgepodge of negotiated pleadings from the leading protagonists in the conflict. Less aimed at truth and reconciliation and more at giving maximum comfort to those political operators who, should prosecutions ever proceed, …

In coming to the only realistic deal on medicines the EU admits Protocol is a work in progress

Mick Fealty on July 8, 2021, 3:08 pm

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Research from QUB showed last week that the protocol splits the NI population right down the middle. I suspect that’s reflection of the unreal way the negotiation process within the joint committee is being projected by both sides. Newton Emerson gives a good example of how the material reality the EU has been projecting dematerialised rapidly under pressure from harsh reality: As the year progressed, it quickly became apparent the medicines sea border was a practical and political absurdity. Private …

Underneath the chaos of the last few months political ground is beginning to shift…

Mick Fealty on July 2, 2021, 6:32 pm

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Newton is a great deal more certain than I am that neither Sinn Féin nor the DUP will bring down Stormont before the next scheduled elections. There’s nothing wrong with his logic, it’s just that in the past neither have always conformed to logic. My own gut feeling is that the overall trend is now heading towards the middle. The DUP is clearly in trouble in North Down which is why their poll topper there has jumped to independent. They’ve always …

Finally, the Narrow Water bridge is going ahead as part of Micheál Martin’s Shared Island Initiative…

Mick Fealty on June 29, 2021, 10:27 am

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In private conversations I often reference the failure to bring this project to pass (despite offers from the EU to cover most of the cost) as a perfect metaphor for one of the key weaknesses in North South relations: a tragic unwillingness to build. Or within the wider political process that have arisen on foot of the Belfast Agreement: ie, a cataclysmic failure to understand that the core utility of bridges (metaphorical and literal) are the benefits it brings, not the …

If the UK and EU “recognise” and “deal with” the “flaws in the protocol”…

Mick Fealty on June 25, 2021, 3:29 pm

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Good spake from Newton Emerson which (like Brian Feeney’s piece on Wednesday) highlights another trapdoor in its rejectionist rhetoric around the Protocol… The cynically engineered electoral competition between Sinn Féin and the DUP ratcheted their votes up together, then down together as despairing voters deserted them in the Alliance surge, until the implosion of the DUP over Brexit suddenly left Sinn Féin polling 9 percentage points ahead. This is the “safety margin” for the nationalist electorate – the extent to …

A chastened DUP which is willing to learn from its own mistakes might be the gift Donaldson needs. But is it?

Mick Fealty on June 24, 2021, 10:09 am

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Yesterday I was asked to do a couple of things in the media. One was on Andrew Neil’s new GB News station (which I can’t actually watch live) and the other was for The Irish Times Inside Politics podcast (starts about 33 minutes in): On both occasions I was asked to share my thoughts on the NI Protocol and the challenges facing the DUP leader elect, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. In preparing for both, a number of thoughts occurred to me …

Fantasies of dominance are of no use in resolving Northern Ireland’s prisoner’s dilemma…

Mick Fealty on June 23, 2021, 10:52 am

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Say what you like about Brian Feeney, he is at least consistent. Today, he futures on the options for Jeffrey Donaldson for bringing Stormont down (ie, triggering an election by doing exactly what Sinn Féin did and refusing to appoint an FM). He has grounds for speculation largely given to him by the DUP’s own rhetoric (and the odd behaviour of the East and Mid Antrim Council in seeking to open their own negotiations with the Cabinet office over Larne port) …

Poots puts down a (removable) marker on the future improvement of the NI Protocol…

Mick Fealty on June 22, 2021, 5:55 pm

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The more cynical (and there’s been a lot of that even amongst the popcorn munchers here on Slugger) may interpret Poots’ ‘softening’ as some kind of bargaining plea from posterity, butt he’s also putting down a marker for future events. When asked about Edwin’s assertion this morning on GMU that Brandon Lewis had assured him there would be significant changes in the Northern Irish protocol he said he would not disclose the nature of private conversations. In truth, Poots himself …