Mick Fealty

Newton Emerson charts the position the DUP finds itself. He, like me, thinks the most interesting call is for the sacking of officials who have been the backbone of Robinson’s operation for much of the last twenty years and more: The response from some is to hack the party down to its Paisleyite roots. Four letters are in circulation calling for Foster to go. The letter from DUP councillors demands a return to “Christian values” and “Ulster conservatism” and also …

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So she’s gone. Or she’s rather going. Arlene has given less than a month’s notice that she is resigning from the party leadership on the 20th May and as First Minister at the end June (the end of political season in Northern Ireland). This seems calculated to take the steam of the present situation, and perhaps copying an old ploy of Peter Robinson’s in slowing things down a crisis in hopes of getting beyond it in some form of regular …

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Well, there’s not much I can disagree with what Stephen says. But it looks like Sam McBride is calling time on Arlene’s brief rule at the top as 75% of her MLA’s signed a letter saying that they had no confidence in her. The BBC reports: It is understood 22 MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly), four MPs and one peer have already signed the letter. It is only a small number of the DUP membership who will get to …

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So the other story today is that after many years of rumours, disquiet is emerging from DUP Associations over the leadership. Looking at the associations involved many of them (but not all) are associated with the party’s MPs. The proximate grievance seems to be the protocol and the fact that Arlene went ahead with a N/S meeting she previously had said she would not attend. It appears she promised not to do something she was legally bound to do. There’s …

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Erm, this wasn’t what I had planned to do next (I’m writing on the latest crisis of confidence inside the DUP), but it bears repeating here. Concerning Jonathan Dowdall, who was briefly an acolyte of no less a person than Mary Lou… …in the Special Criminal Court this morning he was charged with a single count of the murder of David Byrne at the hotel on the Swords Road, Drumcondra, on February 5, 2016. Det Gda Paul Darley, of Ballymun …

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These days on Slugger (since Twitter stole our capacity to break news quickly), I often wait a few days before writing on a news story. But two this morning I think are worthy of immediate treatment. Eighteen months after they suffered one of the biggest negative swings in parliamentary history (18.5%), the Sinn Féin “leadership” in Belfast has sacked the entire “leadership” of Derry Sinn Féin. Aoife Moore reports in the Examiner: Multiple sources within the party North and South …

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Mark Devenport’s report for Spotlight gave ballast to the latest polling on the interminable subject of a prospective border poll. If Boris Johnson took a risk denying Scotland an independence poll, the stakes for doing the same in NI are far lower. In fact, the numbers in the Lucid Talk poll for a United Ireland were in slow regression before Brexit. Looking at party political fortunes, it’s clear that those advocating most loudly on constitutional issues are losing ground. There have …

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Out with Slugger (we’ve had more than 30k readers this week since Monday) there’s been a general shortage of analysis of how we got to rioting 12 year olds across NI. One obvious exception being Newton, the hardest working ‘hack’: Inside Politics w/ @hlinehan "The obnoxiousness, the sneering at loyalist Leave voters… can only be making things worse. It seems more important to far too many people to cling to self-righteousness than to actually fix this" – @NewtonEmersonhttps://t.co/ARlc5mSZCZ — Irish …

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A professor of mine went to go hear Derrida speak once. The entire talk was about cows; everyone was flummoxed but listened carefully, and took notes about…cows. There was a short break, and when Derrida came back, he was like, “I’m told it is pronounced ‘chaos.’” -Phil Gentry, on Twitter For the last year, with perhaps the exception of the US election and its later ramifications, politics has mostly been evident from its general absence. Even Brexit has benefited from …

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Tom Kelly in his Irish News column highlights how the problem of policing in the accountability free zone that is NI… …when he goes the problems of policing in a divided society won’t go away. Future applicants for the post of chief constable may be few and far between when they witness the intrusive levels of political interference/influence an incumbent police chief faces. The ongoing issues about lack of accountability in government and the loss of faith in public institutions …

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So the PPS in Belfast has junked the application from the PSNI to prosecute no less than 24 Sinn Féin politicians under the criminal law. They lay out their reasoning in a statement yesterday. Take that as you like but it’s pretty final. That’s the legal door closing with a dull thud. It’s not hard to see their logic. The messy shifts in the law could give the defendants many opportunities for finding a technical loophole, despite the fact some …

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I started to scrabble down some thoughts on RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Show on Monday night the day after, but then Peter’s copy came in and thought I would let his piece take some of their own wind before dropping my own penny in the pool. This debate is normally a zombie-ish piece, going-through-the-motions. So pinning The Cranberries’ classic on the opening video was genius, and an appropriate backing to Hume’s angry rebuke to SF’s murder-for-peace strategy of the time. The only misleading steer came …

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Whatever about Nichola Sturgeon being the most divisive figure in Scottish politics, it seems she knows how to play her public. Boris Johnson’s derisory 1% rise for NHS staff after everything they have gone through, was an open door. And Ms Sturgeon is walking right through it, offering staff in NHS Scotland a full 4% rise. The reality though is that the SNP has been the only party in Scotland that’s been in charge of public pay settlement for the …

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Lá fhéile Phádraig sona daoibh go léir, or happy St Patrick’s Day all. For once, we’re all confined to our homes, though with the way vaccines are getting out there it won’t be too long before we can enjoy this international holiday together again. Patrick is not just patron of Ireland, but according to Wikipedia of Nigeria, Montserrat, Boston, Rolla, Missouri, Loíza, Puerto Rico, Murcia (Spain), engineers, paralegals, and is invoked against snakes, and sins. He is venerated in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox …

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I don’t want to dwell on the direct issues raised by Terry regarding the Oxford/AZ vaccine, but Tom Chivers at Unherd highlights a key problem that mainstream journalism has with basic numbers… …a simple, but common, way, in which numbers go wrong in the news: the failure to ask “Is this a big number?” After all, 37 people getting sick sounds really bad, on its own. But is it more than we would expect? What do we need to know to understand …

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Over the last year of lockdown Professor Pete Shirlow, Director of the Institute for Irish Studies in Liverpool, has put together an impressive array of materials from lots of different people on both sides of the argument over NI’s future. The front page of the civic space has two summative animated videos on the broad cases for a united Ireland and for staying within the Union. I’ll stick to the pro Union case for now and come to the UI …

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