Mick Fealty

Great news! [Not again!! – Ed] Our own Fergus is a joint winner of Young Cartoonist of the Year… The Guardian reports… The under-30s competition was won by 29-year-old Fergus Boylan from Antrim, who goes by the handle @infiniteguff, for his depiction of Boris Johnson’s infamous adviser Dominic Cummings stuck deep in a hole, and looking upwards with trepidation. At ground level, Johnson, Gove and Hancock dig with gusto, splattering four essential workers stood behind them. The judges called it …

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Looks like the Oxford vaccine is on its way… The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved for use in the UK, with the first doses due to be given on Monday amid rising coronavirus cases. The UK has ordered 100 million doses – enough to vaccinate 50 million people. This would cover the entire population when combined with the full order of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said. It comes as millions more people in England are expected to …

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Nice precís on John Naughton’s excellent substack blog of good things about 2020 from Tyler Cowen’s column in Bloomberg: The astonishingly rapid creation of several kinds of Covid-19 vaccines A “very promising” vaccine candidate against malaria, perhaps the greatest killer in human history New CRISPR techniques that appear to be on the verge of vanquishing sickle-cell anemia GPT-3 (AI) technology that composes remarkably human-like prose DeepMind’s machine learning system that seems to have cracked the problem of protein folding Driverless …

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It’s an old principle in business comms that ‘everything communicates’. Whether we like it or not other people will pick up and interpret the signals you send, even the ones you don’t intend for them to pick up. As certainty has grown around a future United Irealnd particularly amongst the younger cohorts in the south, nationalism is giving off signals that even the standards of pre power sharing NI don’t need to be adhered to. The south’s Workplace Relations Commission …

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This week we had a reminder that parties on the left are not going to let the crash of twelve years ago die any time soon, when the Taoiseach Micheál Martin misspoke and claimed that the banks had not been bailed out. He went on to clarify that what he meant to say was that the banks were actually nationalised without compensation to the shareholders, which is pretty much what the UK government did with Northern Rock. It damaged the …

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So last night was part one of our Review of the Year. If you want to catch up with or join us tonight and tomorrow, get your tickets here. I have to say the quality of the live stream is exceptionally good and nice dynamic between David and Alan. There’s great insight into how the MPs were key to the DUP tipping hard into backing Brexit, and asking whether as the first big decision of Arlene Foster, who was riding …

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I’ll make this brief, but I think this statement from Arlene Foster yesterday, on the launch of the NI Centenary is worth sharing not least for the remarkable note of maturity it strikes (in contrast to some of the responses it has invoked)… “I welcome the “Our Story in the Making: NI Beyond 100” branding and fund which was announced by the Northern Ireland Office. The 2021 centenary will at times be about reflection, commemoration and celebration but it must …

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Nice use of Northern Irish history to illustrate a facet of the negotiations between the UK and the EU from IJP… No one is disputing that, at the end of the transition period in just three weeks, the UK could set up its own regulations and trading standards as a sovereign state. However, the deal on offer is that if it chooses to do that, it will be liable for the entire cost (that is, tariffs on all goods and …

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Just putting this here… What the data shows is that during the first week after getting their shots, both groups of people kept getting covid-19 at about the same rate. But after that, the lines start to separate. And they just keep separating and separating. That’s the result of the vaccine taking effect, which usually takes a few days and gets boosted by a second dose. After two weeks, hardly anyone with the vaccine was getting covid-19. But the disease …

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I’ve been fairly busy with other matters so forgive my tardiness in picking up Stephen Dempster’s Spotlight documentary which highlights a number of abiding realities of our so called post conflict era, for example, how more than 20 years after the Belfast Agreement there are some 12,500 people who are members of loyalist paramilitaries. The numbers are part of the rivalry game these organisations play to get one up on each other. Often they signify very little in themselves. The piece …

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Well, moving on from Brian’s entertaining piece, I’m not as sure as he is on what to make of the latest move in Brexit negotiations. The EU will have powers to order UK customs officials to do checks, but it is not clear on what proportion. John Campbell gives us a clue, but points out that definitive conclusions are premature. Northern Ireland retail which was afraid of charges being imposed on GB imports, seems relieved. It looks like an extension …

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Few of us have underestimated the effects of Covid if you have vulnerabilities, nor the fact that predicting just what those vulnerabilities are and how they are likely to play out in older people is challenging. But the vaccines coming online will likely change the dynamics around this quite rapidly come the new year. Anyone with kids will know and understand just what a tough ask social isolation for the young (and not just antsy teenagers who are capable of …

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