Obelisk

You may not feel it, but we here in Northern Ireland are currently living in the calm before the storm. One day, a few years from now, when there is a right wing British Prime Minister in place and Labour are sulking on the opposition benches, we will likely see a wholesale attack on the Good Friday Agreement by people who don’t live here and who don’t care for here and yet who have ultimate authority over us as they …

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It’s a phrase we hear all too often, dropped into political speeches or in answers to questions to journalists by Unionist politicians when discussing the constitutional issue. ‘The benefits of the Union’, the shorthand for the case for Northern Ireland’s continued membership within the United Kingdom that is apparently so obvious that it needs no elaboration. In decades past perhaps it didn’t need elaborating. The United Kingdom was the roaring engine of that gigantic wealth extraction machine known as the …

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There have been few political meetings as relentlessly hyped as Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska yesterday, even though the White House had done its best in recent days to tamp down expectations. After all, the President of the United States, the most powerful man on Earth and purported leader of the West was literally rolling out the red carpet for a man wanted by the International Criminal Court and who had authorised an invasion of a …

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It has been nearly two hundred years since the Great Famine which saw one million people die, one million emigrate and which haunted the survivors in one form or another for decades after. Whilst nobody alive on the island of Ireland today has lived experience of it, the impact of that historical inflection point has echoed across the centuries. It is a testament to the impact famine can have on a people, particularly when that famine is man-made, that the …

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Karl Marx and Winston Churchill would have had very little in common overall but both seem to have shared similar views on the cyclical nature of history. Whereas Marx famously said ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce’ in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” it was Winston Churchill who added the necessary contextualization in a speech in 1948 where he said (evoking the words of George Santayana) “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to …

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I’ve always had a thing for Greek myths and legends. These fantastical tales full of cruel and capricious Gods, wicked monsters and daring heroes have seeped into the very bedrock of western culture. One of my absolute favourites is the story of Sisyphus. Aptly for the purposes of this essay, this ancient Greek King proved too clever for his own good in cheating death and managed to greatly antagonise Zeus himself. He earned himself a fate far worse than what …

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I am writing this several hours after the ceasefire in the war between Israel and Iran was due to have taken effect. Now it HAS been a shaky start, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) fired two missiles towards Israel before the start time of the ceasefire but which only landed in Israel after the start time of the ceasefire. Either it was done in error or, just as plausibly, they were hoping to get some last licks in and hoping …

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“Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings, to open gateways before him so that their gates be closed no more: I myself shall go before you, I shall level the heights, I shall shatter the bronze gateways, I shall smash the iron bars. I shall give you secret treasures and hidden hoards of wealth, so that you will know that I am Yahweh, who call …

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As the late, great Terry Pratchett once said ‘It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it’ and in the modern world that seems to apply first and foremost to the profession of journalism. It’s not an easy time to be a journalist. Throughout history, at least in societies free enough to have them and whose governments didn’t instead turn the media into an organ of the state, journalists at their best have sought …

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As truly awful as October 7th 2023 was, one of the things that crossed my minds on that horrific, ghastly morning as I followed the news rolling in was how predictable the coming weeks would be. October 7th was the inciting event in 2023, but previous conflicts had similar triggers. In 2006 it was a cross-border raid from Gaza by Hamas that killed several Israeli soldiers and saw the abduction of Gilad Shalit (who would end up spending five years …

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The principles underpinning gravity are fairly easy to grasp. The more massive something is, the greater the pull it has on objects within its proximity. The bigger the object, the greater the pull, with truly massive objects dominating all other bodies in its vicinity, compelling them into orbit through sheer size. In the field of global markets, economics is underpinned by a similar law. Bigger markets force smaller ones into their orbit through sheer mass, with proximity the clinching factor, …

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One of the more famous political terms is that of the Potemkin Village. A Potemkin Village is ‘… in its original meaning, any of a number of fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great. The term has also come to be used to describe an elaborate facade designed to hide an undesirable reality.’ As with all the best stories and sayings, it seems the origin story is apocryphal, but the term itself has become incredibly useful to point out one of …

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It may be hard to believe it, but we are coming up on NINE years since the Brexit referendum (and before you know it we will surely be inundated by retrospectives of the event on the tenth anniversary next year in 2026). A lot has happened since the 23rd June 2016. We had years of political chaos in Westminster both before and after the date the United Kingdom officially left the European Union. We had a (fingers crossed, knock on …

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The now customary refrain of those trying to engage with President Donald Trump has been to ‘take him seriously, but not literally’. The Academician Josep M.Colomer expounded on the theme in an article for the ‘Fair Observer’ website. “To try to foresee the next four years with US President-Elect Donald Trump, we should remember what we learned during his first presidential term: It is a mistake to take him literally and mock him because he is not serious in his …

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I wish I could say I was surprised when Donald Trump blithely announced to the world his plan to remove the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza, I really do. I wish I could say such a departure from the norms of the international order, that the most powerful man on the planet and leader of a nation that has long fancied itself as a benevolent hegemon saying these things would be a profound, stupefying shock. I wish I could say that, …

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So, some four hundred and sixty-eight days since the October 7th atrocity, Israel’s security cabinet has approved a ceasefire deal that may at last lead to an end to Israel’s revenge on Gaza. I use the term revenge deliberately of course, because with a very rough estimation of some sixty-five thousand people dead as per recent reports which, if borne out, would represent 3% of Gaza’s pre-war population  (the vast majority of whom were civilians) and with the territory comprehensively …

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After thirteen years and many, many, many deaths , I hope you will forgive me for my jubilation at the fall of Syrian monster and latest refugee, Bashar al-Assad. The very best leaders are those who share in the deprivations of those who follow them, but Bashar may have left it a little late to discover how it feels to be driven from his country by an armed conflict, his (many) homes ransacked, the family tomb desecrated (they even burned …

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Around a month ago I wrote a piece highlighting what I argued to be the ‘Realpolitik of the Windsor Framework’. The vast majority of Unionist politicians are unhappy at the Framework and have been expressing their displeasure over these arrangements since they were implemented but that displeasure has become increasingly noisy since Jim Allister (through sheer luck) was afforded the ability to promote a private member’s bill on the issue at the same time Stormont was required to conduct the …

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One of the factors that complicate any solution to the violence currently plaguing the Middle East is the need for one side or the other to convincingly be able to declare victory. To tell its supporters that all the pain, all the sacrifice, all the death was worth it. To end the war without being able to declare you’ve won is tantamount to accepting you’ve lost, and few things are as painful to accept as defeat in a conflict. After …

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Sometimes a historical nugget comes out of the woodwork that, when you read it, illuminates for but a moment a completely alternate pathway that our history may have taken.Such is the case with the 1607 proposal from Sir Thomas Shirley who proposed settling Jews from the continent in Ulster to King James I. I imagine most people, like myself, are unfamiliar with the exploits of a man who died nearly four centuries ago but the summary at the top of …

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