Casement Park is demolished and unbuilt, and the SDLP is fighting a sitting MLA in its own ranks. The nationalist vote has barely moved since 1998, even as unionism has declined. Now Jon Burrows is talking up Northern Ireland’s future and challenging Michelle O’Neill to debate it. Nationalism talks up an imminent border poll but has no policy map to get there.
Emergency general surgery left Enniskillen in December 2022, weeks after Stormont fell and with no minister in post to answer for it. Nearly four years on, the Trust says outcomes improved, its own consultants dispute the figures, and the regulator has quietly reversed the recommendation it once called urgent.
A Garvaghy Road march in current circumstances would achieve little beyond sectarian turbulence. But the Parades Commission’s flawed decision-making has left it damaged goods too — and the way out is new appointments and a cultural accord governing all parades, protests and public events.
Queen’s University Belfast’s Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice hosted the launch of the first Northern Ireland Peace Index (NIPI). The Index is the result of a partnership between QUB and the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), an independent, non-partisan global think tank headquartered in Sydney. Funded by UKRI through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the investigators are Dr Andrew Thomson and Professor Dominic Bryan. The IEP team was led by Dr Paulina Pijacka and Dr David Hammond, with Brett Savill, IEP’s …
Elizabeth Clarke MBE is a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, a school governor, charity volunteer and mum of five. After almost 20 years in public service, she recently changed career to become more involved in politics and the community she grew up in. Next year, Northern Ireland faces a rare moment in its democratic life. With two major elections on the horizon, parties will be selecting candidates and communities will be deciding who represents them. It feels like the …
As part of this year’s Féile debates and discussion programme, the Integrated Education Fund (IEF) hosted a public event at St Mary’s University College in Belfast, to launch new research into the reality of parental choice in school selection in Northern Ireland. The event was chaired by Amanda Ferguson, a Belfast-based freelance journalist and Northern Ireland correspondent for Reuters, and opened with a welcome from Dr Jessica Blomkvist, IEF’s senior advocacy officer. The research was presented by its author, Kathryn Torney, a freelance journalist, researcher, and consultant. A …
The latest LucidTalk poll gets read as unionism in decline. Look at the blocs instead: unionism’s problem is fragmentation, nationalism’s is quieter and harder, and both the DUP and Sinn Féin are both paying for a partnership that delivers nothing.
France’s climate convention implemented 58% of its proposals and reached 78% public awareness, proof a citizens’ assembly can work when a state gives it real authority and resourcing. Sinn Féin’s defeated unity bill had neither, and a wider, patient conversation would serve the question better than a set-piece assembly ever could.
I don’t know what caused me to fall in love with America: Old Glory, the bunting, the cowboy hats or the country music sung by Mel Tarner. But I do know where and when it was: early 90s, aged eight or nine, at a working men’s club in East Belfast. Cigarette smoke filled the air, and women ate prawn cocktails served in wine glasses. Every day, people dressed like extras in a spaghetti western. Men with six-shooters on their hips, …
It looks like we are a couple of weeks out from a new Prime Minister in the UK. There’s been plenty of commentary about Andy Burnham and what he may bring to the table when, as seems inevitable, he takes over in mid-July. But what about Northern Ireland ? Burnham is making a major set-piece speech tomorrow about his economic plans, and we know that devolving more power to regions across the UK is something he has strong views on. …
During a week dominated by Jeffrey Donaldson’s conviction, a quieter story slipped past: the Irish Government’s Shared Island Initiative passed €1 billion in commitments to 2030. From a Stormont cricket ground to a sub-two-hour Belfast–Dublin train, it revives a pragmatism that runs from Seán Lemass straight to Micheál Martin: cooperation without precondition, benefit without constitutional strings. The question now is whether Northern ministers will become active partners or passive recipients.
Britain’s productivity flatlined in 2008, eight years before the referendum. Brexit added cost, and serious frictions but the real causes run deeper: weak investment, weak industrial strategy, and an employment model that grew jobs while output per hour stalled. Even Northern Ireland, the one part of the UK with a genuinely distinctive post-Brexit settlement, tells the same story.
Fine Gael has chosen Garret FitzGerald’s centenary to launch a blueprint for Irish unity. But preparation is not persuasion — and the unaligned middle who will actually decide remain unmoved by border-poll rhetoric.
The labour market is changing shape — from a pyramid with a broad base of entry-level jobs to a diamond with a glut of experienced middle-tier workers and a radically contracted bottom. Harvard economists warned us what happens when a successor generation can’t find work. Belfast showed us what it looks like in practice. And it isn’t just a problem for the young.
My dad died two days before Christmas in 2023. On the day of his funeral rain poured from the heavens. We waded through thick mud to get to his grave. “Christ,” my brother remarked, “it’s like the f**king Somme.” In Northern Ireland, protestant burials are often small, private affairs. Only close family go and you must be invited to attend. When we arrived, we expected a small number of people. To our surprise, there was a crowd. My dad was …
A defence of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement’s legacy, arguing that while most unionists have embraced its principles, Sinn Féin has systematically undermined the consent framework — leaving centrist unionism stranded and the Agreement itself surplus to republican politics.
A stabbing attack in north Belfast has triggered a night of serious disorder across the city and sparked protests in several UK cities. Here is a cautious summary of what has been reported so far.
A new survey reveals that 55 per cent of Northern Irish voters would refuse to back any party that collapses Stormont — and that support for institutional reform now cuts across the unionist-nationalist divide. But as public opinion shifts, are the politicians listening?
Northern Ireland’s unionist parties face a reckoning — caught between reactive politics and the collaborative vision of the Good Friday Agreement. Without a credible strategy or genuine commitment to its three strands, political unionism risks permanent decline.
The debate about Stormont’s future is asking the wrong question. The real issue is whether nationalism has the honesty to tell a younger generation what constitutional change actually requires — and the institutional competence to prove it can govern in the meantime.
