Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann came to Belfast for the first time and drew a crowd that may make it the biggest ever held. It also put Ulster Scots music in front of an all-island audience and got a DUP deputy First Minister speaking Irish. Ten things the week told us, and one it didn’t.
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.
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.
A “gold standard” poll shows nationalism closing on the union. Reverse the question, keeping the format identical, and unionism’s lead jumps from 6 points to 33. The same biases drive both results. Here’s how question framing quietly sets the political weather in Northern Ireland, and a simple test to level the field.
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.
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 …
Families were burned out of their homes in Belfast this week in openly racist violence. But Sara Morrison, who has lived in Belfast most of her life, argues that what happened on the Newtownards Road is the product of decades of political failure, an unfinished peace process, and communities that were never rebuilt. A vital if uncomfortable read.
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 major new Policy Exchange report argues that England’s higher education system is broken beyond tinkering: too many students, too much debt, collapsing standards and a funding model that serves nobody well. For Northern Ireland, where one in five of our students cross the water to study, the consequences are closer to home than you might think.
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?
Every July, blue and red pallets go up in flames on loyalist bonfires across Belfast. The theft is brazen, the impunity is total, and the cultural defence is well rehearsed. But behind the smoke lies a harder question — who is actually running this politics, and what do they gain from ensuring nothing ever changes?
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.
Cracks are emerging on the Irish left, with Labour, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit all signalling reservations about Sinn Féin’s policy direction ahead of the next election.
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.
The International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE) at Ulster University hosted a seminar to mark the exhibition “Aftershocks: The Sensory Afterlives of Violence”, on display at the university’s Belfast campus until 13 May. The seminar brought together Professor Roísín Higgins (Maynooth University), who organised the event and chaired proceedings, in conversation with Professor Élise Féron (Director of INCORE); Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick (Senior Lecturer in Drama at Ulster); and Dr Adrian Grant (Lecturer in History at Ulster). The discussion focused on their research and its relationship to embodied memory — how conflict …
The border poll arithmetic is simple: nationalism cannot win it alone. The votes needed sit with people who want competent government, not constitutional drama. So why, after twenty-five years in power, is there so little evidence of the former and so much of the latter?
David McNarry, former advisor to FM David Trimble and a former Strangford MLA for UUP/UKIP argues Unionism’s fractured political landscape may have found its wildcard — but will Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have the courage to play it? It is true that in ceding political primacy to nationalist and republicans, unionists have paid a heavy price. Cringeworthy is the woeful state of unionist representation in the NI Assembly, Belfast City Council and across local councils. And yet the divided party …
