Politics

Another escape from scrutiny as First Minister runs roughshod over Stormont committee…

| Readers 3125
white bottle with cup

I’m putting this up with a minimum of comment. It’s the Stormont Committee for The Executive Office (TEO) which has accumulated 1.7k views within hours of the session finishing. The reason being is that it is utterly shambolic. At the heart of the spectacle is an odd confusion about committee rules that have in place for 26 years. It’s not actually obvious if anyone on the committee (possibly even including the clerk) understood those rules up to the point they …

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The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland: Beyond Unionism and Nationalism … watch back the book launch

| Readers 1613

The academic team who study the sentiment and opinion of political party members and elected representatives turned their gaze to the Alliance Party some years ago. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland: Beyond Unionism and Nationalism was launched this evening in Ulster University. You can watch back the speeches, responses and Q&A. Dr Máire Braniff introduced proceedings before Dr Clare Rice and Prof Jonathan Tonge highlighted some of the findings. Dr Sophie Whiting chaired a panel of journalists and party …

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Sinn Féin’s secrecy crisis deepens as victim gives his version of the Ó Donnghaile story

| Readers 8320
yellow car toy on white surface

You knew Sinn Féin was in some trouble when it called for Paddy Kielty to be censured for a joke at the start of the Late Late Show, even though their ongoing saga has been pretty much the only thing in the southern domestic news for the last fortnight. Then on Saturday evening the Sunday Independent  dropped a bombshell in the form of aa personal testimony from the young person Niall O Donnghaile sent the inappropriate texts which eventually lead …

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Sinn Féin’s “politics of concealment” means that what we know now is certainly not “the story…”

| Readers 6315
an abandoned building with graffiti on the walls

In the weirdest consensus of post Belfast Agreement Northern Ireland Sinn Féin has agreed to a TUV proposal to cancel former Lord Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile. Just days ago he was using X to attack journalists for following the McMonagle story. That was before we knew about his own behaviour, and the real reason for his stepping down with a fine encomium from party leader Mary Lou McDonald. Along his official portrait, all evidence of his existence on Twitter has …

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There’s no magic carpet out of Sinn Féin’s multiplying issues, other than to make some hard choices…

| Readers 6694
selective focus photography of wind blowing on four green and purple buntings

So Sinn Féin’s troubles continue, this time they are merely deepening in the south. Over the weekend the party lost its second TD in a week to resignation. It wasn’t over the McMonagle case but the result of internal machinations. Kildare South TD Patricia Ryan resigned last Wednesday citing internal censorship by the national leadership of any criticism of the party’s dismal performance in the local and European elections, and the vetting of questions for Mary Lou McDonald. Then on …

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In the Dáil Sinn Féin leadership still trying to deflect as further details emerge on McMonagle’s access to Stormont

| Readers 4966

You’d wonder what Pearse Doherty was on yesterday in the Dáil when his colleague and leader of the opposition treated their party’s liabilities around McMonagle with lurid insouciance, as it becomes ever obvious the whole party needs to go into rehab. Political parties are a particular type of voluntary organisation which plays an important role in gauging public sentiment and mediating between ordinary people and ultimately the institutions of government be it in opposition or as party of the executive. …

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Question for Sinn Féin over its handling of convicted sex abuser: who had knowledge?

| Readers 3120
moon eclipse

“…uncertainty eases the way for con artists to make fraudulent claims” -Rob Nelson Listening to Carlo Gebler’s new podcast series for BBC Radio 4 on the Provisional IRA’s mass escape from the Maze Prison back in September 1983 you cannot fail to be impressed with its meticulous planning and ruthless execution by the prisoners. Organisation was to become the hallmark of Sinn Féin’s electoral success as they moved from a twin track armed/democratic struggle to a latter day commitment to …

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Maurice Quinlivan TD on McMonagle: “I’ll be quite clear, I’m pretty sure we didn’t know…”

| Readers 3463
to be continued sigange

A messy few days in, and some inside Sinn Féin must be questioning the party hierarchy’s decision to make its head northern spin doctor carry the can for what increasingly looks like a much wider screw up. In 22 years I don’t remember anything like it. The problem with secrecy, be it that of the Catholic Church or in more recent times Sinn Féin’s problematic handling of sex cases within its own ranks, is that eventually it gets hard to …

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Why Michelle O’Neill’s answers in the McMonagle case just don’t add up…

| Readers 4470

It’s a sniper’s rule you only get two shots at the enemy. A third and they will figure where you’re hiding and you’re a goner. This is now Sinn Féin’s fourth scandal and it is very clear it just cannot deal with child sex abuse cases that involve its members. Being the fourth ‘shot’ the party can no longer expect to have the benefit of the doubt. Their defence on previous occasions was that they were historic, but policies were …

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Why everything you’ve ever heard on the Northern Irish constitutional question is wrong…

| Readers 3374
orchestra playing their piece

“…we don’t so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things”. – Ben Evans, via Memex 1.1. Like queuing for paper tickets for space trips once imagined in 1950s sci-fi, confident predictions of a near term border poll miss the fact that the future will track through possibilities adjacent to the present, not a linear projection of that present. Before I get to what I want to say, let me be clear about what I’m not …

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A do-nothing Programme for a do-nothing Executive

| Readers 1267

A couple of weeks back, the sixth Northern Ireland Executive released its draft Programme for Government. Coming over six months after the Executive was formed in February, following a gap in office of around two years, a naive observer might have had high hopes for this document, especially given that, during the election campaign in 2022, most of the parties talked up a good game about getting the government up and running.  The UUP manifesto said : it is vital …

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Michelle O’Neill addresses Ard Fheis for the first time as First Minister

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Michelle O’Neill took the stage of the 2024 Ard Fheis for the first time as First Minister. The party’s strong results in Northern Ireland have been a bright spot in a difficult political year, and O’Neill’s personal ratings remain high eight months into the job. O’Neill’s speech touched upon issues dear to her base: Casement Park and Irish language rights. O’Neill referenced the need for Irish unity and tried to set out how the change narrative in Northern Ireland could …

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Sinn Féin’s drop in the southern polls demonstrates the problem of “pre-fab” politics…

| Readers 3864
2 women standing in front of blue wooden door

There was a time when I paid more attention to polls than I have over the last six or seven years. To be honest I lost interest in trying to analyse them because with the increased frequency of each publication the variation between them became limited. In yesterday’s Inside Politics podcast from the Irish Times there’s a superb conversation hosted by Hugh Linehan with Theresa Reidy and Aidan Regan on the apparently sudden collapse of sentiment for Sinn Féin in …

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Gavin Robinson attempts a reset after a difficult year

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Gavin Robinson took to the stage in his first speech as DUP leader. Addressing around 300 delegates, he attempted to reset a party that had been battered over the past three years. With devolution restored and a run of elections now behind the party, Robinson has a huge task ahead. How do you restore a once-dominant party to its former strength? One clear message from the conference is that the DUP is in a rebuilding phase. Despite the success of …

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A stiff warning to the DUP that “what got us here is not going to keep us here.”…

| Readers 4092
woman falls on purple surface

…they are no substitute for a small number of strong local connections. -Benjamin Allen, researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard I was asked on Nolan yesterday to comment on Lee Reynolds analytical piece in The Critic magazine (brutally titled “Unionism has to wise up”), timed no doubt ahead of this weekend’s DUP party conference and the new leader’s first big set piece speech. The focus was consideration of a name change, to signal to the Northern Irish …

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“We must robustly challenge those who still insist violence was justified…”

| Readers 4742
green and blue bird kissing each other

In The Irish Times Trevor Ringland challenges an oddly identitarian idea that’s been in vogue recently in ways it was not during the actual Troubles (especially if you had read An Phoblacht regularly) that it was the IRA that brought civil rights. This odd philosophy (which the comedian Andrew Doyle correctly acknowledges is present in both mainstream right and left discourses elsewhere) associates wrong doing, not by the individuals responsible, but layered for guilt primarily by identity. This has been …

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Will it be better with Mike the second time around….?

| Readers 2235
person above mountain and body of water

I have not spoken to many UUP members about Mike Nesbitt MLA’s return as leader of the party. What is evident is that views range from the lukewarm and “who else is there now that we are turning to individuals a second time?” to concern about his combining the position of UUP leader and the Executive role of Minister of Health. Some of the more lukewarm suggest, without any evidence it must be said, a reluctance to give up a …

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As Colum Eastwood step downs as SDLP leader, will the next leader be any better?

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school of gray fish

The Irish News’s John Manley breaks the news that Colum Eastwood is to step down as only the sixth leader of the SDLP since its establishment in 1970. It comes just over week after his UUP counterpart Doug Beattie also announced his departure. At first he put a brake on his party’s decline but in the 2022 Assembly election it suffered a huge anti DUP squeeze from Sinn Féin to which neither Eastwood nor his party had an answer. Now …

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UUP: Clear policy grounded in a strategic direction would increase the possibility that commitment will follow

| Readers 1545
A small bird perched on top of a tree branch

A lot of cheap shots are being taken at the Ulster Unionist Party as its latest travails are exposed. Previous comments of ‘warring tribes’, ‘impossible to lead ‘, of pseudo religious, cultural and political powerplays, all of which present, are mined to dismiss the UUP as a serious political party; incapable of providing constructive, creative and competent leadership even within its own membership. For too many years, it has struggled, often in a meandering fashion to do so. Its internal …

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New UUP Leader to be decided in September

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UUP plan to have new leader in place by 14 September at an extraordinary general meeting pic.twitter.com/8z1JgR1oSb — Jayne McCormack (@BBCJayneMcC) August 20, 2024 David McCannDavid McCann holds a PhD in North-South relations from University of Ulster. You can follow him on twitter @dmcbfs