Society and Culture

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. …

Read more…

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 …

Read more…

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 …

Read more…

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 …

Read more…

…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 …

Read more…

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 …

Read more…

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 …

Read more…

A thneed’s a-fine-something-that-all-people need. -From The Lorax by Dr Seuss, 1971 Culture eats strategy for breakfast they say. I’ve long believed that Alex Salmond knew what a lot of his Scottish nationalist cohort never really did, ie that before movement was possible he would have to tackle the cultural barriers to his party’s appeal. Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland has only fitfully understood that reality, in figures like Curry, Hume, Fitt, McGrady and Mallon and those all plied their trade …

Read more…

In the doldrum life of Northern Ireland politics losing one seat is a misfortune, two careless, three criminally negligent. To have escaped two more potential losses is a serious warning from the future for the DUP that for too long played just one card. Since the writ of that one card trick (keeping the FM’s job for unionism) ran out in the last Assembly election in 2022 the party has been on notice that it needs to find another reason …

Read more…

Machiavelli in his famous handbook for democratic survival The Prince divided all states into either republics or principalities. The former were easily overrun, but hard to retain. With the latter once conquered, there is great ease in holding it.  This morning, Northern Ireland has two distinct political cultures. East of the Bann where voters will not tolerate any failure in their politicians, whereas in the west and south where no matter who is standing, the Sinn Fein brand has become …

Read more…

There was much packed into the recent Ireland’s Future event at the SSE arena but little debate. Apart from the mild rebuke of former UDA member and loyalist politician David Adams arising from comments by an unnamed member of the Irelands’ Future Board in a newspaper column, most of the panel members were of the same mind. Presumably, happy contributors to what Professor Colin Harvey referred to as “the growing coalition for constitutional change”; sharing common if narrow purpose and …

Read more…

Colin Coulter and Peter Shirlow interrogate the overall data to question confident predictions around the future constitutional destination of Northern Ireland and come up some challenging questions for a popular media narrative. On Saturday last, Ireland’s Future hosted the latest in a series of public events. In the Spring, the pressure group launched a document specifying 2030 as the ‘right time’ to hold a constitutional referendum. There is little discernible logic in the text as to why that might be the …

Read more…