DOCTORED PHOTOGRAPHS were ignored in last night’s uncomfortable interview between Mark Carruthers and Basil McCrea on The View. It should have been the Lagan Valley MLA’s opportunity to quickly draw a line under the last two years of allegations, accept that he could be more patient with staff and pivot the narrative back onto the electoral hopes for himself and his party.
In October 2013, Sarah Ewart braved the public gauntlet by speaking on the Stephen Nolan show of her experience as a pregnant woman carrying a foetus with fatal abnormalities. Few could find themselves unmoved by Ewart’s tragic story – made worse by archaic laws in Northern Ireland forcing her to travel to England to pay for abortion services. Speaking to an audience that included an individual who would soon be convicted of harassing Marie Stopes director Dawn Purvis, Ewart argued …
When ‘talking’ by email last night, a friend who is far from unsympathetic to the SDLP remarked “you know you’ve a problem in politics and life when its your own efforts that afflict you most!” Alasdair McDonnell has just had a fortnight from hell, and for the most part the hell his party has just gone through was entirely of its own making. In short, someone on McDonnell’s front bench was trying to be just a little too clever with …
By far the most fascinating point in the BBC’s new replacement for Hearts and Minds, The View [catchy title, eh? – Ed] was this sequence in which Bro McFerran Managing, Director of Allstate Northern Ireland, cuts to the chase, pointing out that the campaign for lower corporation tax and long (and thus far rather sterile) dialogue between the Stormont Executive and HM Treasury is somewhat beside the point. In his view, technology provides a viable route to economic growth in …
