United pressure on Sinn Féin may be needed to break the legacy payments deadlock. Their own will benefit

dFM Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin Has Martina Anderson’s outburst distracted attention away from the substantive issue of the legacy payments deadlock, or given a boost to resolving it, following the court case requiring Michelle O’Neill in effect to remove her veto or exercise her option to resign? The scheme covers violence related to the Northern Ireland Troubles between 1966 and 2010, including incidents in Great Britain and Europe.. . People will get between £2,000 and £10,000 a year for the …

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Major battle likely over the UK government’s latest Legacy plans.

For those of us who don’t provide an essential service there will be time and energy  to spare for the matters I’ve  already  drawn attention to, such as  the government’s  latest Legacy proposals  produced last week. They abruptly overturned  everything that has gone before, reached after  years of tortuous  gestation and months of consultation,  concluding in July last year. They were contained in a brief statement above the name of the new Secretary of State Brandon Lewis: Reconciliation and information …

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How will they square the circle of unfettered access to Northern Ireland ports? Check it out on – Thursday now

David Frost ( no, not that one, now deceased) According to the Sunday Times we will know the approach the UK will adopt for the next stage of EU withdrawal in a couple of days, now that the country has left the organisation and we are in the transition phase of less than a year.  The UK government are taking up a position of maximum distance from the EU procedures and laws quite different from the  erratic harder no softer …

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How historians can provide correctives to “memory wars” in dealing with the past

 

The Ulster-born, Oxford-based historian Ian McBride has published what I take to be the essence of his evidence to the government’s consultation on dealing with the past. He discusses the potential role for professional historians in the proposed institutions prescribed for dealing with oral history, information retrieval and identifying themes and patterns in events.  He takes for granted that Sinn Fein are winning the battle of the narratives. This is hardly surprising. In a new era where “equality” between peoples and traditions is a legal requirement, unionists persist in playing a zero sum game they’re bound to lose, in which every nationalist or republican gain is written down as a unionist loss. The answer is not merely to provide a contrived balance but to tell fuller stories with an open mind. Thus, the exposure of collusion is complemented by an account of success in infiltrating the IRA.

While the suggested list of themes is far from exhaustive, it goes straight  to the heart of many controversies and follows the line of the best investigative journalism. However while concentrating on the causes celebres on all sides of the conflict,  he fails to mention the essential political contexts behind them, without which many of them might seem “random” or “mindless”. The absence of other than self serving insider accounts of state strategy and tactics is also  a yawning gap waiting to be filled.

McBride argues for a bigger role for historians than the  government envisages.  They have prescribed fairly tight control by government or government appointees for all the usual reasons, plus the additional one of  trying to allay fears that the local parties would lose all control over the process.

While McBride incidentally challenges  these restrictions, he is  more concerned here to establish historians’ credentials than describing the essential requirements for exercising them. His appeal is professional and non-partisan, while insisting (over- apologetically perhaps, to head off partisan retorts), that everyone brings a background to their work, consciously or not. His case can credibly  be set alongside the high reputation of the writing of contemporary Irish history. His one anxiety is that a professional approach would be too dull (my word) for the general reader and register little impact on political debate. He would redress this in part by being unafraid to make moral judgements – in other words, concluding who on the basis of the evidence in different cases bears the greater blame. Risky as this would be, it brings the themes down to human level. But it raises the fundamental question: can history, especially recent history,

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The consultation on the Legacy Bill has predictably divided along sectarian lines and is doomed to fail. Radical thinking is needed, and is available

Arthur Aughey, a doyen of thoughtful unionism, has made an important contribution to the Newsletter’s series on “the legacy scandal” ( no mistaking  their point of view). The draft Bill involves a civil service logic: it is time to get this done; the template has been agreed; so let’s get it done. From that bureaucratic angle, it all makes perfect sense. The Legacy Policy Team has done its job There is another logic in play, that of policing and justice. …

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Westminster’s reply to the SNP’s case for remaining in the single market was taken seriously after all. So why did May allow Sturgeon to claim she’d been ignored?

Here’s a strange thing. There we were, led to believe  that Theresa May had dismissed almost with  contempt Nicola Sturgeon’s  carefully  considered case for the UK, or at least Scotland,  to remain within the single market. It turns out it wasn’t like that at all. We know that because the Scottish Government itself has just published a reply to the SNP’s paper Scotland’s Place in Europe, from the Brexit Secretary David Davis in a letter dated 29 March. It lists …

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EU nationals are going through 85 pages of hell to claim their right to remain

In the atmosphere of increasing tension as we enter the month of triggering Article 50, the  government faces at least a temporary defeat in the Lords over the status of EU nationals. Peers are unlikely to accept home secretary Amber Rudd’s claim in a letter to each peer that: a guarantee of EU nationals’  right to stay, however “well-intentioned”, would not help the hundreds of thousands of UK citizens living on the continent as it could leave them in potential …

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No side deal for soldiers, Theresa. If you can legislate for the language, you can legislate for the legacy

It  would  be hard to find an issue that  illustrates how little Northern Ireland matters to some Conservative MPs as the campaign to halt police investigations into cases of alleged army misconduct during the Troubles. It’s not so much calculated indifference as blimpish blindness. This was the question to Theresa May at PMQs today: 22 February 2017   Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con) Q9. If she will take steps to introduce legislative proposals to provide legal protection to …

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Shame on the politicians for allowing the PSNI to become the victims of a tabloid firestorm over army prosecutions

A tabloid storm  blown up  by the Sun and the Mail with the Daily Telegraph in tow  has been set off to save  hundreds, perhaps thousands of “our boys” – the soldiers who served in the Troubles – from the “ witch hunt” of being singled out as a class for prosecution as a result of Army action in the Troubles. The surge probably owes more to  the  establishment campaign against prosecutions over Iraq – one case now being  the …

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While the Supreme Court continues the agenda moves on. A hard Brexit looks more and more likely and the future of the Irish border is in the balance.

The Financial Times (£) says it all in the editorial quoted at some length below  – or most of it. If Theresa May had introduced a simple bill granting MPs a vote on Article 50, the November High Court case and the appeal to the Supreme Court would not have happened. What it doesn’t say is that the UK government look like triggering Article 50 before the end of March to leave the single market and the customs union. They …

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Theresa Villiers is a semi-detached secretary of state. She needs to focus up, or go.

Mick’s post brings out the striking  ontrast between this debate in the Dail and how Westminster is currently dealing with Northern Ireland.  There is a powerful irony that Dublin is far more interested in our affairs than London, even though London as the paymasters has the overwhelming responsibility. In NI questions on the same day,Theresa Villiers limited herself to a fatalistic statement of the position  on deadlock. Although she has met the parties there have been no serious attempts at …

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