Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

  On the 16th edition of PoliticalOD, we discuss the Irish American reaction to the Internal Market Bill, and the response of both the government and Northern Ireland's executive to a rise in Covid cases. The common theme is ambiguity. Boris Johnson sold the Withdrawal Agreement, which creates a trade border in the Irish Sea, on the basis that it did no such thing. From its inception, we've been told that no paperwork or tariffs would be necessary, even though those features were explicitly included in the Northern Ireland protocol. There were mechanisms to mitigate the worst aspects of the deal, but they relied upon the EU acting constructively and reasonably in negotiations. It was never clear why we should expect this change of approach from an organisation that has used division in Northern Ireland ruthlessly to attack the UK, throughout the process. The Internal Market Bill is the government's attempt to ensure that the EU does not insist on the most extreme type of bo...

At PoliticalOD, we've largely avoided discussing the virus, but this episode coincides with some confused messages coming from the executive.  We're hoping to get the economy restarted and schools are back this week, but there's a risk that efforts to restore a form of normality will be undermined by the rather more panicked tone of the health minister. At the same time, the education minister was forced to perform a u-turn after the announcement of exam results became a fiasco right across the UK.  With mixed messages in mind, we look ahead to Northern Ireland's centenary, which is upcoming in 2021. As unionists look to use the celebrations to bolster the Union, in the News Letter I asked how unionism should define its core set of guiding principles . We should also be using the national dimension of this occasion to ' win friends and influence people. ' Speaking of winning hearts and minds, we look at a new 'publishing platform' called Dissenting Voice...

It's almost two months since our last podcast and the time since then has been dominated by Covid-19. At the start of the crisis, Northern Ireland's health service was in an unenviable position. The NHS has performed with distinction nevertheless, coping with the disease and saving lives, but when coronavirus moves into the background, its underlying problems - decades of delayed reforms and mounting waiting lists - will remain. We ask how the power-sharing executive is likely to cope with these challenges, in light of some of the dividing lines that have emerged again as we try to restart the economy and move out of lockdown. And we look at its chances of putting together a budget, given the main parties' preference for making crowd-pleasing announcements and funding pet-projects. You can download the episode from Podbean here . We're also available at Spotify , iTunes And at Pocket Casts .

The coronavirus crisis hit Northern Ireland properly just as Sir Patrick Coghlin published his report into the RHI scandal. This was an unfortunate coincidence, at a time when people were looking for the parties at Stormont to work effectively together and set aside their differences for the common good. At The Critic , I examined the problems exposed in the report in detail. A malfunctioning civil service, a lack of political expertise, but, most pervasively, a cavalier attitude to public money, so long as it was believed to be coming from Westminster. The Executive has traditionally used devolved government to extract every last penny from the Treasury, then divvy it up, rather than taking on the difficult work of reforming services. As The Dissenter argues on his blog , ministers were busy finding money for their political hobby horses, while much needed ICU units were left unfinished. The rapid spread of Covid-19 has brought a new-found seriousness to the work of most members...

Now that Northern Ireland's power-sharing institutions have been back at work for a couple of weeks, David from  The Dissenter and I met up to discuss how things have been going. So far, the new Assembly has been dominated by complaints about funding and the debacle over MOT tests, which are currently suspended due to equipment failure in the test centres. At the start of the last decade, we were in the midst of another crisis caused by crumbling water infrastructure. In the News Letter last week , I pointed out that nothing much had changed in the last ten years. By 2030 will Stormont have addressed the most pressing issues we face today? It's doubtful while the focus is always on attracting more money, rather than spending what we have wisely or effectively. There is little emphasis on genuine collaboration or a shared message from the new Executive. Instead, any difficult conversations about policy are immediately shut down. This is given visual expression by p...

William Murphy [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)] In the latest PoliticalOD podcast, we ask whether the New Decade, New Approach document really promises a new dawn at Stormont. A wave of optimism accompanied the deal - anything to get the institutions back together - but already, as I pointed out at CapX , the atmosphere is beginning to sour. An unseemly wrangle over money has broken out, as the parties struggle to explain how they'll pay for a wishlist of new commitments. As ever, their answer is that the Treasury should stump up the cash, but there is an atmosphere of wariness in London about funding Northern Ireland even more lavishly, thanks to the RHI inquiry's revelations. David and I examine more of the agreement's pitfalls. It was published in a way that flouted Strand 1 of the Belfast Agreement, it leaves key issues cloaked in ambiguity and it fails to address the structural frailties that cause Stormont to crash repeatedly. I wro...

Jeremy Corbyn’s first visit to Northern Ireland as leader of the opposition was never likely to be greeted with enthusiasm by unionists. Hardly anyone is gullible enough to fall for his attempts to explain away decades of overt sympathy for the IRA. He retains links to Sinn Fein’s leaders and, just days ago, he reaffirmed his preference for a ‘united Ireland’, which, his spokesman says, “the majority of those people across the island” want to see. Even before Corbyn arrived in Belfast last week, his itinerary generated controversy. The Labour leader did not meet local members of his own party, who have been involved in a protracted struggle with their leadership to stand candidates in Northern Ireland elections. They argue that voters deserve ‘equal citizenship’ and the chance to vote for parties that can form the UK government, but they’re unlikely to persuade Corbyn, who hasn’t renounced his belief that the British state is an occupying force in Ireland. He also decli...

In his News Letter column (1 January), Alex Kane says he gets accused of “lazy analysis” when he blames both the DUP and Sinn Fein for the lack of power-sharing at Stormont. I don’t think Alex’s analysis is lazy, but I can’t agree with his implication that the two parties are equally responsible for the breakdown of devolved government. Undoubtedly, the DUP deserves criticism for its conduct in the Assembly. Its role in the RHI scandal was an indictment of its attitude to tax-payers’ money and it gave Sinn Fein a pretext to pull down the Executive. Equally, the party’s intransigence on some issues has allowed republicans to pose as progressives and attract sympathy from naive young liberals. Yet it’s glaringly obvious that the DUP didn’t collapse government and hasn’t prevented it from being reformed. Indeed, the party has even shown signs that it’s prepared to be flexible on parts of the list of sanctimonious demands, or ‘red-lines’, set out by Sinn Fein. When commentators ...

Losing the World Cup Play-Off to a disputed penalty goal was a gut-wrenching experience for Northern Ireland fans. The faithful supporters who returned from Basel earlier this week might have expected to come home to a country commiserating with its team and reflecting on its achievements, through regional TV, radio and newspapers. Instead they were faced with provocative demands to back the Republic in its play-off match against Denmark and accusations of sectarianism, based on information that was at least a generation out of date. The Green and White Army weren’t surprised. They’re used to facing ill-disguised hostility, ignorance and a lack of empathy from sections of the media, including public service broadcasters, whose remit is supposed to be Northern Ireland alone. The supporters’ hurt feelings are understandable, but do some of their critics have a point? For instance, should Northern Ireland fans show more generosity and cheer on the country country to their so...

In the recent past, there was a common idea among academics who thought and wrote about unionists, that there were broadly two types of unionism in Northern Ireland. ‘Cultural unionism’ concentrated on defending a way of life regarded as specific to Protestants in Ulster and it was most closely associated with the DUP, while ‘liberal’ or ‘British unionism’ was focussed on the UK as a whole and influenced some quarters of the UUP. People’s attitudes and motivations can rarely be put into categories so neatly, but there was some truth to the distinction. A common Ulster Unionist jibe asserted that the DUP was an “Ulster nationalist” party with little time for UK politics or modern British society, and scarcely deserved to be called ‘unionist’ at all. From the perspective of late 2017, it’s a lot more difficult to sustain that claim. Whatever the merits or otherwise of Brexit, the DUP threw itself into a nationwide campaign and argued the case for the whole UK to leave the EU...

We don’t yet know how Brexit will affect Northern Ireland exactly, but the referendum result certainly revived the nationalist trope that Irish unity is ‘inevitable’. The Republic’s national parliament recently published plans for a forum “to achieve the peaceful reunification of Ireland”, Sinn Fein blithely assure unionists that the “British identity” will be protected in a thirty-two county state and newspaper columnists rush to tell readers that the fourth green field will soon “bloom again”. One particularly excitable author, Kevin Meagher, a former special adviser to Shaun Woodward, (remind me again why unionists didn’t trust that former secretary of state), even called his book “ A United Ireland: Why unification is inevitable ”.    In response, unionists have challenged nationalism’s “self-regarding, single certainty” in a series of astute articles. At the dissenter blog, a leading academic took apart the question of a “United Ireland, inevitability an...