Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Migrants on the march in Hungary. A heartrending photograph of a small boy’s dead body, washed up on a beach in Turkey, has prompted a change of tone from the Prime Minister on the refugee crisis.  David Cameron announced yesterday that the UK will house ‘thousands’ more people from camps around the Syrian border, after suggesting previously that admitting “more and more refugees” offered no solution. A picture of Aylan Kurdi, a Kurdish boy from Syria, dominated front pages on Thursday.  The three year old had been in one of two dinghies, which left Turkey bound for the Greek island, Kos, a busy hub for refugees in transit to northern Europe.   Aylan was one of 14 people to die when the boats sank.   The image captured both a personal tragedy for the boy’s family, as well as the misery and desperation involved in a migration described as the biggest movement of people to Europe since the second world war.  It’s understandable that th...

The SDLP is showing some imagination by running a Polish candidate for next year’s council elections.  Immigrant communities in Northern Ireland have grown exponentially over the last few years and parties need to examine how immigrant votes can be won. I know that the UUP experimented with leaflets in minority languages during the 2005 general election campaign, but I’m not sure quite how engaged unionist parties were with this issue in 2010. Poland is obviously a strongly Catholic country and some people might assume that the natural allegiance of Poles living in Northern Ireland would be to nationalist parties.  Immigrants of all types, though, are far more likely to be swayed by economic and practical arguments, rather than the age-old constitutional debate. There’s a swathe of new voters to be tapped and the best way to go about it is by reflecting their presence and their concerns in the political arena.  That's the approach the SDLP is taking and Alliance to...

In stark contrast to the sweeping hyperbole which filled opinion pages in the weekend newspapers, O’Neill has written an intelligent commentary of issues surrounding immigration to Britain from central and eastern Europe, prompted by attacks on properties housing immigrants in Belfast and a subsequent exodus of Romanian families from their homes. In particular he examines the plight of Roma, many of whom have suffered institutional prejudice, rights abuses and violence in their home countries, before being subjected to wanton thuggery by youths in South Belfast. O’Neill highlights two issues which are particularly pertinent to the case of Romanian Roma. First, countries from previously communist parts of Europe have been admitted to the EU without sufficient scrutiny of their legal treatment of minorities. Certainly this has partly been influenced by good will and good faith on the part of longer standing EU members. There was (and remains to a degree) widespread sympathy for neig...

Whichever way you look at it, the arrest of shadow Home Office minister , Damian Green, was an extraordinary event. Reportedly 9 (nine) anti-terrorism officers from the Met Police attended the MP's apprehension! More bizarre still was the explanation for Mr Green’s arrest. Purportedly it was for publishing documents received from a Civil Service ‘whistleblower’. Government leaks are an established means by which the opposition garner information as to the workings of government. The Prime Minister and Home Secretary claim to have had no prior knowledge that the arrest would be made. How far this is attributable to maintaining ‘plausible deniability’ remains to be seen. The arrest certainly made for a bad day for Parliament. Its ability to hold the executive to account has suffered a reverse. It will be interesting to see if anything further comes out of this, because on existing information, it is the Home Office and Met Police which emerge from the incident with most ques...