Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

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...

This column appeared first in the News Letter, Friday 21st July 2017. It’s a pungent irony that, in Northern Ireland, the political movement that tried to murder its way out of the UK uses words like ‘equality’, ‘rights’ and ‘respect’ incessantly. It’s even more ironic that Sinn Fein has been allowed to subvert these terms relatively unchallenged, while so many people, particularly the young and naive, have been taken in by its trickery. When republicans talk about ‘equality’, they’re not demanding equal treatment under the law, or an equal opportunity to work, or equal access to benefits and a home, or even freedom from discrimination, because all those things are guaranteed already by some of the most stringent legislation in the western world. Instead, Sinn Fein’s idea of equality is a pretext to attack Northern Ireland’s place in the UK. In Shinner-speak, any outward symbol of the province’s Britishness becomes a sign of inequality and the institutions and emblems ...

There are many less than admirable aspects to Northern Ireland’s largest political party - the DUP - and I’ve written about them extensively .  The Democratic Unionists have a history of sectarian intolerance and rabble-rousing populism.   Over the years, they’ve changed dramatically , attracting support from mainstream unionists and establishing a wider membership profile, but they’ve never quite ditched their hardline, fundamentalist Protestant image.   The DUP’s social attitudes are often strikingly traditional, its ideas about Britishness can seem foreign to people in the rest of the UK and it is sometimes criticised justifiably for an ambivalent, contradictory attitude to loyalist paramilitary groups..   Therefore there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise the Tories’ decision to seek Democratic Unionist support to form a government, without resorting to the deluge of nonsense that some journalists, commentators and Tweeters directed at t...

After both the Manchester and London Bridge terror attacks, party political campaigning was briefly suspended.  However, Islamic terrorism has inevitably become an important issue in this general election and, rather ironically, Jeremy Corbyn is on the offensive , criticising Theresa May and the Conservatives for imposing cuts on the police that put public safety at risk. This is not a subject on which the Labour leader has much credibility.  Not only has he a long record of sympathising with terrorist causes, he and his associates have also actively opposed many of the security agencies that are charged with keeping us safe.  The blogger Guido Fawkes points out that , just three years ago, Corbyn defended the idea that young British people who had fought for ISIS in Syria should be allowed to return to the UK without “legal obstacles”. The Labour leader also argues that British foreign policy, including military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and ...

This article appeared first in the News Letter's General election supplement (1 June 2017). Since devolution, and particularly after the restoration of the Assembly in 2007, the centre of gravity in Northern Ireland politics moved steadily away from Westminster back to Stormont.  The tendency was compounded after pressure to stop ‘double jobbing’ eventually put an end to dual mandates, so political heavyweights and party leaders could no longer juggle their responsibilities in both legislatures.   For a number of years, the most high profile political personalities in the media have operated from Stormont, while some MPs became relatively anonymous.  There were even occasional suggestions that difficult characters or party rivals were sent to the House of Commons to keep them out of mischief.   With this General Election, there is a very good chance that the political balance will shift back toward Westminster.  Many of the most urgent challenges No...