The furore over DUP councillor Graham Craig’s remark about Belfast City Hall chief executive Suzanne Wylie has shown once more what sanctimonious bullies self-styled progressives can be. Or, as a Christian friend put it, modern-day Pharisees.
Attempting to normatively blame, or to empirically explain, the trajectory of post-Agreement politics via the consociational model alone is reductionist as it fails to acknowledge both the dynamic created by the peace and political processes’ internationalisation and the...
I first met Martin McGuinness in 1996. I lived in London and had come late to political journalism, having written my first article in 1994 because I was horrified at the mostly wimpish coverage of the IRA in the Republic.
Well, I’ve had another look at Martina Anderson’s performance in the European Parliament on Monday night, and when I stopped laughing I tried to take it seriously.
I watched Gerry Adams dissembling on the BBC's Andrew Marr show on Sunday morning and then I read his weekly sermon. The sacrifices I make for Northern Ireland! Here are a few of the questions a watching Martian trying to get to grips with British politics might have asked...
Last week I was on Talkback discussing nationalism with the eminently reasonable Dr David McCann. The topic had hit the headlines because the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan had said there was “no difference between those who try to divide us on the basis of whether we’re...
Party is following the template of Orwell's 1984 in 'drive against bigotry', writes Ruth Dudley Edwards.
Like many commentators, I’ve been humbled by recent failures as a political forecaster. I’d bragged about accurately predicting the result of the 2015 UK general election, but was brought down to size by getting both the Brexit referendum and the US Presidential election...
I’ve been wondering what gets into the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood. At a time when his party’s only hope is to seem sane, sensible and less sectarian than Sinn Fein, and with the potential to govern competently along with the UUP, he’s been having outbursts of grandiosity and...
It was bad news for Sinn Fein last week that no doubt well-meaning people nominated Martin McGuinness for the Tipperary International Peace Award. On Talkback, I was asked to comment on comparisons between him and Nelson Mandela: some nationalists see both as...
At the beginning of Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Theresa May said this: “I am sure that the whole House will join me in sending our thoughts to the friends and family of the police officer who was shot in Belfast over the weekend.”
I’ve been thinking about Arlene Foster, and about what went wrong. We met first, I think, when I was covering an Orange parade in Fermanagh in the late 1990s in which she was participating as a member of the Rosslea Accordion Band.
You have to hand it to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for tenacity and a remarkable ability to cling to power. “My friend and comrade for almost 45 years,” is how Adams described McGuinness last week, which suggests they bonded in July 1972, when with other IRA...
I’ve just finished reading Secret Victory: the Intelligence War that Beat the IRA, a fascinating book that left me very angry. Not that I haven’t frequently been angry about the appalling treatment of the RUC, but Dr William Matchett’s account of the exceptional contribution of...
This time last year I obligingly provided readers of this paper with a list of people Northern Ireland would be better off without. I was clearly in drastic spring-cleaning mode, as among those I proposed was Thomas “Slab” Murphy, whom I despatched to Libya in a ship big enough to...
I hope you had a good Christmas and forgot all about politics, which can leave us simultaneously bogged down and het up. We need to keep a sense of perspective.
I was brought up in Dublin by my historian father to understand that the history of Ireland should be the history of all the people in Ireland. That was a revolutionary notion, for post-partition Ireland separated history as much as territory.
Last week Thomas Kenneth ("Ken") Whitaker - a friend to all good people in Ireland, north and south - reached his 100th birthday. A public servant of exceptional ability, dedication, selflessness and influence, though he mostly worked behind the scenes, he is spoken...
In the same week that Michael D Higgins, President of the Irish Republic, issued an embarrassing tribute to Fidel Castro, I was watching The Crown, the brilliant Netflix series on the life of Queen Elizabeth II.
I have tried to address what I think is a psychological problem inside the heads of some unionist leaders. These were the words of Martin McGuinness last week, as he participated in a relaunch in Clifton House of a Sinn Fein document on reconciliation.
Has there ever in the history of the United States been a president like Donald Trump? That’s the question people have been asking nervously since the election results sank in.
I’m grateful to hysterical left-wingers for reconciling me so quickly to the election of Donald Trump. It was reminiscent of the days after Brexit, when having been rather nervous about having voted for it, I was reassured by the sheer tunnel-vision and viciousness of many...
Irish-American support has been key to the success of the peace process,” the Northern Ireland Finance Minister, Mairtin O Muilleoir, explained last week. Well, that’s one way of putting it. It would be more accurate to say that Irish-Americans’ support was the key to...
I don’t know about you, but I was a total ignoramus about politics in my mid-teens and so were the vast majority of my contemporaries. Fortunately, we didn’t have the vote. In this era — when the young get their opinions from the echo-chambers of social media — they’re...
Once upon a time, a favourite song in the Sinn Fein hymnbook - often echoed on its banners - was “No hierarchy of victims”. Their argument was straightforward.
Consider these quotes from Colum Eastwood, leader of the SDLP since November 2015. The first, last April, was apropos his readiness to talk to dissident republicans: “I would go anywhere and speak to anyone if I thought it would save one life.”
My close friend Nina is probably the least sentimental person I know. Thoroughly English yet educationally and professionally European-minded, she has little interest in Ireland, north or south.
So why doesn’t he sue? People have been asking this for years, as allegations follow allegations about Gerry Adams. Last week’s Spotlight about the murder of Denis Donaldson reignited the debate once again.
It’s a pity that social media attract such a large number of bigots, hysterics and mischief makers, but maybe they are made less dangerous by having such a safety valve. Because I like to know what people who don’t have the chance to write in newspapers are thinking about, I...
I am no fan of Gerry Adams, but sometimes he makes me laugh. He achieves that only unintentionally of course, for the pompous and self-righteous make poor comedians. They can, however, often be unwittingly funny, especially if one has a sufficiently black sense of...
Last week I wrote critically about Celtic fans responsible for a pro-Palestinian flag display at a match against an Israeli team. I would have been equally critical had Rangers flown Israeli flags during a match against Palestinians.
In Scotland last week to speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival about the 1916 Easter Rising, I read in The National, the pro-independence daily newspaper, a fervent defence of the hundreds of Celtic supporters who flew Palestinian flags at the Champions League match with Israel’s...
Bert Ward, an idealistic English communist who played a key role in persuading the Labour Party to listen to unionists, died last week. His interest in Northern Ireland came in the early 1970s.
Sir David Goodall, a diplomat who was a major player in the negotiations that led to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which was opposed by unionists and republicans, died last month.
There were commemorations last week marking the death on August 3, 1916 of Roger Casement, born in Dublin in 1864 and brought up from the age of nine in Ballymena.
My 2015 was mainly spent writing a book about the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the seven men regarded as the founding fathers of the Irish republic whom few people knew much about.
If you really want an adrenaline rush,” a young friend was advised recently, “forget extreme sports. Just go to a London dinner party with Left-wing economists and tell them you voted for Brexit.” There are plenty of other liberal groups which believe that only old,...
Theresa Villiers will be no loss - all British Secretary of States should stay over there - that was a tweet last week from Martina Anderson, one-time convict and now an MEP, thus once again showing herself to be a member of the ungracious Adams wing of Sinn Fein.
More than a fortnight has passed since pundits, pollsters and the press were made fools of by the United Kingdom’s electorate. Still, the end of the world seems not to be nigh!
Is it time to send in the police to storm Labour Party HQ and release the prisoner known as Jeremy Corbyn? In the past few weeks, Corbyn's been looking increasingly like a prime candidate for a home for the bewildered.
This is of course a nervous time for anyone with imagination.
In Budapest for a few days and reading about Hungary's history, I couldn't help yet again dwelling on MOPE, the Most-Oppressed-People-Ever narrative of Irish history thus nicknamed, skewered and demolished by my friend Liam Kennedy.
A new friend whom I met for dinner last week reported that in the west of Ireland, where he goes often, he had asked an old friend if he'd read my latest book, The Seven: the lives and legacies of the founding fathers of the Irish republic.
Although I’ve never been able to summon up any interest in football, I’ve just spent hours reading about and around a Rangers vs Hibernians Scottish Cup Final on May 21. It was a door into a world that troubled me more than I had expected.
When it comes to Brexit, I've tried to do my homework. I've listened to dozens of discussions on radio and television, read hundreds of articles and talked to a wide variety of friends and acquaintances of differing political opinions in the UK and the Republic.
Apparently the Sinn Fein experiment with equal pay has hit the human-nature buffers.
Last week the Queen suffered a minor embarrassment because her umbrella apparently formed a parabolic curve that magnified her speech.
My historian father had a horror of closed minds. Prior to every election, before deciding which candidates to vote for, he read every word of the party manifestos. But in his last few years, having come to the conclusion that men had made a mess of everything, he...
The Irish general election took place on February 26, but it is only now that a new government seems imminent. The election produced a stalemate.
Dissidents see themselves as the true keepers of the united Ireland flame. It took the Provisionals 30 years to come to heel. Don't expect their successors to be quick learners, says Ruth Dudley Edwards.
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