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A border poll? About what, exactly? Voices are urging a border poll so we may all vote on which nation Northern Ireland should belong to - the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. Talk of Irish unity is said by the Financial Times to have entered the mainstream of debate.
Eileen Evason has certainly earned the right to be taken very seriously. She's an acknowledged expert in the infuriatingly complex world of social security benefits.
I was invited to lead a Welfare Reform Mitigations Working Group which was established in November 2015 on foot of the 'Fresh Start' agreement.
Instead of a badly drilled colour party of masked men fumbling shots, Gerry Adams took time to fire a freedom fighter comment over Martin McGuinness' grave. It is a measure of how far Sinn Fein has travelled that Adams could deliver a military-style salute and remain to savour...
On Saturday I was honoured and humbled to be ratified as the 16th leader of the Ulster Unionist Party - the only local party of modern and confident unionism, and the only party that has ever represented the form of positive unionism that I readily identify with.
Over the past two decades Ireland has been transformed as a result of the peace process. Peace was declared 19 years ago in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which promised a new political dispensation in the North.
Imagine your next staff appraisal. Do you feel you have had your training needs met? Tick. Timekeeping satisfactory? Tick. Loyal and enthusiastic team player? Tick. Sales going well? Tick. Meeting targets for squat thrusts, press-ups and exercise bike speeds? Needs...
This week's story about Cadbury and the National Trust leaving out references to Easter in their great British Egg Hunt publicity was a bit of a storm in an egg cup.
When morality and party politics mix, the result is never pretty. The suspension of three SDLP councillors in Belfast because they refused to toe the party line on condemning harassment or intimidation of women outside sexual health clinics is a case in point.
It sounds like a great idea - a stained glass window in City Hall to celebrate Belfast's LGBT citizens. I like the thought of those pompous marble halls, once the preserve of people who chained the swings on Sundays, being lit up by a colourful tribute to gay life in this town.
It's traditional for any motorist pulled over for a minor traffic offence to say to the police officer in question: "Shouldn't you be catching real criminals instead?" It must be infuriating to hear this umpteen times a day, but drivers do have a point. It's about priorities.
During a St Patrick's Day reception at Westminster this year, a well-known Fine Gael senator recounted a recent conversation he had with a SDLP politician. The Fine Gael man, responding to some political flattery from his northern counterpart, said: "Ye northern...
Arrogance and audacity are two of the hallmarks of Sinn Fein, and I came across another example of this this week. Before the recent Assembly election, Sinn Fein organised a major electoral registration campaign across Northern Ireland. Thousands of people had been...
Less than a fortnight ago the "great and the good" assembled in Derry to bury Martin McGuinness and eulogise him for having abandoned the politics of coercion in favour of consent as part of a search for a resolution of the long running Northern conflict.
The secret police in communist East Germany had a special unit called the Division of Garbage Analysis, whose job it was to rummage through people's rubbish bins for signs of subversive activity. That included looking for traces of 'Western' food.
As the dreary trench warfare between the DUP and Sinn Fein continues at Stormont, the unstoppable juggernaut of Brexit rolls on with all its threats and dangers. Those who rejoiced last week at the triggering of Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon may soon realise there is little to...
This was a murder inquiry that was flawed from the outset, denying Michaela's family any hope of justice in the subsequent trial of the two men accused of her murder.
With negotiations ongoing on the legacy of the past, it appears likely that the government wishes to commence a public consultation on proposed legislation to finally implement the Troubles-related elements of the Stormont House Agreement.
This isn't how we imagine evil. An ordinary looking man in an ordinary house in an ordinary street.
Whether we follow the sport or not — in fact, whether we regard it as a sport or not, or just as an odd way to get maimed or even killed — there is no doubt that road racing is a task for people of exceptional character.
Few people, even among pro-Brexit voters, want a 'hard' border. In Northern Ireland, 56%, including a sizeable minority of unionists, voted Remain. But contrary to Brexiteer promises of an electronic or 'soft' border, there will be a hard border. The question is where?
As fresh talks aimed at rebuilding power-sharing commence today we should pay heed to the advice of journalist, essayist and controversialist Christopher Hitchens on public discourse: "Banish your sentimentality."
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...
Sinn Fein's paranoia over Brexit is easily understood.
Gerry Adams's infantile dismissal of former Secretary of State Owen Paterson as "a complete tube" raises the question of why anyone seriously expected talks on the formation of a new Stormont Executive to lead anywhere.
In Budapest there is a field just outside the city limits known as Memento Park. It's where they deposited all the gigantic, grandiose public statues of Lenin, Stalin, Marx and Engels when they were removed after the fall of communism.
Many people are aware that the absence of a local budget will have serious consequences if the Stormont Assembly is not restored effectively within the near future.
Like Caesar, Kenny Shiels has every reason to beware the month of March. For, as with the ill-fated Roman leader, it is a month in the life of the Derry City football manager which has been attended by tragedy and death.
At 4pm on Monday, the deadline passed at Stormont and there was no agreement among the political parties in Northern Ireland. The responsibility for that impasse lies almost entirely at the door of Gerry Adams and the “hard men”.
Early one sunny Sunday morning in the 1980s, while driving from Dublin to Belfast, I encountered a number of elephants, horses and llamas standing at the side of the main road at the Killeen customs post. They were part of a travelling circus having its documentation checked as...
In the nearly two decades since the victory of democratic politics on this island we have faced many moments of truth. The process of reaching and implementing an agreed future was never going to be easy.
On March 29, 1673, the-then English Parliament introduced the Test Act, penalising Catholics and non-conformists alike.
Securing a Stormont deal would have been fitting memorial to their late colleague, says Alban Maginness.
As I walked through Belfast yesterday with students, not from these shores, one of them, a cheery lad but with an uncharacteristically solemn expression, pointed at the gable end of the Garrick Bar and said: "Those are wise words after what I heard today".
Sinn Fein is fully committed to getting workable political institutions and a fresh Executive up and running which can deliver for everyone in our society on the basis of equality, respect and integrity.
Readers of the Belfast Telegraph, and many thousands of others across Northern Ireland, did not vote on 2 March for the situation we face today.
The widely anticipated failure of the post-election negotiations has come to pass and, predictably, the blame game is well under way.
Alderman Chris McGimpsey is an old friend of mine whom I value for many reasons, including his thorough decency, his passionate desire to help people at the bottom of the heap, his complete lack of any kind of sectarianism and his black humour.
The Secretary of State, James Brokenshire, has a decision to make. The current legal position requires him to call an election to the Assembly within a reasonable time, but there are strong reasons why he might not want to do that.
It can be safely assumed that James Brokenshire was not appointed Secretary of State with a full-blown devolution crisis in mind.
The official deadline was 4pm today. But yesterday afternoon, Michelle O'Neill issued a blunt statement (an "enormous bloody spanner" was how one talks delegate described it to me): "Today we have come to the end of the road.
"Happy Mother's Day." These were not the words the Press was expecting Gerry Adams to open with as they waited anxiously for news of a political breakthrough.
Let's pray that the canonisation of Martin McGuinness promotes good politics in Northern Ireland. Because it has delivered a deadly blow to democratic politics in the Republic of Ireland.
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.
On November 21, 2016, Martin McGuinness and Arlene Foster agreed a joint statement. Here is the opening paragraph: "Day by day, slowly but surely, politics here is changing. And it's for the better. The focus is increasingly now on policies and delivery - on finding the best...
Ian Paisley explained that he was able to look past Martin McGuinness's past as an IRA commander because, as a fellow Christian, he was bound to consider it more important how a man ended his life than how he began it.
The piper leading the coffin of Martin McGuinness into the Long Tower church yesterday played a rebel song, Kelly the Boy from Killane, '...the foremost of all in the grim gap of death'.
The passing for any family of a husband, father and grandfather is obviously a time of sadness for the family. It is entirely appropriate they are given space to grieve and those who wish to pay their respects can do so.
I'm one of those people who think that speaking ill of the dead is not particularly helpful. However, I am not a hypocrite and I don't believe in glossing over history when someone does pass away. I remember how hurtful it was when my Uncle Joe - reported to be a one-time leader of the IRA - died after a long illness and how reading the different comments flung around on the internet was painful.
So Bill Clinton is to attend Martin McGuinness's funeral. Will he I wonder, as he shakes hands with Gerry Adams, Michelle O'Neill and all the rest of the republican aristocracy, give any thought to his victims other than wishing they would shut up and move on?
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