DAVID McWilliams is a formidable man. He was raised in Monkstown, as comfortable a South Dublin area as you could wish for. He was educated at Blackrock College and Trinity College,  he has a Masters degree in economics from the College of Europe, Belgium. He invented the phrase ‘Celtic Tiger’ and he warned about its coming demise and the collapse of the property bubble in the South when others closed their eyes. In short, McWilliams knows his economic  onions. So when in a recent article he compared the economies of the North and South, it made informative reading.  To say he thinks Brexit was a bad idea would be an understatement. He notes that the two UK areas which firmly voted Remain – the city of London and the North of Ireland – are both doing well despite Brexit. The reason the North is doing well, McWilliams argues,  is because the South is essentially dragging it up, raising its standards. Between January and April of this year, exports from south to north went up by 40 per cent. The North, thanks to the Protocol, is ideally placed, with access to the UK market and to the EU market. Yet northern unionists are intent on firing an Exocet missile into the Protocol and rendering it unworkable.  If anyone should be trying to parade the benefits of being in the UK, it’s unionists. Yet ironically it’s unionists who are doing everything in their power – including paralysing Stormont – to make the North not work. The irony is that the North, when established more than 100 years ago, was an industrial power-house. Belfast was bigger and more thriving than Dublin, and in the early years of the twentieth century the six northern counties were responsible for two-thirds of the island’s industrial output.  All that has now been reversed. The North is dependent on the British annual subvention, and if it didn’t get it or a similar sum from elsewhere, the state would collapse. Relying on the subvention, McWilliams argues, handicaps self-reliance in the North.  What is shocking is that there are still unionists and even some nationalists who cling to the idea that the South is backward and poor, the North modern and well-off. This, to put it bluntly, is bunkum. As McWilliams notes, the South’s economy is six times bigger than the North’s,  even though its population is only 2.5 times bigger. The median income in the south is €43,915  while that of the north is €33,500. He doesn’t add that the North has rates whereas the South doesn’t have them. Which is why I’m noting that fact. With his track record, McWilliams is a man well worth listening to.  Those who are (rightly) calling for a citizens’ assembly to look at the prospects of a united Ireland are routinely dismissed, told that this is not the time, they are dreamers and, besides, the border poll would be lost by nationalists. This kind of talk is infectious, until those who favour Irish unity begin to think maybe it would be better to wait ten or twenty years. The truth would appear to be the reverse – it’s those who decry the notion of Irish reunification who have a weak grip on hard economic facts. There are even Northern nationalists who will tell you that the South’s health system and its education system  are both inferior to what we in the North enjoy. Poppycock. The huge tech firms like Google and Apple and Facebook repeatedly cite an educated work-force as one of the reasons for establishing themselves in the South. As for health in the North, an NHS where all services are free at the point of delivery  is certainly a good idea. But try getting your dental needs met without dipping deep into your pocket, or try getting a hip replacement and see how you feel after two years on the waiting list. The people of Ireland north and south need educated in the economic realities.  When the economic facts are made clear, the notion of a prosperous north being shackled to an impoverished south will implode. It’s time our politicians headlined the facts made available by David McWilliams and others like him. They can’t afford not to.

I HAVE known Tom Hartley for 55 years. During that time he has given decades of service to the republican cause. He has been an organiser, a writer, a propagandist, a leader. During the anti-internment protests of the early 1970s, and then the H-Block/ Armagh campaign, he was in the front line. He was Chair of Sinn Féin in Belfast and then during the hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981 he was responsible for the Sinn Féin Prisoner of War department, ensuring that we had a line of communication with  the prisons. In the 1980s Tom was Ard Runaí of the party. With the development of the Sinn Féin peace strategy Tom, along with Jim Gibney, led our effort to engage with political and civic unionism and the Protestant churches. Later Tom became a popular Belfast City Councillor and Mayor of the City. Among Tom’s many talents – a bodhrán maker and player par excellence with a fine taste for good food and fine wine – he is also an historian who has written about the people and history of Belfast through his fascinating books on the City Cemetery, Milltown Cemetery and Balmoral Cemetery. Tom decided many years ago that the republican history of the city – often ignored by the more established institutions – needed to be told and preserved. So Tom became a collector. Posters, leaflets, badges, publications, books, speeches, in fact anything that wasn’t nailed down would find its way into the Linen Hall library for the perusal and preservation of this and future generations. Mostly republican, but his collection also reflects the differences of opinion and politics within our society. In 2016 the Ulster Museum began its ‘Collecting the Troubles and Beyond’ project to which Tom has donated over 2,000 objects.  Last week Tom opened his own unique collection: A Collector’s Story. At the well attended event he said: “If you’re not seen – you’re not heard. When you’re not heard someone else will steal your voice, either distort or silence your narrative.” So, take the time to go to the Ulster Museum. You won’t be disappointed. Tom has made an invaluable and innovative contribution to the story telling of Ireland. Well done, a chara.

Cancel culture salesmen oddly immune from the problem YOU don’t hear so much about it now because the word has become so much a part of our daily vocabulary, but when Squinter was a boy and a young man he regularly heard complaints about the increasing use of the word “cheers” as a substitute for “thanks”. It was claimed that the word simply didn’t exist in Belfast – or anywhere else across the North – pre-1969 and that it had been brought here by British soldiers at the start of the Troubles. Perhaps it’s true, perhaps it isn’t, but what’s clear is that the complaints didn’t gain any traction because the word is to be heard everywhere these days. Bit like “cancel culture”. Up until recently the phrase was only to be heard in the British media and it was on the lips of Tories, Brexiteers, Tory Brexiteers, right-wing newspaper columnists and Brexiteer newspaper columnists (which is essentially the same thing, when you think about it). But during a conversation at the weekend Squinter heard the phrase uttered during a pretty harmless conversation about vaping. The claim was made that the increasing number of restaurants and pubs in Belfast that are clamping down on indoor vaping is an example of “cancel culture”, even though it might seem to be a perfectly reasonable thing in the age of Covid (on the rise again) and in relation to a device which is essentially a virus hose in the hands and mouth of somebody infected with the virus. Cancel culture doesn’t exist, needless to say. People have always got the sack or been disciplined or been thrown out of places for bad behaviour. Somebody headbutts you in the works canteen it’s not cancel culture if he gets the heave-ho. Similarly, if people like Squinter don’t like breathing in vapour that has been in the lungs of somebody else it's not cancelling people to tell them to knock it on the head. But the clearest evidence that cancel culture doesn’t exist is not in the frankly comical deployment of the phrase in casual conversations by Jo and Joe Soap in the living room, supermarket or pub, it’s in the fact that the very people who punt the cancel culture myth are people who, if it did exist, would have been the first to be cancelled. But they haven’t been. In fact, they have positively benefited from appalling behaviour that would have seen the aforementioned Jo and Joe given their P45s before they could see “It’s political correctness gone mad.” To use another phrase that is currently growing in popularity, Tories and their media chums who behave appallingly tend to “fail upwards”. The classic example, of course, is the head of the party that’s telling you that cancel culture is going to eat your children and rob your granny: Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson. The rap sheet is a familiar one, but when it’s read while constantly reminding oneself that Johnson and his chums spend their time assuring us that teachers are getting cancelled for saying the word “blackboard” and bacon sandwiches are being cancelled to placate the Muslims, it takes on a new depth of meaning. 

SOMETIMES it is worth going back to basics. As public standards are attacked and begin to be dismantled, it is worth asking – why are those standards there in the first place? And when you ask that you think, perhaps, last week was a good week for human rights. Last week, as a flight with asylum seekers was about to take off for Rwanda, it was grounded due to an intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. There were two instinctive reactions. The first was to be glad asylum seekers had benefited from international protections, and the other was outrage because national sovereignty was being interfered with by a foreign/international court. Agreeing with the latter view, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, immediately flexed by questioning Britain’s long-term commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Court which is its guardian. From the moment Brexit was mooted and the long-term commitment of Britain to the European Union was going out the door, the European Court of Human Rights and the Convention itself have been conflated with membership of the European Union. They are of course entirely separate arrangements and bodies, but if you have been fed for decades the English nationalist lie that foreign “interference” in domestic affairs is a bad thing, then it is easy to see how all non-English norms, courts and standards are viewed as the “enemy” and such lazy conflation gets rarely corrected. When England voted for a government that views rules, laws and norms as undesirable inconveniences, the hatred for this perceived “interference” was vindicated. But why is Britain in something it apparently hates so much?  Who hoodwinked them in such times of weakness past?  Of course, not without irony, it was Winston Churchill just after Britain and the Allies won World War II. It was at a time when international cooperation had defeated the extreme right and the horror of the most devasting of wars demanded higher international laws providing recognisable standards and protections to mitigate against such horror ever happening again. What had happened during Germany’s Nazi regime was entirely legal in domestic law, and popular. From the early 1930s state power had enshrined discrimination and hatred so that the Holocaust became possible. Protections of minorities and the vulnerable through law and agreed international courts  were seen as essential to end the cycles which led to crimes against humanity. The European Convention on Human Rights was signed as the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights’ local application. Britain was a key player in both documents.  It is notable that their ‘Empire’ was crumbling all around them and they were engaged in awful foreign policy, yet somewhere there was a recognition that something greater was possible and desirable. This century in Britain the exact form of state abuse and populist politics that the Convention was designed to protect against has emerged. The same contempt for law and human rights is being espoused on a daily basis from the centre of power. Which is why what happened last week at the European Court of Human Rights was so important. This is exactly why the Convention was drafted and the court was established, for these are the exact circumstances when minorities are so vulnerable and state power so putrid. And, thankfully, it is proving its value in these dark times. Long may it be protected. 

FAMILIES of those murdered by British state forces have held a rally outside the NIO’s Erskine House office on Chichester Street on Tuesday, a day after the ‘Bill of Shame’ reached the second reading stage in the House of Commons. The families were joined by political representatives for Sinn Féin, the SDLP and People Before Profit, as they called on Boris Johnson to scrap the proposals. Speaking at the rally, Sinn Féin Cllr Ryan Murphy, whose grandfather Terry McCafferty was murdered by the UDA in 1974 alongside his colleague James McCloskey after they were singled out from their Protestant workmates as they played cards over lunch, said that many of those gathered shared similar experiences. “With all that hurt and pain, there is also a desire and drive that we won’t let things go. We will keep going in their memory,” he said. “My family has campaigned along with others in the pursuit of truth and justice. Again, like many people here today we have never found out who was responsible for killing our loved one.  “Yet, 30 odd years after his death we found out that the guns used in his murder were taken from a UDR Barracks in 1972. These are the uncomfortable facts that the British government don’t want to emerge. “In an attempt to cover up their dirty war, access to the basic legal process is what the British Government are trying to deny from each and every one of us. “As families we have a right to that basic legal process. As families we have a right to an investigation. As families we have a right to truth. As families we have a right that our loved ones will not be forgotten and will be remembered.”