TO paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, change happens slowly and then all at once. Again and again in the past century we’ve seen long decades of geopolitical orthodoxies blown away with bewildering speed. From the Soviet Union to Germany to the Balkans, the gradual and inevitable move towards change and away from imposed and unsustainable polities, states and statelets became at the end a frantic and irresistible rush.
A VICTORIOUS Sinn Féin’s first significant announcement post-election was that it would continue to respect the d’Hondt system of equitably allocating positions in councils which they control. The first significant announcement by the DUP was to claim that the result had given them a renewed mandate for the boycott of the Stormont institutions.
ONLY the naivest of the naive would contend that this week’s local government election is just about the council staples of emptying the bins and burying the dead. Like so many other things here for the past century and more, City Hall politics have become consumed by the politics of partition – aka the politics of division.
THERE’S a danger that too much can be read into the news that the Republic of Ireland will this year experience a €10 billion budget surplus and a €16 billion budget surplus in 2024.
THE appalling incident in Lurgan at the weekend when two thugs attempted to gain entrance to the home of a young mother and her toddler while shouting the foulest sectarian abuse will yet again see the PSNI’s stock tumble in the eyes of the nationalist and republican community right across the North.
A GROUP which represents a wide range of public bodies across the North has written to Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris expressing its alarm at the range and extent of “drastic reductions” to services here.
THE DUP received the political equivalent of a punishment beating on Tuesday when Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris launched an extraordinary attack on the party over its continuing refusal to allow MLAs to do their jobs in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis.
THE music hall farce that was the fleeting visit of US President Joe Biden to the North is a museum quality illustration of the rapid descent of the United Kingdom in the past seven years from second-tier world power to global laughing stock.
A NEW poll by Queen’s University this week shows that two-thirds of people here want the Stormont institutions back up and running on the basis of the Windsor Framework. While that figure remains stark and a rebuke to those who travel across the water to pretend that the Protocol is massively unpopular, it is an underscoring of reality and nothing new. The DUP’s continued boycotting of Stormont has always been a minority sport.
THERE’S a lesson to be learnt from the unedifying weekend episode in the County Derry village of Tobermore when a bilingual sign was removed from a local park by people unhappy with the Irish language in ‘their’ locality.
THE familiar unionist response to visits by US Presidents is at best suspicious, at worst hostile – and news that Presidents Joe Biden and Bill Clinton are coming to the North to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement have maintained that tradition.
WE have no idea who was responsible for the shooting of a man in the Springfield Road district of the city on Tuesday. But regardless of who pulled the trigger; regardless of who ordered the trigger pulled; regardless of why the man was shot: this was another barbaric act carried out by people who are a blight on this community and whose actions stand in sickening contrast to the inspirational work being done daily by so many in so many places to make this a better place for us all to live.
HOT on the heels of the dilemma thrown up for loyalist culture by a raft of local council reviews of bonfire spaces in the wake of the death of a man on a Larne bonfire last year, the Orange Order has come in with a ‘hold my beer’ moment.
Not by chance have West and North Belfast been left behind when it comes to the cycling revolution transforming the city.
THE SDLP’s astute and increasingly impressive South Belfast MLA Matthew O’Toole best described a new unionist plan for a resolution of the Protocol saga when he said it was “a fundamentally unserious document” replete with “unworkable fantasies”. The most fleeting glance at what’s essentially a hardline anti-Good Friday Agreement wish list shows that analysis to be on the money. The report has been authored by an unelectable loyalist blogger and an unheard-of, student-age ultra-Tory operative with zero history of involvement in politics here. It recommends entrenching the supremacy of the centuries-old Acts of Union, which is illustrative of the mindset of the authors. It argues that existing EU laws which pertain to the six counties can be kept, but only so long as they are transposed into UK law and – laughably – only as long as they mirror British law. And the customs conundrum, it posits, can be dealt with by way of self-declaration – a facile suggestion which has been brought up and shot down countless times. The report is the work of two people who represent no-one, but it has received widespread coverage, mostly because one of the authors, Jamie Bryson, is believed to play a central role in advising DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson and in shaping the party’s anti-Protocol strategy. It is an embarrassing indictment of Mr Donaldson’s leadership that he has allowed his primacy in the campaign to overturn the Protocol to be hijacked in this way. Elsewhere, the serious job of repairing the mess brought about by the DUP’s blind pursuance of a hard Brexit continued this week as British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly arrived in the North to speak to the parties about a deal he has struck with the EU on data-sharing (a meeting hit by an attendance spat). Labour leader Keir Starmer and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar are both slated to arrive here separately on Thursday for a round of talks with the parties. Meanwhile, in another key sign that a deal is on the cards, Sinn Féin northern leader Michelle O’Neill said she’d had a positive telephone conversation on Protocol progress with Tanáiste Micheál Martin. The unremitting rancour and bitterness that has been the hallmark of the coalition government’s relationship with Sinn Féin has been set to the side as the prospect of progress looms larger, and that’s to be welcomed. Mr Donaldson, meanwhile, also had a talk with the Tanáiste and later said that any restoration of Stormont can only come about on the back of an accommodation “built on solid foundations which are supported by unionists and nationalists”. It is deeply unfortunate that the DUP’s laudable commitment to cross-community harmony was nowhere to be seen when the party went all-in the disastrous Brexit project which was opposed by a vast majority of nationalists, but let’s hope sense has been seen. The mooted February date for a deal will be on the DUP leader before he knows it and the work of preparing his base must begin now – if it’s work he’s willing to do.