September, 2017

There are three major strands of thinking  on the future of our North-East Nest (NEN). The first is that unionists must be persuaded of the good sense of a reunited Ireland. Brexit has opened up a main highway for this view, establishing as it does an overwhelming argument for not just a seamless, invisible, magic-tree border […]

I was on my way to Derry yesterday morning and I tuned into the Nolan Show on Raidio Uladh/Radio Ulster. They were discussing a blog Sinn Féin’s Jim McVeigh had done on sluggerotoole.com, about how the media here (I think he was referring to radio phone-ins) propogate a lazy one-lot’s-as-bad-as-the-other version of our politics. Malachi […]

I’ve just listened to the DUP’s Simon Hamilton, in his commendably low-key speech pattern, making clear that the problem with getting the Stormont institutions active again is that Sinn Féin have announced red lines in advance of any negotations, while the DUP puts forward no such impediments. Everything is on the table, as it were. […]

Martin Dillon, former BBC producer, has said  the BBC was biased against Catholics during the Troubles. This has been presented as headline news by the Belfast Telegraph, among others.  I worked on a considerable number of (strictly non-political) BBC radio documentary programmes during the 1980s and had a nodding acquaintance with Martin Dillon. At the time […]

  Pics 1-4 are by Perkin Warbeck   Pic 1 Pic 2 Pic 3    Pic 4 “Waves of still-legal immigrants from the English enclave of the UK inudated the hot-as-hell Malta this week, an island already in the grip of Heatwave Lucifer . The UK, the putative former member state of the EU, and […]

So it’s happened. Labour have decided to make the move that so many in Britain and Ireland were hoping for . They’ve concluded that for Theresa May to drive the British economy off the edge of a cliff might not a good idea. Jeremy Corbyn has to be careful with this one. The media have […]

Watching David Davis in his exchanges with Michel Barnier, you wonder how the Tory negotiator can be so dim. He’s confronted with twenty-seven other countries but he still thinks that Britain should decide when trade talks will begin. Barnier and the EU have told him that other matters must first be resolved but Davis still […]