2 Irelands together

The mountains and beaches which are among my favourite places on this beloved island

Posted on Thursday, 27 August, 2026 by andypollak

For more than 60 years I have cycled and walked all over Ireland. This year I was barred by doctor’s orders from my usual week’s cycling, this time in Kerry (again). So I am going to write about 14 of the extraordinary places I have visited in that time on foot and on bicycle. I have tried, as far as I can, to pick places that are remote from the tourist trail.

I will start with what is probably my favourite hill walk on this beloved island.This starts at Oldbridge in County Wicklow at the southern end of Lough Dan, opposite the scout centre. You follow a small road and forest tracks and then up a steep path to Scarr mountain, which gives you a panoramic view of the whole of Wicklow, from the Sugar Loaf in the north to Lugnaquilla and Croaghanmoira in the south. Then it’s north-west across boggy semi-paths to Kanturk, down through the appropriately named ‘Slough’ (not to be attempted after wet weather!) and back to the shores of Lough Dan. The last mile or so is along a marvellously picturesque and well-marked track on the banks of that prettiest of Wicklow lakes. This is an excellent walk for fit and slightly adventurous foreign visitors, a beautiful three-hour outing only an hour’s drive from Dublin.

My favourite hotel in Ireland is Hunter’s Hotel at Newrath Bridge near Rathnew, a few miles north of Wicklow town. This wonderful old ‘coaching inn’, built around 1720 and expertly and generously managed by the Gelletlie brothers, Richard and Tom, must be unique in Ireland: for its antiquity as a functioning hostelry, its delightful gardens (vegetable, lawn and flower) and its warm and hospitable atmosphere. It is my favourite ‘overnighting’ place in Ireland by a distance. This is the first of two places in the country I hope to find in heaven if I ever get there.

Then there are the Blackstairs Mountains in County Wexford. I was visiting a friend who lives in a house at the head of a glen half way up one of those mountains, in a place called Corrageen, earlier this month. It was a perfect summer evening when I walked across a rough field – surely the highest field in Wexford – towards the central 735 metre summit in those hills,. As I lay down in the sun-dried grass on that mountainside and looked across the historic plain of Killane (as in the 1798 ballad ‘Kelly the Boy from Killane’) and Enniscorthy to Vinegar Hill and the Irish Sea, I experienced one of those blissful moments of total peace and contentment that happen only rarely in this busy and sometimes conflicted life.

My next places are four of Ireland’s glorious beaches and bathing places, all of them in Munster. I often thank the gods for Ireland’s inclement weather (not much in evidence during the past summer) which prevents our beaches – surely among the world’s finest – from being overwhlmed by foreign tourists. The first is the Cove across the harbour from Kinsale. This exquisite small beach in its sheltered estuary is always in danger of being overrun by visitors from Cork city and further afield, so on fine days it’s best to visit it first thing in the morning.

Seventy kilometres further westwards along the Cork coast is Lough Hyne, a unique warm seawater lake that sustains an enormous variety of plants and animals, many of which are not found anywhere else in Ireland. Along its western bank on the small road to Barlogue pier, you will see – if you are alert to it – a tiny jetty which is an ideal swimming spot. I have swum here from March to November without suffering overmuch from the cold.

West again is Sherkin Island, reached by a regular ferry from the pretty yachting and fishing village of Baltimore. On a sunny day the short walk from Sherkin pier to Silver Strand, past the (now closed) island school and through a grove of shady trees, is magical. I often imagine that if I went to heaven, just beyond the pearly gates would be this marvellous stroll. A warning: the sea off Silver Strand is usually freezing!

Over the border in Kerry, on the shores of Dingle Bay, is Ventry beach. This magnificent arc of sand, looking across to the Kerry mountains, must be one of the world’s great beaches. And yet when I visited it on a hot day in June it was almost completely deserted.

Talking of the Kerry mountains, my favourite (and certainly the most remote) cafe in the country used to be the Cookie Monster cafe (now unfortunately closed) in the wilderness of the Bridia Valley under Ireland’s highest mountain, Carrantouhill. Six years ago I approached it across a rocky pass from the equally remote Black Valley while escaping Covid by walking the Kerry Way. Most Irish people haven’t a clue about this most magnificent of long-distance walks, although it is well-known in Britain and Europe. What a marvellous experience they are missing – this is the unspoilt Irish wilderness at its most sublime.

However, perhaps my favourite mountain area in the country is north Connemara and south Mayo, around the Twelve Bens and Mweelrea. Here I have walked and climbed with daughters and friends up the ‘Ramp’ under Ben Bury, a steep, forbidding but spectacular trek that begins at Doo Lough (scene of the terrible 1847 ‘famine walk’ when scores of people died in appalling winter conditions after being turned away for famine relief) and ends with a tramp across the broad plateau which leads to the peak of Mweelrea, Connacht’s highest mountain. Not to be attempted in bad weather!

On the other side of Mweelrea is Killary Harbour, Ireland’s longest and most beautiful fjord (which was said 120 years ago to be large and deep enough to house Britain’s entire Royal Navy, when that navy was the world’s largest). Here is a 16 kilometre walk along the southern lough shore (or about half that length if you leave a second car at Bunowen), which is best concluded with a pint in Hamilton’s cosy bar in Leenane. This is a walk I have been doing since was 18 years old, when there was a marvellously remote youth hostel, presided over by the memorable Festy Mortimer (and in a house once inhabited by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) at the tiny fishing harbour of Rosroe at the start of the walk.

Finally to the North. Here, although most of my childhood summers were spent in my grandfather’s wooden ‘gypsy’ caravan in Portrush (built by him on an old horse-drawn fire engine chassis), my preferred beach is the one along the coast at the bustling and friendly north Antrim town of Ballycastle. That evangelical grandfather’s influence is evident in my 12th favourite place, the little Reformed Presbyterian Church beside the Kellswater river between Ballymena and Antrim, where they used to prefer to sing unaccompanied psalms rather than hymns to music.

I lived for 14 years as a lodger in a handsome Georgian house in the Mall in Armagh, owned by my esteemed astronomer friend John Butler. They were largely happy, if extremely, busy years as I opened and ran the Centre for Cross Border Studies (now the Centre for Cross Border Cooperation) in the town. The gorgeous green sward of the Mall, with its tree-lined avenues and cricket pitches, was always a balm to the soul in stressful times.

Last of all is Slieve Donard in the Mournes in County Down, the highest mountain in Northern Ireland. This lies above the charming seaside resort of Newcastle, and you begin the walk to its summit in the town’s Donard Park. It’s not a particularly difficult four-five hour walk up and down, but unlike in Kerry and Wicklow you start the ascent from sea level, so by the time you reach the top up a particularly steep incline, you feel every centimetre of its 850 metres!

Please excuse the excess of superlatives in this blog, gentle reader: superlative is what I feel when I think of walking or cycling in the Irish hills and mountains, seascapes and countryside.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, The island environment | Tagged europe, ireland, Northern Ireland, travel | 5 Comments

The Truth Recovery Process and its ‘conditional amnesty’ campaign come to an end

Posted on Monday, 3 August, 2026 by andypollak

For the past eight years I have been involved with a group of people called the Truth Recovery Process (TRP) which has been campaigning for ‘conditional amnesties’ for those former combatants in the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ – from state and paramilitary forces alike – who are prepared to come forward and tell the truth about the killings and other violent acts they were involved in. The group was led by former journalist and historian, Padraig Yeates, former Glasnevin Trust chair John Green, head of the Messines Fellowship Harry Donaghy, and former Labour Party deputy leader Liz McManus.

Earlier this summer that campaign was stood down. In our final statement we said: “We felt, and we still do, that is is important to develop alternatives to the courts for those who wish to address the very real division caused by decades of conflict between rival traditions on this island through means other than a very adversarial criminal justice system that often pits communities against each other. It was patently obvious that relying on the courts to deal with the legacy of over 3,500 dead and over 45.000 injured by the conflict was not only a totally inadequate approach to dealing with these issues, but counter-productive in many cases.” [The group made clear we were not opposed to individual people taking court action to find the truth about what happened to their family members.]

“We were also encouraged by the success of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains ((CLVR), which provided for ‘protected disclosures’ to be made by former combatants, and other people with information relevant to victims’ families seeking the recovery of their loved ones’ bodies, without facing prosecution. We felt, and still believe, that the narrow ground between protected disclosure and conditional amnesty could have been bridged by appropriate legislation. But neither the British nor the Irish governments have shown any interest in exploring this alternative to the tortuous and expensive process of criminal prosecution through the courts.

“With the benefit of hindsight, we have to accept that the Truth Recovery Process was probably initiated much too late. It was something many of us has assumed would have emerged naturally in the aftermath of the 1998 Agreement. Like others we failed to realise that the priority for most of the politicians involved in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was to consolidate the positions of their parties in the new constitutional dispensation rather than address the underlying causes of recurring conflict.”

A number of former combatants had committed in a personal capacity to participating in a Truth Recovery Process if it could be established. They had been involved in the earliest and bloodiest years of the conflict in the 1970s. Our initiative may have been a case of “too little, too late” for them. Since the TRP campaign began almost all of the ex-combatants we were in contact with have died.

Successive British Secretaries of State did not last long enough to complete their learning curve in dealing with this extremely complex legacy of the ‘Troubles’. However the Irish government – which showed even less interest than the British – had no such excuse for their inertia and lack of ambition. For a while they hid behind the excuse that conditional amnesties would be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, although Dublin Senior Counsel Micheal Lynn examined the ECHR and told us that was not the case.

All that is left is a few public inquiries (like the Pat Finucane Inquiry), trials and tribunals that will seek to address a small handful of outstanding cases. Many thousands of other families seeking the truth about the deaths and serious injuries of their loved ones – as well as unaddressed miscarriages of justice where people were wrongly convicted of serious crimes – will be the flawed legacy of the past that Northern Ireland will have to use for navigating an uncertain future.

We concluded our statement: “Reconciliation is dependent on establishing the facts – the whys and the hows – leading to apologies and forgiveness. It is not going to happen all the time, but as countless truth and reconciliation programmes have shown, the journey is an important as the outcome. Whatever the future holds for Northern Ireland, be it part of a United Ireland or United Kingdom, or as its own state, it desperately needs a process concentrating on reconciliation. The two governments seem happy to kick this can down the road, blithely ignoring the forever damage it causes.” At a TRP conference in Belfast in April 2023, we heard impressive testimonies of how post-conflict peace and reconciliation programmes in South Africa, Colombia and Chile had dealt with difficult legacy issues, something the Good Friday Agreement had largely ignored.

The British government’s response to the legacy problem was to set up (in May 2024) the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), although this was opposed by all Northern Ireland’s political parties, largely because they doubted its investigative capacity due to the NI Secretary of State retaining powers over the disclosure of confidential British national security information. It was nevertheless headed by three distinguished and honourable men: former Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan; Peter Sheridan, former senior RUC and PSNI officer (the highest ranking Catholic in those bodies) and chief executive of Cooperation Ireland; and former Chief Commissioner of the NI Human Rights Commission, Professor Bryce Dickson.

Despite this widespread opposition, the ICRIR has received requests from around 300 families to investigate their loved ones’ deaths and serious injuries. However it has faced a serious problem in seeking cooperation from the Garda Siochana and the Irish authorities. It has sought information from the Garda in around a dozen cases. These involved bombings or shootings that happened “within hundreds of yards of the border, where the killers fled straight across, in some cases straight into the guards’ arms, who arrested them,” senior ICRIR investigator Keith Surtees (the former London Metropolitan Police commander highly regarded for his work on the Operation Kenova inquiry into the British Army agent ‘Stakeknife’) told the Irish Times‘ Mark Hennessy.¹ Some of those arrested were subsequently let go. Others were prosecuted for possession of firearms. But noone implicated in any of the dozen or so cases in which information was requested were ever convicted of any of the offences the ICRIR is investigating.

These cases are just a few of around 500 IRA killings with connections to the South, the ICRIR believes, yet it is barred by the Irish Government from getting information from the Garda about any of them. Eight letters to the Department of Justice and the Garda have merited nothing more than an acknowledgement, while just one received a ‘we’ll get back to you’ letter.

“It is hugely disappointing that the engagement that would have occurred three years ago with Operation Kenova’s investigators has now completely disappeared,” said Surtees. “It’s now off the agenda.”

This is despite a vague ‘framework’ ‘agreement on legacy issues between the British and Irish governments last September. The main result of this so far has been the bringing into effect in June of Irish legislation that will enable sworn evidence to be taken from the Garda, former Ministers and other relevant Southern public bodies about the Omagh bombing.

It remains to be seen if this will be effective 28 years after that atrocity, the worst of the ‘Troubles’. In the words of Kenny Donaldson, the director of the Fermanagh-based victims and survivors organisation SEFF: “That atrocity was planned in and executed from the South, with the bomb carried across the border and the bombers escaping back across the border. The Irish government should have given the British judge carrying out that inquiry access to courtrooms in Dublin where he would have had full rights to compel witnesses to attend, and to bring people in from the Southern administration in to answer questions. 75 per cent [of the planning and preparation] of the Omagh bombing happened south of the border. Those responsible had been involved in a bombing spree for the previous 18 months and were being watched by the Southern authorities. If that’s not forensically brought out in any inquiry, you’re going to have a very, very jaundiced outcome. If the Irish state were to show a level of responsibility and acknowledgement around those issues, it would perhaps make sections of the unionist community in Northern Ireland begin to think ‘here’s a state prepared to actually look at itself and to deal with its wrongs’.

PS A final word of tribute to my friend and former Irish Times colleague Padraig Yeates. This distinguished journalist, historian – author of four acclaimed books about the 1913 lockout and Dublin during the War of Independence period – and trade union activist, was the real dynamo behind the Truth Recovery Process initiative. That initiative may have come to naught. But those of us who passionately believe in reconciliation in the North as a necessary pre-requisite (or at least accompaniment) to the possible eventual coming together of people on this island are greatly in his debt.

¹ ‘You have to tell the truth about the hurt that people suffered in the Troubles’, Irish Times, 16 July 2026

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics, the-troubles, writing | 3 Comments

Could the Jeffrey Donaldson case change the course of Northern Ireland’s history?

Posted on Wednesday, 15 July, 2026 by andypollak

I have been listening to a most interesting Irish Times podcast with the Northern Ireland commentator and former Ulster Unionist press officer, Alex Kane, about the political impact of the court judgement last month that found former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson guilty of rape and sexual abuse of two very young girls (and reading a follow-up article by Kane in that newspaper).¹

Kane detailed Donaldson’s astonishing list of sins, quite apart from the rape and abuse conviction, calling him “a thoroughgoing hypocrite” who, while “cloaked in evangelical Christianity” condemned homosexuality, drunkenly wandered around the Houses of Parliament slugging wine; ‘projectile vomited’ over the Mayor of Beijing during a visit to China; frequented gay saunas; added the purchase of porn films to his parliamentary expenses claim form, and had a number of extra-marital affairs (one of which led to his wife bugging his car).

Turning to politics, Kane recalled the DUP’s support for the Conservative governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson on the basis that any post-Brexit agreement with the EU would ensure that Northern Ireland would remain “unequivocally and unambiguously inside the United Kingdom.” As we know, that didn’t happen, with the Northern Ireland Protocol (amended by the Windsor Framework) setting up an Irish Sea ‘border’ for goods, thus keeping the Irish border open and the North partly in the EU. In response, the DUP collapsed the Stormont institutions.

In January 2024 unionists were shocked and surprised when Donaldson brought the DUP back into the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly without any major change in the Protocol. At the time, many DUP members, and most vociferously Jim Allister, leader of the small, ultra-conservative Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), wondered what had changed his mind.

Kane says Allister now thinks he knows what caused Donaldson’s u-turn: blackmail. In a statement following the court’s verdict, Allister said: “For unionism, a very chilling and troubling issue arises, namely how far did his troubles give rise to his sell-out on the Protocol? To me it is inconceivable that the government was unaware of his proclivities and the idea of such being used as leverage is far from fanciful. Was he on a mission of attempted self-preservation in the hope, no matter how deluded, he could stave off the fate that has now befallen him?”

Kane put it more bluntly: “Did the 2024 agreement come about because Jeffrey Donaldson was being used by the intelligence services who said ‘get this deal done or we’re going to spill this story?”

In 10 months there is a Northern Ireland Assembly election. Kane says this will be the biggest test for the DUP since the post-Good Friday Agreement election in 1998. He says much of the DUP’s core base, made up of deeply conservative evangelicals, will be shocked to their roots by the appalling things Donaldson has done.Their support for the DUP “might just disappear overnight” he said.

He added that at least 50% of DUP supporters “would not care if the Assembly disappeared tomorrow.” They would have a new home: the anti-Good Friday Agreement, anti-Assembly, anti-power sharing Traditional Unionist Voice. In the latest opinion poll – before the Donaldson verdict – the TUV share of the unionist vote was was running at 11-13%. This was compared to a 7.6% of the total vote, giving the party one seat, in the 2022 Assembly election.

If the TUV benefits from disillusioned DUP voters – and maybe even some desertions from disillusioned DUP MLAs – and wins seven or eight seats, the very foundations of the Good Friday Agreement institutions could be in danger. “If they bring down the Northern Ireland Assembly, the British prime minister [almost certainly Andy Burnham] will have to make a key decision,” said Kane. “Does he want to be lumbered with Direct Rule, or does he say: ‘you’re forcing my hand. You’re bringing down the one thing that gave you some semblance of government, where you were allowed to do things for yourselves. We’re going to test the water with a Border poll.”

“That would be catastrophic for Ulster unionism,” said Kane. Speaking as an “unembarrassed, unapologetic unionist”- and a very well-informed one – he knew that unionism was not at all prepared for a Border poll.

Kane wrote in his follow-up Irish Times article that he was not convinced that Donaldson was blackmailed. However [he said in the podcast] “if that is true – and a lot of unionists believe it. If that is true, then they have to face the one consequence of that. It means there is no length to which a British government would not go to unsettle unionism. You can’t have it both ways . You either trust your own government or you don’t trust your own government. If unionism keeps pushing its own base towards a situation where you cannot trust anyone, you make it much easier for those who say ‘Well, if you don’t trust anyone, you don’t trust your own government, you don’t feel secure, let’s have a [referendum] vote and see what happens. Maybe more and more unionists would say: ‘Stuff it, let’s be 20% in a united Ireland rather than 2% in a United Kingdom.”

Personally I don’t believe we’re anywhere near a Border poll (quite apart from the fact that unionists in a united Ireland would be more like 11-12% of the total population rather than 20%). But the scenario Kane paints is not impossible. He said that on three occasions since Brexit, the British Government had chosen to take steps that angered unionism, and since the prorogation of Stormont in 1972 one would be “hard pushed to find an example of the British government having done anything favourable to unionism…And that is unionism’s major problem. The clash is between what they want and what the British government’s long-term intentions may be.”

Kane is one of Northern Ireland’s most knowledgeable commentators, but he doesn’t always get everything right. In 2017 he told me of his belief that there were 150,000 ‘soft’ unionists who were persuadable of the merits of Irish unity, and he expected to see that outcome in his lifetime (he was then 61). A month later he wrote: “Irish unity will be the last big political story in my active writing lifetime.” Nine years later we are no significantly closer to unity.

However I’m sure Sinn Fein are rubbing their hands in glee to see the disarray in unionism. A deep lack of trust between Ulster unionism and the British government can only play into their hands.

Let me finish by raining on that party’s parade a little.In a depressing but insightful article on the eve of the 12th July celebrations, the Irish Times‘ Mark Hennessy wrote about how the village of Drum in County Monaghan – often described as the most Protestant place in the Republic – was the target of a torrent of sectarian trolling following the revelation that the husband of Heather Humphreys, Fine Gael’s candidate in last year’s presidential election (and a Presbyterian), had been in the Orange Order, like so many Border Protestants.²

Angela Graham, for many years the highly-regarded manager of the nearby Clones Family Resource Centre, and a leader in her Monaghan Protestant community, spoke of being “shocked to the core” at the “blatant sectarianism – it hurt so much”. Humphreys was portrayed as “an Orange bitch” and unworthy of being the state’s first citizen because of her background. Graham asked why Taoiseach Micheál Martin, outgoing President Michael D. Higgins and incoming President Catherine Connolly had not spoken out in support of her community, contrasting this with President Mary McAleese’s invitation to Aras an Uachtaráin “as part of the Orange family.”

She went on: “People like me, who were open to a conversation about a united Ireland, would now not be interested in having that conversation. How could we say to our unionist neighbours or friends that this is a very welcoming place to live, faced with a minority who engage in this terrible racist and sectarian behaviour and stirring up hate?”

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald is always full of pious platitudes about how welcome Northern unionists will be in a ‘new Ireland’. “I believe Irish unity is the best solution for all of our people, including our unionist brothers and sisters”, she said on assuming the party leadership in 2018. Unfortunately the remnants of an ugly old Ireland for whom unionists and Orangemen are hate figures showed their faces in Monaghan last year, and I suspect that not a few of them came from the Sinn Fein family.

“In my view the South isn’t prepared for what Northern Ireland being reunited with the rest of Ireland is going to mean”, the former head of the NI Community Relations Council (and former Alliance Party chair) Duncan Morrow, told political scientist Padraig O’Malley in 2023. He gave the example of “conversations around symbolic issues” [including Orangeism] which he says will be “brutal, difficult, endless and emotive, as they have been for 20 years in Northern Ireland.”³

¹ ‘How the duplicitous double life of Jeffrey Donaldson threatens the future of unionism’, Irish Times podcast with Hugh Linehan, 2 July; ‘Was Donaldson blackmailed by the British government?’, Irish Times, 6 July

² ‘Border Protestants still reeling from abuse of Heather Humphreys’, Irish Times, 11 July

³ Padraig O’Malley, Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, p.305

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 1 Comment

Why the anti-immigrant riots in Belfast made me ashamed to be a Northern Protestant

Posted on Friday, 26 June, 2026 by andypollak

I am not a typical Northern Protestant, with a father who was a left-wing Czech refugee. But part of me identifies with my County Antrim Presbyterian mother, her family and community. As a half-Irish boy growing up in London, a lifelong love affair with Ireland started through my close relationship with my devout grandfather, a lovely man who was an evangelical lay preacher with his own gospel hall outside Ballymena.

That identification made me deeply ashamed at the latest anti-immigrant riots earlier this month, the third summer of such attacks by loyalist mobs on people with brown and black skins in Belfast and other Northern Irish towns. The racist violence, sparked off by a horrific attack by a Sudanese refugee on a 44-year-old man in a Catholic area in north Belfast, apparently attempting to behead him (which was videoed by a passer-by and shared widely on social media), was overwhelmingly in areas controlled by loyalist paramilitaries.

The family of Stephen Ogilvie, the victim of the attack, issued a statement saying they wanted to “make it absolutely clear that overnight unrest is not welcome, and peaceful protest is the only way forward. We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work.” They said they did not want this “terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility”.

However that is exactly what happened. In the Lower Newtownards Road in east Belfast, a rampaging mob targeted ethnic minority migrants, kicking in their doors and burning a bus and cars in their streets. People came out of their houses “to show they were white”, said one local resident. Masked youngsters, teenagers and younger, blocked streets while recognisable loyalist paramilitaries looked on. As Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph put it: “This is one of the strongholds of the Ulster Volunteer Force. No one sweeps through its territory blocking roads and torching buildings without its approval.”¹

The Assistant Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Ryan Henderson, disagreed, saying there was “no evidence” that the riots were coordinated by paramilitaries. On this occasion I prefer to believe a highly reputable journalist like McBride, who identified one man who threatened him as a notorious UVF member and the man standing beside him as a major drug dealer who was once close to a UDA leader.

ACC Henderson said there was evidence of social media coordination, both inside and outside Northern Ireland. The trillionaire owner of social media network X, Elon Musk, and the English fascist agitator Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon) were among “the high profile figures sharing lists of locations directing demonstrators to where protests could take place”, wrote Seanín Graham in the Irish Times.²

McBride stressed that the violence was localised in mostly deprived areas. “Few middle class residents of Belfast experienced more than mild inconvenience. This is one of the enduring injustices of the post-Good Friday Agreement era. No one in authority would say so, but conditions that would be intolerable in leafy suburbs are accepted when confined to deprived areas.By embedding and elevating paramilitary leaders, society has bought peace and freedom elsewhere, but consigned other areas to oppression.” To be a resident in an area controlled by these leaders is to live in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation; doubly so if you are an immigrant.

“One of the central objections of those objecting to migration in loyalist communities is that disproportionate numbers of foreign nationals are living in their areas. Yet one of the central reasons for this is that rents are lower in areas controlled by loyalist paramilitaries because many local people don’t want to live there,” wrote McBride.

Rioting in Belfast, usually involving sectarian violence, has been endemic for nearly 200 years. The Bombay Street riot in August 1969, in which a loyalist mob – aided by the overwhelmingly Protestant reserve police force, the B-Specials – burned that entire Catholic street off the Falls Road to the ground, was the effective start of the large scale violence of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’.

The difference this time is that the attacks were against dark-skinned immigrants rather than Catholics. Colm Walsh, a Queen’s University criminology lecturer who has just completed a study of the anti-immigration violence in Ballymena a year ago, while recognising the frustration of people in Protestant working class areas at poor housing conditions and public services, expressed concern about the increasing levels of race-related violence in the North. “As you see trends in sectarianism go down, you see trends in hate crime go up.”

Unionist leaders were, as usual, less than unreserved in their condemnations of the rioting, although DUP leader Gavin Robinson said “violence, intimidation and racism are wrong.” However he was more concerned about the issue of illegal immigration. He called for the British and Irish governments “to work together on effective immigration controls, intelligence sharing and enforcement at ports and airports, preventing abuse of the system before people ever reach the [Irish] land border.We need a British Isles solution that works for everyone.” Hadi Alodid, the Sudanese man charged with the attack on Stephen Ogilvie, had entered Northern Ireland through the Republic.

Northern Ireland Assembly Speaker and former DUP leader Edwin Poots claimed that Northern Ireland had the second highest number of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom.However according to the independent fact-checking service FactCheckNI, of the 361 local authority areas in the UK, Belfast, where most asylum seekers in the North are situated, had the 20th highest number of asylum seekers in 2025.

If unionist politicians were mealy-mouthed, at least one judge was not. Refusing to grant bail to an alleged rioter in the High Court, Mr Justice McAlinden warned that “this type of civil disorder and outrageous, racist and thuggish behaviour has to be nipped in the bud and anyone who is convicted of this offence should face a severe sentence because, plainly, racist violence has no place in civilised society.”

“If we look back as far as 1938 and see the Nazis burning people out of their houses during Kristallnacht, what did that lead to?” the judge asked.“History tells you that the acceptance of racist violence leads to catastrophe and it must be nipped in the bud.”

Sam McBride also warned that “unionism risks repelling a growing section of the population – migrants – who could be decisive in a future Border poll.” I agree: repelling people is what violent loyalism does best. I repeat what I wrote after the anti-immigrant riots in Ballymena 12 months ago. “Why do loyalists keep displaying this hate-filled face to the world? Such actions only confirm the image much of the outside world has of Northern Ireland loyalists as ‘beyond the pale’ thugs and bigots. It is fair comment to say that for a community that has few friends in the world anyway, the violent goings on in Ballymena [and now Belfast] will have done absolutely nothing to maintain the few friendships they do have. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom – and particularly to the UK monarchy – is an entirely legitimate political position. Why do they allow it to be sullied by such extremism and violence?”

I feel particularly for my loyalist friends – the likes of John Kyle, Debbie Watters, Brian Ervine, Sammy Douglas and Jackie Redpath – good and decent people who have worked day and night to make Northern Ireland a fairer, juster and more harmonious society. Racist and anti-immigrant hatred and violence – odious and despicable in themselves – also undermine that noble work.

The ordinary, peaceful citizens of Belfast redeemed the city somewhat on the Saturday after the riots when an estimated 15-20,000 people gathered outside City Hall for an anti-racism rally. Areeg Fareh, from Anaka Women’s Collective, told the crowd: “We have made Northern Ireland our home. We are in communities all around the city. Yes, we have experienced racism. It is challenging and it hurts, but most people here have shown us kindness and understanding.We bring skills and knowledge in a diverse range of areas, from medicine to engineering, from business and computers to art and culture. We have much to give and want to share with you all.”

My friend Paul Nolan, the prominent social researcher, who volunteers with the refugee support group Belfast City of Sanctuary, said:”The day before the rally I had attended a meeting where, one after another, refugees and asylum-seekers told of the terror they had experienced. I felt shame for my city. When I arrived at the rally the numbers seemed small at first but soon the front of the City Hall was thronged as were the adjoining streets. My heart began to lift and when we began the spontaneous chant ‘We are Belfast! We are Belfast!’ it suddenly felt like that could be true.”

And what to do about the continued existence of the loyalist paramilitaries as a violent and disruptive element in Northern Irish society? This thorny question has flummoxed the politicians in three capitals for much of the past 28 years since the Good Friday Agreement. Last year the Irish and British governments appointed a Dutch conflict resolution expert, Fleur Ravensbergen (who has experience of working to end conflicts in the Basque Country, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo among other places) to report back on how Northern Irish paramilitary groups could be wound down. Her report, within the framework of the Independent Reporting Commission set up in 2015 to monitor progress on tackling paramilitary activity, is due in August.

The governments are hopeful that the direct engagement of this impressive woman with paramilitary leaders can lead to an initiative that would bring about movement on an issue that has remained stubbornly resistant to progress for so long. She has been formally mandated by the governments to come up with a mechanism that will lead the paramilitaries – who are a complex and toxic mixture of the criminal, political and local/communal – belatedly to integrate into what is now a largely peaceful and democratic society.

¹ ‘NI’s snarling serpent isn’t migrants, but mob rule of thugs who assaulted me under nose of the police’, Belfast Telegraph, 13 June

² ‘The X factor: how foreign agitators helped spark racist riots across the North’, Irish Times, 13 June

Posted in General | Tagged history, Northern Ireland, politics | 1 Comment

Why Shared Island, not ‘Brits out’, is the way forward for Ireland

Posted on Sunday, 14 June, 2026 by andypollak

I have just come out from two and a half weeks in hospital, which means I haven’t closely followed the anti-immigration riots in Belfast, except to feel – as someone from a Northern Protestant background – horrified and ashamed once again that members of my community were in the forefront of that explosion of racism and violence. I will return to this difficult topic in a forthcoming blog.

The 2025 annual report of the Shared Island initiative was launched last month to the usual deafening silence from the media. This pioneering cross-border cooperation programme, initiated by Taoiseach Micheál Martin six years ago, has so far allocated €600 million (over €100 million on new projects last year) and is committed to spending two billion euro by 2035.

At the 2026 Fianna Fail Ard Fheis, also last month, Martin called Shared Island “the most consequential north-south initiative ever taken by an Irish government”. It has provided a major addition to the EU Peace and INTERREG programmes that funded so many cross-border projects in the first two decades of the century.

Martin said it is not about “reheating well-worn and comfortable rhetoric” (on RTE he was tougher, criticising the “empty rhetoric which we’ve had for nearly 100 years” – he should have inserted the adjective ‘nationalist’ into both statements). He went on: “It’s about the much harder, perhaps more uncomfortable, and certainly more important work of building the physical, societal, educational and person-to-person connections that we need if we are ever to achieve the goal of bringing people together and achieving agreement on now we are going to share our island.” He pointed out that all-island trade is now at a record high of €17 billion per year.

The Taoiseach is absolutely right. He also quoted Sean Lemass saying: “When people begin to work together it’s a habit that will grow.” I saw that with my own eyes when running the Centre for Cross Border Studies (now the Centre for Cross Border Cooperation) for 14 years up to 2013. I saw teachers and health workers and civil servants and university academics and spatial planners – including many from a unionist background – learning to work together in all-Ireland networks that we helped to bring together.

Intelligent people on both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland should welcome Shared Island: nationalists because it is a sensible way to build support for eventual unification among non-nationalists who can be won over by the economic, financial and social generosity of the Dublin government; and unionists because it’s a major ‘no strings attached’ funding source at a time when both UK Treasury and EU funding are drying up or threatening to dry up. It is accompanied by genuine efforts by Dublin to understand and help unionist communities. Strong loyalists I talk to are full of praise for Department of Foreign Affairs officials who help their projects with funding and advice.

Of course there is considerable self-interest involved from the Irish government. As the Northern Ireland editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Sam McBride, puts it: “If Martin isn’t rushing to a Border poll, then he needs to show he’s doing something on the North.”

However he goes on: “Far more significant is the strategic element. A senior official close to the Taoiseach involved in deciding how the funds are spent once told me that the key test was constitutional neutrality: Would this make sense if there was a united Ireland, and would this make sense if there was never a united Ireland? An hourly train service between Dublin and Belfast clearly ticks both boxes. Put more simply, it’s just common sense.”¹ The 40% increase in passengers using the more frequent service is another win for common sense.

Look at some of the projects funded: an islandwide nature restoration and biodiversity programme; linked therapeutic centres for children with cancer and their families; a joint women’s entrepreneurship scheme; the North learning from the South’s superior DEIS programme for tackling educational under-achievement; an all-Ireland pollinator plan; a new teaching building for the University of Ulster campus in Derry; the overseas joint marketing of the Wild Atlantic Way and the Causeway Coast in the North; working together to restore peatlands in both jurisdictions (and in Scotland); co-centres for research and innovation on climate, biodiversity and water, and on sustainable food systems; electrical vehicle charging points at sports clubs across the island; a cross-border arts and cultural heritage programme. One could go on and on listing these unquestionably common sense projects.

We all have our favourite individual projects. As a Green Party member, I was delighted to see the Nature Farming Friendly Network in the North linking up with the marvellous Burrenbeo Trust in County Clare, led by the visionary environmentalist Brendan Dunford. There are some I would criticise. I have my doubts about spending €107 million on the Narrow Water bridge across Carlingford Lough when Newry has a perfectly good by-pass and beauty spots like Carlingford medieval town and the Cooley Mountains are already adequately served by road. On a much smaller scale, what is the North-South Shared Ireland Teacher Research Exchange (T-Rex) – an all-Ireland version of an existing Southern programme – going to do that the highly successful Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (SCoTENS) hasn’t been doing for the past 24 years, completing literally hundreds of cross-border research projects in this area?

Which brings me to the International Centre for Local and Regional Development ICLRD). I was at the 20^th annual conference of this important all-Ireland network of planners in Dundalk last month. I heard the inaugural joint head of the North South Ministerial Council, Tim O’Connor, a former senior Department of Foreign Affairs official, call the ICLRD “a beacon of what we intended when we started this journey 28 years ago.” The former chair of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, Professor Peter Roberts, spoke of “the absolute necessity for ICLRD to continue to broker the many ‘difficult to grasp’ issues in planning on the island of Ireland.” And leading Belfast planner Diane Fitzsimons said that the ICLRD had “created the trust to bring people together from all levels of government, all professionals, planners and engineers,from all across the island.”

Building trust in order to come together to solve difficult issues on this island: isn’t that the largest part of what the Good Friday Agreement – or at least its ‘Strand Two’ North-South dimension – was all about? Yet I was amazed and disturbed to hear that ICLRD’s main university sponsors – Maynooth University and University of Ulster – may be contemplating withdrawing their funding from this highly innovative all-island network. What an extraordinarily foolish and short-sighted decision that would be.

The late Sir George Quigley, the visionary business leader who was behind both the Dublin-Belfast ‘economic corridor’ and ‘island of Ireland economy’ concepts in the 1990s, shortly before his death in 2013 praised the ICLRD’s work on the mapping of ‘functional territories’ throughout the island. He called this “a potentially exciting concept since, put at its simplest, it could hopefully be developed to provide guidance in an island context on what services should be put where, having regard to optimum catchment areas, thereby enhancing accessibility by ensuring that services are affordable, economically operated and effectively configured and managed to sustain high quality.” He urged governments to act on the ICLRD’s recommendations and “not to let a single idea that merits follow-up fall on stony ground.”²

Contrast that careful and practical, yet idealistic, scenario with the empty rhetoric demanding an utterly unplanned Border poll within the next five years from the likes of Sinn Fein and the nationalist lobby group Ireland’s Future. Shared Island is clearly part of the George Quigley/ICLRD frame of mind. Isn’t this one of the routes which will allow the people of this island one day to come together politically, having shown they can come together economically and socially?

As that wise woman, former Labour Party deputy leader Liz McManus, put it recently when praising Shared Island as the most sensible way forward: “I have this sense that here in the South, in the Republic, that very often people would like to see victory over the Northern unionists. And it’s as basic as that: ‘Ah, the last of the Brits, we’ll get them off the island…and I find that abhorrent.”³

So do I. Shared Island is a way to bring the people of Ireland together. It may be too slow – and it may not even work. But it’s hugely preferable to the old irredentist demand for ‘Brits Out’ (which effectively means ‘Northern unionists out’), which will lead us inevitably back to violence.

PS I was delighted to see that three friends (and one person I admired) were awarded Quiet Peacemaker Awards by the John and Pat Hume Foundation recently. They were Julitta Clancy of the Meath Peace Group; Paddy Harte, former chair of the International Fund for Ireland, and Colin Flynn of the asylum seeker and refugee support group, Places of Sanctuary Ireland (and Eamonn McCann, the civil rights activist, socialist and writer). In the foundation’s words, the award recognised “everyday peacemakers who, during the Troubles or today, quietly and effectively promoted peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.”

¹ ‘Hard cash, soft power: How Dublin’s millions for Northern Ireland managed to upset both unionists and nationalists’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 May

² Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland, Spring 2013, p.18

³ ‘There’s a bit of a buzz about being older: Liz McManus on ageing, life after politics and why she thinks Trump is a monster’, Irish Independent, 5 May

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 2 Comments

Why aren’t more of our children being educated together in Northern Ireland (and Ireland)?

Posted on Thursday, 7 May, 2026 by andypollak

When foreign, and especially American, visitors come to Northern Ireland, they are amazed that one of the outcomes of our much-lauded peace process isn’t far more Catholic and Protestant children being educated together. The growth of the integrated education movement, which began with a group of idealistic parents setting up Lagan College in Belfast in 1981, has been slow. In 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement, there were 41 schools (24 primary and 17 post-primary) enrolling around 3 per cent of all pupils. 25 years later, in 2023, 70 schools (47 primary, 21 post-primary and two nursery schools) catered for 8 per cent of all pupils. There are around 1,100 schools of all types in the North.

The main problem is that it has been extremely difficult to open any new school in Northern Ireland in the past 20 years because falling birth rates have led to the closure of 200 schools. This has meant that most integrated schools in that period have been ‘transformed’ from existing schools, with quite a few of those seeking integrated status doing so in the face of imminent closure due to small numbers. Also all but one primary school have come from the state, largely Protestant ‘controlled’ sector, which has suffered most from falling birth rates.

Between 2000/1 and 2025/6 the proportion of Protestant pupils fell from 43% to 28%, the proportion of Catholics fell from 51% to 50% and the proportion of Others rose from 7% to 22%. The Others category includes other Christians, other faiths, and those who with no religion or who did not record their religion, but is probably mainly explained by the growth of secularism.

In an interesting Irish Times column last month, Newton Emerson wrote about 25 communities, mainly in rural areas west of the Bann, which are each served by a Catholic and a state de facto Protestant primary school.¹ They have to find a way of sharing one school, or risk losing both, a death knell for any small village.

He cited a strategy document from the Department of Education which looked ahead to 2033, the year in which Northern Ireland’s total population is expected to go into indefinite decline (even allowing for immigration). According to this document, primary and secondary school enrolment will have fallen by 20.5% and 9.5% respectively by that year (with a falling birth rate, the younger the pupils, the fewer of them there will be). “As a result, an extraordinary 40% of all schools in Northern Ireland will be unviable by 2033, up from a quarter today,” he wrote.

Tony Gallagher, emeritus professor of education at Queen’s University Belfast, and a noted authority on the North’s extraordinarily complex education system, does not disagree with this diagnosis, although he notes that Emerson’s analysis is based on the largest projected decline in numbers. Projected numbers for primary school pupils tend to be more variable as they depend on generations as yet unborn.

Gallagher says: “This generation of young people are the most liberal, tolerant and inclusive in Northern Ireland’s history. Some people would say that the single most important thing to do to solve Northern Ireland’s problems of sectarian division would be integrated education. I think this places an unfair and inappropriate burden on the shoulders of young people and teachers. Our societal divisions are political in nature, not educational, and the primary responsibility for solving these divisions lies with our politicians . Separate schools do not produce bigoted generations, but they can lead to friendship networks that keep many young people in community silos, so disrupting those processes can help.”

He says that integrated schools are one important way of achieving this goal, but progress on this has been slow and there are other routes that should be pursued as well. Nearly 20 years ago he and fellow Queen’s University academics came up with the idea of ‘shared education’. This involved two or more schools in an area – Protestant, Catholic and other – collaborating closely together, sharing teaching and learning and facilities, while retaining their own buildings and identities. Pilot shared education partnerships between 2007 and 2014 involved over 100 schools. In 2018 the Department of Education reported that “over 583 educational settings from across all sectors have engaged in delivery of Shared Education to more than 59,000 pupils.”

Biennial reports from the Department of Education to the Northern Ireland Assembly indicated that over 60 per cent of schools were involved in ‘shared education’ partnerships up to the Covid crisis. The reports highlighted the advantages of a wider curriculum, teachers learning together and evidence of increased mutual empathy and understanding among pupils coming together to study sensitive subjects like history. Of course during Covid movement of pupils between schools was obviously impossible. Gallagher contrasts the work of teachers in these shared schools, working collaboratively for the common good, with Northern Ireland’s politicians inability to do the same.

Gallagher also points to a third possible option involving ‘joint faith’ schools managed by two or more of the Churches together. Joint Catholic/Anglican schools already operate in England, Canada and Australia. He thinks the Churches should be challenged on why they haven’t pursued this option, pointing to their rhetoric that they are now open to children from all denominations. The evidence since the Good Friday Agreement indicates very little change in intake patterns.

Gallagher’s view is that as many different routes as possible should be pursued simultaneously to provide opportunities for young people from different communities to engage with one another, rather than putting all our eggs in the one integrated education basket. The idea of joint faith schools is not dissimilar to a proposal from an independent review of education which reported to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2023 and proposed ‘jointly-managed community schools’ with church involvement. This review proposed creating a network of 177 of these schools by 2031, educating one-fifth of all pupils. These are ambitious and radical ideas which a deeply conservative (and cash-strapped) society like Northern Ireland may not be ready for. Somewhat surprisingly, DUP Education Minister Paul Givan appears to have largely accepted them.

Gallagher, who went to Catholic schools himself, says that in unionist-run Northern Ireland they were “the only public spaces where Irish identity could be celebrated.” He expressed a concern that in some future united Ireland, even if the Catholic Church no longer controlled the schools, a unitary system would prioritise an Irish identity and provide little space or recognition for the identity of the Protestant, British minority.

Meanwhile in the Republic the progress of the multi-denominational Educate Together school movement has also slowed. There are currently 118 Educate Together schools (97 primary and 21 second level), out of a total of over 3,000 primary schools and 700 secondary schools. Nearly 90% of primary schools remain under the patronage (i.e. ownership and control) of the Catholic Church.

A recent Department of Education survey of 200,000 households found that 40% of parents with children in denominational primary schools would prefer that ethos to shift to a a multi-denominational one.² Given that, it is extraordinary that no new Educate Together school has opened in the past four years.

The main problem is with the transfer procedure. Under 2012 legislation brought in by a Labour education minister, Ruairi Quinn, if a denominational school is to ‘transfer’ or ‘divest’ to become multi-denominational (under Educate Together patronage), a school’s patron – in most primary schools the Catholic bishop – has to give his approval for the process. This has happened on very few occasions. In addition, parents who may not go to church but still feel an emotional connection with Catholicism, and want their children to continue to be prepared for holy communion in school (often by teachers who don’t go to Mass), are often opposed.

Partly because of this, Educate Together has concentrated on expanding by opening schools in areas of new housing, such as new Dublin suburbs. In these cases the Department of Education runs a process where potential school patrons apply to open a new school. Over the past 20 years these new schools have mostly been Educate Together schools along with Community National Schools managed by the state’s area Education and Training Boards.

The politicians in Dublin don’t want to be seen forcing Catholic schools into multi-denominationalism. For a local politician it’s a headache they can do without. And there are always right-wing ‘flag wavers’ who will complain that this is the latest example of ultra-liberalism and globalism.

“In a country where only a minority now practice religion, how can it make sense to educate children apart in religious-run schools?” asks one longstanding Educate Together activist. “And in an era when we’re talking about a new, united and harmonious Ireland, how can we expect that to work educationally when the schools are still 90% controlled by one church? How is that going to create a united nation?” He also stresses that migrant children must be in this mix. “It should not be about educating Catholics and Protestants together, but about educating all children together.”

¹‘Falling numbers compel schools to integrate or close’, Irish Times, 9 April

² ‘Many parents seeking shift of ethos in schools’, Irish Times, 7 April

Posted in General | Tagged education, history, ireland, Northern Ireland, religion | 1 Comment

The British identity of Northern unionists must be respected and protected in a new Ireland

Posted on Wednesday, 1 April, 2026 by andypollak

I’m going to return this month to the theme of my last blog on Northern Ireland’s continued existence in a new or united Ireland, as outlined by SDLP leader Clare Hanna in her essay in the recent publication What Northern Ireland Means to Me. She said then: “Fundamentally – and I think this is really important to say – Northern Ireland’s always going to exist. I think there’s a perception that in a new Ireland – whatever that looks like – that this group of people in this shared identity just dissolves.”

Given that unionist politicians refuse to engage in discussion about what they would demand if there was ever a Border Poll majority for unity – on the understandable basis that turkeys don’t discuss Christmas – nationalists and republicans often ask ‘What do unionists actually want in order to agree to become part of a united Ireland?’

What they want is actually quite straightforward: they want their British and Protestant identity and culture to be respected and protected in a future united state.This is particularly so for those urban working class and rural unionists for whom the Orange Order, parades, bands and bonfires are important (most middle class unionists care much less about these things). A young loyalist acquaintance of mine said recently that nationalists’ fear of loyalist violence – or maybe everyone’s fear of such violence – in the event of a narrow vote for unity in a Border poll could be largely assuaged by making legal and constitutional provision for such respect and protection. “That’s a real incentive for nationalists,” he said. “If they can do this properly, they’re not going to have to worry about loyalist violence.”

He cited a 1974 statement by the leadership of the Ulster Volunteer Force: “Our basic objective is to preserve our Protestant liberties and traditions and our British way of life. By that we don’t mean the preservation of the link with Britain (my italics), but of those traditions of religious and civil freedoms which have characterised British democracy. When we talk of the preservation of our Protestant traditions and liberties, we simply mean that we want to ensure that we are able to worship God in the manner of our choice and not according to the ordinance or dictate of any outside organisations such as the Catholic Church.”

Obviously, with the dramatic decline of the all-powerful 20th century Irish Catholic Church and the secularisation of contemporary Irish society, Irish Protestants now have complete freedom to worship, express themselves and live full and equal lives with their Catholic fellow-citizens. Therefore the challenge now is not religious but political. In political terms how can the present Republic, many of whose citizens share an instinctive anti-Britishness, assure the passionately pro-British Northern unionist citizens of a future all-Ireland republic that they will be treated with equality and respect?

There are many ways of doing this, but three possibles immediately come to mind. Change the flag; change the anthem; change the Constitution. The Irish tricolour, with its laudable message of peace between the green and orange traditions on this island, has been irredeemably sullied in the eyes of most Northern Protestants and unionists by its use on the coffins of and in parades to honour dead IRA men, regarded by them as murderers and terrorists.

‘Amhrán na bFiann’ is a militaristic and ultra-nationalistic 19th century dirge that should not be the national song of a renewed nation based on “harmony and friendship” (in the words of the post-1998 Article 3 of the Irish Constitution) between the opposing and formerly warring ‘tribes’ in Ireland. It is a little known fact that two competitions were held in 1924 and 1925 to try to find a new national anthem, but the standard of entries was so abysmal that the judges (including the poet W.B.Yeats) decided to stick with ‘The Soldier’s Song.’

The Constitution is an altogether more difficult matter. I suggest that one possible change might be to insert a clause recognising and pledging legally to protect the loyalty of a significant minority of the Irish people to the British monarch. Unfortunately, this would have to be put to the Southern electorate in a referendum. Would they pass it? Certainly not. Successive Irish Times/ARINS opinion polls have shown that over 70% of voters in the Republic would not support changing the flag or anthem. A clause recognising the passionate royalism of Northern unionists would be an impossible further step too far for the instinctive republicanism of the Southern electorate. It would be a brave and foolish Southern politician who would even suggest it.

Rejoining the Commonwealth is another suggestion that opinion polls show would be overwhelmingly rejected by the Southern electorate. My young loyalist acquaintance thinks such an action would represent a “massive gesture” of welcome for unionists. To say “No, absolutely not” would be an equally huge gesture of rejection.

Then there are the complex governmental structures that would be required to recognise both the togetherness and (in some respects) the continuing separateness of the two parts of Ireland in a united state. The eminent US-based political scientist Brendan O’Leary, in his 2022 book Making Sense of a United Ireland (required reading for anyone interest in this existential issue), is dismissive of the different types of federalism that might address the concerns of unionists.

There was the Sinn Féin Eire Nua proposal in the early 1970s to reconstitute the four historic provinces: Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster. He points out that neither elected republicans nor elected unionists in any party in Ireland are pushing to recreate the historic nine-county province of Ulster.

A new Ireland based on city-regions – in which Northern Ireland could remain a large city-region – is utterly impractical, says O’Leary. “Decomposing the North will be difficult enough without having to re-engineer the South at the same time.” He is similarly dismissive of the future cantonisation of Ireland along Swiss lines – the Helvetic Confederation is largely governed through 26 cantons and some 2,300 communes!

Despite the superficial attraction of a two-unit federation, with the North and the present Republic as the constituent units, O’Leary points to the extraordinarily poor record of two-unit federations internationally. “Think only of Pakistan and Czechoslovakia, and the failure to reunify Cyprus.”

He argues that international evidence suggests that “federations can only cope with genuinely deep communal divisions where there are many units in the federation, preventing domination by one unit, and where a party system develops which provides political linkages across internal regional boundaries.”

O’Leary is kinder to the proposal that Northern Ireland would have ‘home rule’ within a united Ireland, with the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive continuing with its present powers, although these would be granted by Ireland’s parliament rather than Westminster. This model would enable the North to persist with different educational, health and welfare state policies, and to keep its own police service and its own courts. “The continuing existence of Northern Ireland, albeit within a united Ireland, would recognise unionists’ local patriotism towards Northern Ireland, and facilitate numerous ways of enabling Northern Ireland to remain, or become, different from the rest of Ireland, all while being part of a sovereign, united Ireland.”¹

O’Leary then lists the difficulties of this model: particularly whether Northern deputies in the Irish parliament could vote on Southern matters and – more importantly – the efficiency losses caused by having two separate health, education, social security, policing systems, and so on. However he concludes that such difficulties would not be impossible to manage. “Such difficulties exist in all polities with what is called ‘asymmetric devolution’, such as the kingdoms of Spain and Denmark [with Greenland], and the United Kingdom.”

Why are these issues not discussed more in the Republic, outside the rarefied (if admirable) conference rooms of ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) and the Royal Irish Academy? I have one modest suggestion. Why don’t the SDLP and Fianna Fail resurrect their short-lived alliance in order to come up with some serious proposal for an Irish unity which would go out of its way to respect and protect unionist culture and identity? I further suggest that they might involve Micheál Martin’s rather brilliant former adviser, Peter MacDonagh (a grand-nephew of the 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh), who went off to live in Prague over 20 years ago after he married a Czech woman. I understand that he is still available to do work for Fianna Fail.

Part of me (the County Antrim Protestant part?) agrees with Public Expenditure Minister, Jack Chambers, when he said in Tralee last month that the government’s Shared Island initiative should not be used to push the cause of unity. He said more than six years of efforts by Irish governments had gone into slowly building support for it and securing “broad and collective engagement,” but that would be put at risk if unionists suspected its motives. He said that “if everything was to be done in the context of a constitutional conversation, we lose people in the room at the very start.”

But the other part of me (the proud, if sometimes critical, Irish citizen part?) says that this conversation will have to start sooner or later and a really imaginative and generous proposal coming from Fianna Fail and the SDLP might go some way to kick-start it by persuading more unionists to engage.

PS Regular readers of this blog know that I have my favourite journalists, north and south, whom I quote regularly: people like Sam McBride, Alex Kane, Allison Morris, Pat Leahy and Fintan O’Toole. I would like to add Mark Hennessy, Ireland and Britain editor of the Irish Times, to that list. That paper’s coverage of Northern and Irish-British affairs has improved enormously thanks to his superb and prolific reports and analysis, including on recent topics as different as the abortive civil case by British IRA victims against Gerry Adams, fading trust between the parties in the Northern Ireland Executive, the views of UCD students on unity and whether the Irish Constitution is a barrier to that unity.

¹ Making Sense of a United Ireland, p. 135

²https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2026/03/24/shared-ireland-programme-cannot-be-used-to-push-cause-of-irish-unity-jack-chambers-says/?

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Republic of Ireland | Tagged ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 7 Comments

Northern Ireland will continue to exist in a new Ireland – SDLP leader

Posted on Monday, 2 March, 2026 by andypollak

A fortnight ago in Belfast’s Shankill Road I met four impressive young people who were deeply involved in their working-class, loyalist community: Stacey Graham, Adam Watters, Ryan McFarlane and Mark McCleave (ranging in age from 19 to 36). All of them work for Northern Ireland Alternatives, a highly successful restorative justice initiative developed and supported by former UVF and Red Hand Commando members, whose co-director is Debbie Watters, Adam’s mother. It has been estimated that NI Alternatives has prevented over 90% of likely paramilitary punishment attacks in recent years.

Graham is a community development worker specialising in community safety and police accountability, and ensuring that working class voices are heard in government agencies. Watters, a recent law graduate, works for BUILD Shankill, which lobbies and organises to develop vacant and derelict land in the Greater Shankill area. McFarlane works with young men at risk of involvement in crime. McCleave is heavily involved in community and cultural festivals and is also chair of a local flute band. Socially committed young community activists like these working their hearts out in one of Northern Ireland’s most deprived areas bodes well for the region’s future.

However when does anybody in the Republic hear or read about the sterling work of these remarkable young people and people like them to make Northern Ireland a safer, more peaceful and more reconciled place? Almost never. They are loyalists, and therefore of little interest to the great majority of southerners who have long ago made up their minds that loyalism is a bad, bigoted, ultra-British thing.

Loyalism is something to be sneered at down here. An example was the decision by a smart sub-editor last month to take a line from a Newton Emerson opinion article inside the Irish Times and splash it at the top of the front page: “A barman in Portadown once told me he had served pints of Harp, fresh off the Dundalk train, to two prominent loyalists plotting a boycott of Irish goods.” That’s loyalists for you, stupid as well as bigoted.

They wouldn’t admit it but I believe this is of a piece with much Southern opinion about the North: that it is, in former Sinn Fein agriculture minister and MP Michelle Gildernew’s words, “a shithole”. This atavistic republican attitude is a far cry from the “harmony and friendship” pledged in the reformed Article 3 of the Irish Constitution after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Northern Ireland is a complex and deeply divided place. But it is home to nearly two million people, many of whom love and are proud of it. I have been reading a little book called What Northern Ireland Means to Me, put together by Allan Leonard and Julia Paul of Shared Future News, an admirable online publication which provides news and stories on peacebuilding, reconciliation and diversity.

What Northern Ireland Means to Me brings together short contributions (along with some gorgeous photographs) from 26 people: moderate nationalists, moderate unionists and ‘others’. SDLP leader Clare Hanna says: “Fundamentally – and I think this is really important to say – Northern Ireland’s always going to exist. I think there’s a perception that in a new Ireland – whatever that looks like – that this group of people in this shared identity just dissolves. And that’s not going to happen in the same way, you know. If you meet anybody from Cork, they have a very strong Cork identity. Or if it’s somebody from Galway, there’s a Galway identity – that regional identity.

“As well as the fact that, in governance terms, there aren’t 25,000 civil servants and teachers and cops and everything ready to just, as soon as there’s a border poll, sweep in here and run the place. We have different governance infrastructures and we have a set of interdependent relationships with the island next door, and those things won’t just change. So I think Northern Ireland will persist and exist, with all the baggage that it has. But I think we will be in a different constitutional place and I think that transition begins now or is beginning now. It’s just how we do it in the most structured way and in the most gracious way that we can.”

Former Presbyterian moderator and Shankill Road minister, Norman Hamilton, speaks for many of the contributors when he says he loves Northern Ireland because “first and foremost, it’s home”; it’s the province where most of his family lives and is a beautiful place environmentally, never more than an hour from mountains and lakes and sea.

“Even though I’m a unionist, I’m a member of the SDLP Commission on a New Ireland, because my Christian identity is far more significant to me than political or cultural identity. I would love to see a commitment to good government emerging amongst the electorate and then being reflected in the way politics is done. It doesn’t seem to me that there is any hope of a good future for us, either north or south, if our politics is so contaminated by bitterness and aggression and polarisation and power seeking. So from my perspective, that is my heart’s desire. It’s what I pray for quite often – that a new generation of elected representatives, both at local and central level, would emerge, who really do want collectively to do good government for the benefit of everybody.”

“What I would say to people from a republican background, from a loyalist background, from a unionist background, from a nationalist background, is that we have to get Northern Ireland working as a political and economic and social entity, and that is the way forward, whatever the outcome,” says Derry-based writer Paul Gosling. “So, actually, for republicans, they are going to have to persuade people in the South that they want to have Northern Ireland as part of a united Ireland. So the way to do that is to make Northern Ireland work immediately as best as possible. And unionists should say to people in Britain: ‘Look, if you want us, we are going to be doing everything we can to make Northern Ireland work as a place.”

Former Ulster Unionist (and Progressive Unionist) Belfast city councillor and GP John Kyle, is “very hopeful for Northern Ireland. The story of Northern Ireland is remarkable because we’ve come through 30 years of civil conflict. Some terrible things happened in that, and yet we had the resilience and the character and the determination to end the war, to find some sort of way to make peace. Now that process is incomplete. But I think that there has been a transformation in Northern Ireland. It shows that people can reflect, can reach out to one another, can extend a measure of grace and forgiveness to one another, and can shape a future then together.”

East Belfast Irish language activist Linda Ervine, a Protestant, says: “I want to see change in Northern Ireland. I want to see an end to the flag waving, Green or Orange tribalism, and I do think that is slowly happening. I do think the middle ground is rising, but unfortunately the two extremes seem to be shouting louder, even though they’re getting smaller. And maybe it will be a united Ireland, or maybe it will still be a Northern Ireland. I don’t lose much sleep over it. To be honest, a referendum will come one day and people will vote, and I’m not really bothered one way or the other.

“I think the thing that would be an issue for me – it would be losing touch with the UK. You don’t mind being part of a united Ireland. But I don’t want to be part of a united Ireland that hates the UK. I would find that difficult.”

Lawyer and commentator Sarah Creighton talks about a “sense of being from lots of different places and you’ve ended up on this wee rock somewhere in the corner of the Irish Sea. My family’s here; we’ve lived here hundreds of years. A lot of my family would have come over from Scotland…And that connection with Scotland is interwoven into Ulster as well. I do feel quite a bit of a connection to my Scots heritage.

“My job is here. I love our sense of humour. I love the people. I love our food, love our culture. It’s a fantastic place. And I love the diversity of Northern Ireland that’s increasingly coming through in the past couple of years. I think we’re a very friendly place. I think we’re a very warm place. Now I think we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of tackling racism and I think we can be a bit more welcoming to people from overseas…But overall I think we’re very good, decent people.”

Writer and journalist Malachi O’Doherty scoffs at people who say “Northern Ireland’s a third world country; it’s post-colonial; it’s a victim of oppression, it’s suffering apartheid. I’d say: ‘Would you ever go and catch yourselves on? Would you ever go and look at what apartheid was? Would you ever go and look at what life is like in a third world country?’

“There is a problem of deep sectarian division in the state. The potential for political players to irritate the fault line is still there. And the potential for people to respond to that irritation and seek opportunity to create mayhem through violence is still there. My generation, born into the trough, didn’t stop that happening in 1970 and the gorgeous, affable, well-intentioned young people of today might not hold it back the next time either…certainly we’ve got a political middle ground now which we didn’t have. There were moderate unionists and moderate nationalists in the past, but now there’s a very large section of society which refuses both those labels. The scale of that is new.”

Claire Mitchell is a writer from a Protestant background who is nationalist-inclined.”I love our diverse and various Protestant heritages, especially the radical and dissenting histories. And so many things I love about home. But at the same time I’m totally shaped by the conflict here and the brokenness of living in Northern Ireland, a place that was born out of violence and into violence We live every day with that kind of segregation and separation, and it seems sometimes like a daily struggle to fight for a positive future.”

However she emphasises that she has “no hostility to Northern Ireland. I’m happy to say the words; I do not bristle. It’s a practical reality right now that I totally accept. But my gaze, I think, is longer. You know, Northern Ireland, it’s been around 100 years; it’s not how we started. I don’t think it’s how we’re going to end up. And I think it’s really important to love and cherish the heritage of this part of the island whilst also embracing the change and the flux of it.”

Let’s leave the last word to a Northern Irish man from an immigrant background. Joseph Nawaz, writer and performer, has a working class Catholic mother and a Pakistani Muslim father and grew up in a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood. Both his parents “came from parts of the empire that were crudely carved up by the British…I think in many ways Northern Ireland is the last smouldering ember of that fractious empire that never quite went out. I think there’s a grand tragedy also to the idea of the fact that the one political group here that most wants to keep Northern Ireland existing seems to be doomed to be the one to undermine its legitimacy, time and time again. Brexit was obviously the most recent example of that.”

Posted in General | Tagged belfast, history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics, travel | 2 Comments

The people of the Republic need to talk about the changes they have to make before unity

Posted on Monday, 2 February, 2026 by andypollak

On the eve of Ireland’s presidential election in October Kevin Rafter, professor of political communication at Dublin City University, came up with a good idea. He urged the new president to “convene a forum to examine the positives and negatives of unity for the Irish Republic itself, a debate that has not commenced.”

I think it unlikely that President Catherine Connolly will displease her Sinn Fein backers by taking action on such an idea. Sinn Fein don’t want an open forum to discuss what significant changes are needed in the South to make the idea of unity more palatable to unionists; they want a Citizens Assembly with one outcome, unity, and nothing upsetting to their base in both jurisdictions (and to people in South generally): no changed flag, no changed anthem, no rejoining the Commonwealth, no new constitutional clause recognising the British identity of the unionist minority and offering them protection for their British and Orange culture. They don’t want a debate on people paying more taxes and receiving reduced public services in a united Ireland.

Take one of these items: rejoining the Commonwealth. 29 years ago President Mary Robinson, addressing the Merriman Summer School in County Clare, asked people to consider their reaction to the proposition that Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth. She stressed that she was not posing the question as a political issue, but in the context of Irish people’s continuing insecurity about their identity.

“I think it is a good way of assessing the insecurities that we still have after 75 years – the lack of a firm sense of ourselves, so that we cannot address that question without a great deal of hesitation and emotion and conflicting views and no clear lines of direction,” she said.

The very idea of rejoining the modern successor of the hated British empire we fought so hard to leave is an outrage to many people in the republic. When a group of ordinary women were interviewed by UCD politics professor Jennifer Todd recently about changing symbols like the flag and anthem to help bring about Irish unity, they responded “intuitively, emotionally and forcefully”, answering ‘No, no, no, no’. When asked about joining the Commonwealth, they said it was like ‘spitting on your ancestors’ graves for everything that they fought for’. However once they heard their own conversation, they pulled back: at the end of the 90 minute focus group, participants were saying “sure that’s never going to work’, ‘we have to be more open minded, ready for some change as well.” Those two contradictory responses reveal both unchanging gut republicanism and a confused openness to the need for change.

Nearly three decades further on, and with the ‘Troubles’ in the North largely ended by the Good Friday Agreement, the possibility of re-joining the Commonwealth as a gesture that might make unionists look a little more kindly at a united Ireland is rarely even raised in discussions about unity in the Republic. In an ARINS/Irish Times opinion poll in December 2021, 71% of people said they would not accept rejoining the Commonwealth to help accommodate unionists in a ‘new’ Ireland. In the same poll 79% said they would not accept higher taxes; 79% less money for public services; 77% a new flag; and 72% a new anthem.

I had asked in an Irish Times column after President Robinson’s speech: “What price are we in the Republic prepared to pay for the beginning of lasting peace and harmony on this island? Not a very high price, I suspect. It’s a debate I’ve not heard yet so I don’t know. I wonder if people in the Republic feel they are so little part of the problem that they don’t have to make any sacrifices for peace. If that’s the majority opinion, let’s hear it. But at least let’s start a debate about what contribution, if any, the citizens of this Republic think they should make to the cause of peace in the North.” Replace ‘peace in the North’ with ‘Irish unity’ and you have the present situation.

Former SDLP leader Mark Durkan has a slightly different take on this. He said in an interview last year that successive Irish governments had made a mistake in not developing Article 3 of the post-1998 Constitution: “It is the firm will of the Irish Nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.”

I believe it is that core phrase “in harmony and friendship” which particularly needs to be further developed. Durkan suggested that “perhaps the best way to take these matters forward would be if the Irish government did something like reconvene the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, or another body like it, but specifically with the idea of developing new understandings and appreciation in relation to Article 3.” He said that the 1994-1996 forum had allowed the parties and people involved to get away from fixed positions and to be creative and future-looking. Such a body could help to ensure that “thinking becomes less partisan, because it is shared, where it is informed and stimulated by other parties’ opinions and by expert opinion.” Civic unionists, if not political unionists, were part of that sharing, as they were in the New Ireland Forum in 1983-1984.

A new 26-county forum as suggested by Professor Rafter could examine other factors affecting opinion in the South on the unity issue. For example, has there been a new upsurge of nationalism in the republic that would make it increasingly difficult to sell major compromises on the flag, the anthem, Commonwealth membership, special arrangement for Northern unionists and so on? Is the renewed interest in the Irish language, especially among young people, evidence of that new nationalism? The huge success of the Irish-speaking, republican-inclined Belfast rap group Kneecap would suggest that it is. The big vote for President Catherine Connolly, with her passionate adherence to the language and to Irish neutrality, is another straw in the wind. During a recent discussion I had with Trinity College Dublin politics students, they agreed that there was a renewed pride in Irish identity among young people, and were uneasy about bringing “British colonisers” (i.e. Northern unionists) into a united Ireland.

Another issue that could be discussed in such a forum is the views on unity of the more than 20% of people in the Republic who are foreign born. “They will have identities that do not align themselves with traditional Green/Orange, Protestant/Catholic or British/Irish binaries. They will be looking not for historic vindication or vengeance, but for better futures for themselves and their children,” wrote Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride in their recent book For and Against a United Ireland. Let us hear from their representatives at the proposed forum.

Of course, the issues facing the integration of Northern unionists into a ‘new Ireland’ in “harmony and friendship” can simply be ignored. I sometimes suspect that many people in the South believe that with the rapidly increasing population of the island, the unionist minority in a united Ireland will only be a little over 10%, and therefore there is no need for any major compromises to attract them in. They will just have to ‘like it or lump it’ if and when a Border poll delivers that unity.

These are all issues that are rarely discussed in the Republic, including in the media. Are they discussed on social media? I simply don’t know: I’m a man of a certain age who does not use social media very often. What I do know – and agree with – is what O’Toole and McBride recommend in their scrupulously balanced treatment of the pluses and minuses of unity: it would be unwise to hold a Border poll “for a considerable period because even nationalist politicians are for now mostly engaging with the issue rhetorically”.

Let us, the politicians and people of the Republic, use that period well by setting up a forum to discuss these existential issues, and – in doing so – begin to get the often complacent nationalists of the present republic used to the idea that they too will have to make compromises if the ‘new Ireland’ is going to be a harmonious and – as far as possible – an undivided society. To quote O’Toole and McBride again: the outcome of a Border poll “will be determined by the growing number of people who are open to persuasion. The open-minded will not be swayed by slogans or appeals to tribal solidarity. They will want good answers to hard questions. Both sides will have to be prepared to make arguments based on facts about the present and realistic projections about the future.” Let us hear those facts, arguments and projections in a new government-established forum in Dublin.

This article first appeared in the 500th issue of the Belfast magazine Fortnight. This independent magazine of politics and the arts has been published, with a couple of short breaks, since 1970. I was its editor from 1981 to 1985.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Republic of Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, news, Northern Ireland, politics | 4 Comments

China, Venezuela, Minneapolis and the familiar small divisions of Northern Ireland

Posted on Tuesday, 13 January, 2026 by andypollak

I never thought I’d be quoting the state-run China Daily for an accurate picture of the sorry state of the world following the US government’s kidnap of autocratic Venezuelan president Nicholás Maduro. But here I go. “From fabricated charges to military strikes and regime change, the operation follows a familiar and deeply troubling script – one that reflects the logic of state piracy”, it said. “Sovereign governments are first delegitimised, then destroyed by force, after which foreign capital moves in to carve up natural resources. This behaviour drags the world back towards a barbaric colonial era of plunder, in open defiance of international law”.

“What the world is witnessing is not a ‘rules-based’ order, but colonial pillaging. Upholding sovereignty, equality and non-interference is not optional. It is the foundation of global stability – and it must be defended”. Will we see the unthinkable next, Europe being forced to mobilise to defend the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland from an invasion by the mad Trump’s America?

As Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, put it: “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end. The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO ,the world’s strongest defensive alliance – all that would collapse if one NATO country chose to attack another.”

Can Europe and the world stop this mendacious (he uttered 30,573 lies and misleading claims during his first term, according to the Washington Post) and megalomaniac US president, an amoral sociopath who does not know right from wrong and believes that the only constraint on his power is “my own morality, my own mind”? A man who is surrounded by genuinely wicked advisers and acolytes: men like Stephen Miller, who believes that “we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. That is the iron law of the world since the beginning of time”; and Steve Bannon, who has been organising and promoting far right and fascist parties all over Europe for more than a decade.

In my Dublin Unitarian church last Sunday, the academic and writer, Anthony Roche, read W.B. Yeats’ prophetic 1920 poem: ‘The Second Coming’. “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold./ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world./The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity./…And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

It is almost a relief to return from this terrifying international panorama to the familiar, humdrum divisions of Northern Ireland. Although even here the excesses of Trump’s savage legions intrude. Renée Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was shot dead by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent while trying to drive away from a confrontation with ICE in Minneapolis – and who was called a “domestic terrorist” by senior Trump officials – spent five summers as a teenager in Northern Ireland as part of Christian youth missions organised by the Presbyterian Church. The former minister of Saintfield Presbyterian Church in County Down, Rev James Hyndman, remembered her as “a lovely, kind, compassionate, quiet, creative girl, just a lovely, lovely girl.”

And so back to Northern Irish affairs. It is sometimes difficult for an outsider, even a passionately interested outsider, to know how bad – or not so bad – things are in that divided place. Leading journalists seem united in agreement that the place is failing. Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph noted that “logically, unionism’s central mission is quite simple: It needs to make Northern Ireland work. Despite the myriad failures of this place, it does work after a fashion. But far too many areas of public services are regressing. Were it not so cravenly populist, the DUP could be leading the debate on revenue-raising or cost-cutting by telling the public that if they want to clean up Lough Neagh, to be able to build houses, and to have better roads, then there must be either more taxes or cuts elsewhere.”¹

Alex Kane in the Irish News found that the relationship between the DUP and Sinn Fein on the Northern Ireland Executive is “immeasurably worse” than it was during the early years of the Paisley-Robinson-McGuinness executive. It is “blindingly obvious that all of nationalism is on what might be described as ‘Irish Unity Now’ territory, while the overwhelming majority of unionism has, to all intents and purposes, abandoned the idea that the assembly and executive can be relied upon to protect and promote the interests of the unionist communities.”²

Malachi O’Doherty in the Belfast Telegraph wrote that the DUP and Sinn Fein are “stuck together as in a tragically fractious arranged marriage, doomed to being unhappy together without the prospect of separation. And they are also doomed to being responsible for governing the region and to bearing the criticism for how badly that is done. This is an awful, pathetic position to be in.”³

The Pivotal think tank set out how badly Northern Ireland has been governed in sober language in its September 2025 report: “The Executive has promised much but avoided difficult choices about
policies, priorities and funding which are essential if real change is to be achieved. The public are yet to see tangible improvements in health waiting lists, GP access, affordable housing, policing, poverty and more. In fact, many of these areas have got worse over the past 18 months.⁴

“No real plans are in place to address some long-term challenges like wastewater infrastructure, productivity and poverty. There does not appear to be recognition that a step-change
is needed, and that continuing with current policies will only lead to further deterioration in outcomes. To this end, it is very concerning that the longer-term Investment Strategy, which was
due to sit alongside the Programme for Government, has still not been published.

“The absence of substantive plans is largely due to the Executive’s continued inability to reach collective agreement on difficult decisions, to work across departmental silos, and to be honest
with the public that choices are needed between different policy aims. Without a doubt Northern Ireland faces many difficult issues, but continuing with current policies will only lead to ever worsening outcomes.”

However despite the widespread impression that the power-sharing Executive is failing to govern the province effectively, relatively few voters want it scrapped. In his latest opinion poll last month, Professor Peter Shirlow, the director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University, asked if people would vote for a party that brought the Northern Ireland Assembly down before the next Assembly election in 2027. Sixty percent agreed that they would not vote for a party that collapsed the Assembly before that election. A mere 12% stated that they would.⁵

Among party voters 51.9% of Sinn Fein voters, 78.4% of SDLP voters, 55.5% of Ulster Unionist Party voters, 70.5% of Alliance voters and 32.8% of DUP voters stated they would not vote for a party that collapsed the Assembly before the 2027 election. Shirlow concluded that this “may suggest that Sinn Fein collapsing the Assembly would not embolden but instead probably undermine the pro-unity vote share.”

¹ ‘Unionism’s lost decade: How a flawed decision 10 years ago precipitated a collapse for the ideology which built Northern Ireland’, 6 December

² ‘In 2007 I had hope. Now I don’t think the parties give a toss about what chaos we’re in’, 31 December

³ ‘Sinn Fein and the DUP are trapped in a miserable marriage…and our sectarian politics won’t let them escape, 30 December

⁴https://www.pivotalpolicy.org/assets/files/publications/pivotal_tracker_2025_sept.pdf

⁵https://sluggerotoole.com/2025/12/17/beyond-the-headlines-northern-irelands-evolving-electorate-part-one/#more-110676666

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 2 Comments

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2 Irelands together

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The people of the Republic need to talk about the changes they have to make before unity

China, Venezuela, Minneapolis and the familiar small divisions of Northern Ireland

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