Northern ireland

4 years to bury the ghosts of Bloody Sunday?

It has just been announced that the police are going to launch an investigation into the Bloody Sunday deaths. It comes after the Police Service Northern Ireland and the Public Prosecution service reviewed the evidence of the Saville Inquiry. There will be a lot of comment about this in the coming days, but I think a couple of things are worth noting at the outset. Firstly, there can be no doubt that a number of soldiers deliberately shot and killed innocent people that day. Secondly, there can be no doubt that they then lied and misled an exceedingly long and costly public inquiry set up precisely in order to find

A question for Martin McGuinness

‘God speed’ was apparently what Martin McGuinness said to the Queen when they met a short time ago. I wonder what she, and the Duke of Edinburgh, would have liked to say to him? Of all the things that the Queen should be asked to do in her Jubilee year, perhaps the most cruel has been to expect her to shake the hand of the former IRA commander and now deputy first minister of Northern Ireland. Many people bereaved by the Troubles have made gestures of almost super-human forgiveness, but few can have been so pushed towards doing so. And McGuinness is a particularly difficult case. Not only has he

Department of Probability: Fornication Desk

We are indebted to Michelle Mulherin, Fine Gael TD for Mayo, for offering this gem during a Dail debate on Ireland’s abortion laws: “In an ideal world there would be no unwanted pregnancies and no unwanted babies. But we are far from living in an ideal world,” Deputy Mulherin said. “Abortion as murder, therefore sin, which is the religious argument, is no more sinful, from a scriptural point of view, than all other sins we don’t legislate against, like greed, hate and fornication. The latter, being fornication, I would say, is probably the single most likely cause of unwanted pregnancies in this country.” That “probably” is lovely. Alas, Deputy Mulherin

Liberal Unionism? In Ulster? Why Not?

On balance, theGood Friday Agreement was (forgive me) a Good Thing. It should be possible to welcome the Agreement yet recognise that it has not delivered everything it promised. Not the least of its troublesome consequences has been the manner in which the centre-ground of Northern Irish politics has been hollowed-out. Time passes, however, and the moment for a viable alternative to the Sinn Fein-DUP double-act cannot, surely, be delayed forever. At least that’s what Robin Wilson suggests in the Belfast Telegraph today. This, perhaps unexpectedly, is the time for a New Ulster Unionism: [N]ow the UUP – otherwise on its political death-bed – has a huge choice to make.

The private sector must be revived in Northern Ireland

One quirk of the welfare reform debate is that many of the reforms won’t automatically apply in one of the parts of the United Kingdom with the worst welfare problems: Ulster. As Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland Secretary, points out in a speech tonight, ‘Northern Ireland has proportionately one third more households living on out of work benefits as the rest of the UK’. He also notes that 1 in 10 of the population there are on Disability Living Allowance, double the UK average. But the Work Programme doesn’t apply in Northern Ireland and any welfare reform there will have to be done by the Executive. Paterson is now campaigning

The forgotten victims of the Troubles

This post, marking the 40th anniversary of the Aldershot bombing, was published earlier on the Biteback website. But as its author, Douglas Murray, is a regular here on Coffee House, and as its subject matter is so important, we thought we’d re-post it here: The 30th January this year was the 40th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day when members of the British Parachute regiment shot dead fourteen civilians on the streets of a British city. The constant commemoration of that day by families of the dead and injured was one of the things that kept its memory alive and eventually led to the British government setting up the Saville

A real-life whodunnit

The Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday is ten volumes or 5,000 pages long and was five years in the writing. The inquiry lasted 12 years, including those five years, and cost the taxpayer £200 million. Some 2,500 people gave evidence, nearly 1,000 of whom gave oral witness. It was set up under one prime minister, Tony Blair, in 1998, and its conclusions were delivered in June 2010 under a different prime minister, David Cameron. It was the lengthiest and costliest inquiry in legal history. The events it was concerned with — the shooting by members of the 1st Parachute Regiment of 13 civilians attending a civil rights

No, Martin McGuinness is Not a Fit and Proper Person.

Since I’ve always thought Shaun Woodward a nasty little toad it’s reassuring to discover the man will do nothing to earn a reassessment. Is anyone surprised he is entirely relaxed about Martin McGuinness’s campaign for the Irish presidency? Of course not. why would ayone be surprised? As the dreadful Woodward made clear, speaking at a fringe event at the Labour conference, McGuinness’s campaign is in some sense the next step in the “peace process”. Yes, really, Martin McGuinness, mass murderer, is a “fit and proper” person to be Head of State. According to Woodward: But what I can do as a fellow-member of the [Labour] race and somebody who was

No paramilitary link to last night’s riots in East Belfast

The PSNI is clear that last night’s riots on Castlereagh Street, East Belfast, were not linked to sectarian paramilitary activity. Rather, this was a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ against the police. As I wrote last week, gangs on both sides of the Ulster divide have been targeting the police in recent months; and they rely on exploiting current economic hardship and ancient sectarian divisions to further their criminal ends. The continued violence is a test of Stormont’s ability to govern without the close supervision from Westminster. It’ll be interesting to see how the authorities, and Peter Robinson and Martin McGuiness in particular, respond in the coming weeks, recognising that this violence does

Ancient hatreds mask Stormont’s current challenge

Ignore the antediluvian hatreds for a moment. As Anne Dawson says, the recent violence in East Belfast was largely inspired by current economic distress. Northern Ireland’s economy is a serious cause for concern. Central expenditure per head is 25 per cent higher in Ulster than the UK norm and 70 per cent of Northern Ireland’s economy lies in the public sector according to parliamentary one estimate. Although the province has much to commend itself to business – competitive operating costs and excellent transport links serviced by substantial capital investment – private enterprise remains depressed. A report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in March found that growth was negligible and that unemployment is running

Why Belfast is ablaze

I live three miles away from where the rioting was happening in East Belfast last night, and heard the helicopters whirring overhead. It was the kind of sound that anyone living in the city hoped never to hear again. As a child, I’d lie in bed and hear bombs and sirens and helicopters — and we had all hoped that dark chapter had been closed. A tipping point of violence has now been reached. A press photographer has been shot, another given a fractured skull after a second night of riots. And in the aftermath, the blame game cacophony begins: Who started it? It was them. No it was them

From the archives: The Good Friday Agreement

On Sunday, it will be thirteen years to the day since the people of Northern Ireland voted in a referendum on the Good Friday Agreement. The result was one of overwhelming support: 71 per cent to 29. Here is Bruce Anderson’s take on the Agreement from his Politics column at the time:   Mr Blair was rough on Mr Ahern (and while Unionists were there), Bruce Anderson, The Spectator, 18 April 1998   Occasionally, one is glad to be wrong. In this column last week, I wrote about the imminent collapse of the Ulster peace process. It seemed then as if everything was unravelling; the gaps between the various sides

When Dublin trembled

On 17 May 1974 — 37 years ago today — I was a 19-year-old student at Trinity College Dublin, celebrating the end of term in the Pavilion Bar near the sports fields. The summer exams were still to come, but we were carefree; the main subject of conversation was whether we could organise a disco party later on. Then, a little after 5.30 p.m., everything changed. First, all about us seemed to shiver, as if there were an earth tremor. Then, just as it occurred to me that Dublin did not generally suffer tectonic stress, there was a deafening bang that seemed to go on for an age. Somebody shouted:

The threat of Republican terror

The Metropolitan Police has released a statement saying that they have received a bomb threat for central London today from dissident Irish Republicans. There’s no information on where in the capital or what time today the warning relates to.   The threat, for which the spurious attempt at justification is presumably related to the Queen’s visit to Ireland tomorrow, may well be a hoax. But if it is real, it would attest to the growing reach of dissident Republicans whose previous operations have been confined to Northern Ireland itself. (The best book on dissident Republicanism is Legion of the Rearguard by occasional Coffee House contributor Martyn Frampton).   If a

Sectarianism breathes again in Ulster

Can Tom Elliott lead the Ulster Unionists? That’s the question commentators in Northern Ireland are asking, after the party suffered yet another reverse at the polls. Elliott was elected leader on a landslide in September and he is already under pressure, seemingly powerless to arrest the decline of the once dominant force in Northern Irish politics. He is visibly rattled, as the clip above proves. It was probably a reaction in the heat of the moment, but one that should alarm for those Tories who still seek an alliance with the UUP.* It was hoped that the scale of Elliott’s victory would unite the fractious party. But the divisions that

Northern Ireland unites, sort of

A man hunt is underway for the perpetrators of yesterday’s murder in Omagh, and the administration at Stormont and the PSNI have presented a united front against antediluvian dissidence. Meanwhile, Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister, is accused by groups associated with the DUP and the Traditional Unionist Voice of having attended an illegal march commemorating the IRA last October. Sectarianism is still rife.

Desperate rearguard

The murder of a police officer in Northern Ireland once again proves that the threat from dissident republican terrorism remains only too real. This latest attack comes against a background of various attempted bombings and hoax alerts that have disrupted life in the province. Back in January, a sophisticated “double-tap” bomb attack on a police patrol in north Belfast was only narrowly averted. Since then a series of incidents have occurred in Derry, Belfast and Fermanagh. Going back further, the last two years (since the triple murder of March 2009) have seen the bombing of banks, courthouses, police stations and even MI5’s regional headquarters in Northern Ireland. Just over fourteen

BREAKING: Car bomb explodes in Omagh, County Tyrone

Not clear as yet if there have been any casaulties. More to follow. Reports are sketchy, but it seems that the blast took place in a residential road, away from the crowded central shopping areas that were the scene of the bloody atrocity committed 13 years ago.  The bomb was planted underneath the car of a local Catholic PSNI officer .The officer is critically wounded.  This act is very likely to have been perpetrated by extreme Republican dissidents; and it follows a trend of Republican/gang violence against police in the province, a battle for which London and Stormont allocated more than £240 million last month. UPDATE: DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson reports that the

Did Obama Ask Peter King to be his Ambassador to Ireland?

Peter King, America’s worst Congressman, is back in the news and just as loathsome as ever. No surprise there. This, however, is news to me and wholly surprising: After Obama was elected president, King got a call from Rahm Emanuel, the incoming chief of staff. “President-elect Obama would like you to be ambassador to Ireland,” said Emanuel, according to King’s recollection of the conversation. King said he thought hard about it over a long weekend, fantasizing about hosting his Irish relatives at the ambassador’s 62-acre estate inside Dublin’s Phoenix Park, where the Irish president also lives. But King declined the offer. “I just felt I would be defending foreign policy

The coalition outlines its national security concerns

What a curious creature this National Security Strategy is. For some reason, I expected something more than a 39-page document in the same mushy pea colour scheme as the coalition agreement. But that is what we’ve got – and it doesn’t really tell us much. The centrepiece of the document comes on page 27 (reproduced below), with a neat, three-tier guide to the security risks facing this country. At the highest priority level are atrocities such as “chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack by terrorists,” and “hostile attacks upon UK cyberspace”. Further down, there are mentions for “organised crime” and “disruption to oil or gas supplies,” among others. But, before