Northern ireland

Belfast, Northern Ireland Phillip Brett was just nine years old the night a neighbour called to say his brother, Gavin, had been shot. Their father raced through the streets of their Belfast estate, arriving just in time to cradle his eldest son as he died. The teenager had been celebrating a friend’s birthday at the local Gaelic football club when he was gunned down by a loyalist gang looking for a Catholic to kill. But they got it wrong – Gavin had been raised Protestant, their parents having married across the sectarian lines that once divided Northern Ireland, with friends from all sides of the mixed community they lived in.

Sometimes old grievances are best laid to rest. That was certainly the view of Tony Blair when his government issued nearly 200 ‘comfort letters’ to Irish nationalist gunmen in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. But a decision by the Northern Ireland High Court on Wednesday will upend that principle, setting back years of compromise and reconciliation. For some time it has been all but impossible to prosecute IRA men for murders committed during the Troubles. British security forces, however, remain vulnerable, although most are now in their seventies and long retired. One, indeed, died during a trial last year, one suspects partly from the trauma of being dragged through the courts

What did we learn from the Chancellor’s spring statement? As James reports on Coffee House, Rishi Sunak’s promise of an income tax cut by 2024 offered a strong indicator of how – and when – the Tories plan to fight the next election. Meanwhile, the OBR’s finding that rising inflation will lead to the biggest fall in living standards since records began in 1950 highlights how even with the new immediate cost of living policies – including a 5p cut on fuel duty – the coming months will be painful for many households. However, aside from cost of living, there was another problem Sunak’s statement highlighted: the Northern Ireland protocol.

Last night’s spat between the Foreign Office and the Treasury was hardly reassuring for Unionists. If you missed it, a Treasury amendment proposed a change to customs regulations where ‘UK’ was replaced with ‘Great Britain’. What’s so bad about that, you might ask. The answer is that it would have codified the carving-out of Northern Ireland as a separate legal entity. This is something that the protocol establishes: Northern Ireland continues to follow EU customs rules while Great Britain is able to diverge. But this breaking off of Northern Ireland is something the government was supposed to be trying to prevent. Sure enough, the amendment was pulled and Liz Truss

In his resignation letter, the Brexit minister Lord Frost justified his decision to quit by pointing to tax rises and Covid restrictions. But there is another potential reason given the timing. Late last week, the UK conceded that the European Court of Justice could have the final say over the Brexit settlement in Northern Ireland. Frost is a negotiator. It might be that he didn’t want to undermine his successor by over-emphasising the scale of the British retreat. Or it could be that he is holding back dissatisfaction with the negotiations for a second broadside at the Prime Minister. But it is a critical development. ECJ oversight was always a

The possibility of a political wing of a terrorist organisation becoming a party of government in an EU member state would normally be headline news. But that’s precisely what’s happening in Ireland.  Sinn Fein is currently enjoying a consistent lead at the top of the polls in the Republic; a recent example from the Irish edition of the Sunday Times shows it had surged by six points to 37 per cent, some distance ahead of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, currently coalition partners. Public approval of the Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald — the middle-class Dubliner who described the IRA campaign as ‘justified’ and mused that there was ‘every chance’

Lord Frost’s Lisbon speech represents the most cogent argument yet for replacing the Northern Ireland protocol. So naturally it has been buried under a slurry of snark, solemn head-shaking and breathless indignation. It is worth stepping back from the noise. Switch off the shouty man on LBC, mute the ‘this is not normal’ people on Twitter, and avoid at all costs the catastrophist-analysis of the academic-activists. You will miss nothing. In fact, read Frost’s speech for yourself. It was meant to send a message about the protocol and it does so directly. The Irish are our neighbours. It is in both our countries’ interests that we maintain and enhance the ties

As a general rule in post-Brexit politics, when David Frost makes a public intervention on the Northern Ireland protocol, it tends to dampen rather than soothe UK-EU relations. Frost, charged with improving the protocol, is a divisive figure in Brussels who is seen to catch flies with vinegar rather than honey. His speech was expected to be an escalation in the current war of words between the two sides. In the end, the talk itself was slightly less confrontational than expected. Frost effectively declared the Northern Ireland protocol dead and called on the EU to work with the UK Frost effectively declared the Northern Ireland protocol dead and called on the EU to

Are the Tories serious about getting rid of the troublesome Northern Ireland Protocol? The latest extension to the so-called grace period – the third in recent months – means that plans for post-Brexit checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland have been suspended again. But this isn’t the good news you might think it is for unionists in Northern Ireland. In the short term, of course, it avoids a repeat of ‘sausage wars’ and megaphone diplomacy around the Protocol’s Article 16 (which allows Britain or the EU to take unilateral action in certain circumstances). This can only be good news. Yet for nervous unionists there is a disturbing lack of security about what might happen when this grace

Is the Police Service of Northern Ireland equal to the task of dealing with the sour, indigestible remnants of Troubles paramilitarism? Events this weekend in an estate on the outskirts of Derry, showing yet more glorification of a terrorist by armed men firing weapons, suggests otherwise. Michael Devine, the man who was venerated by half a dozen goons dressed in black this weekend, starved himself to death in Northern Ireland’s notorious Maze prison in 1981 along with nine other republican prisoners in pursuit of political status. He was also a founder of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), one of the most viciously and overtly sectarian paramilitary death squads produced

Sinn Fein is not a normal party. It sometimes feels impolite to point it out in the era of the Belfast Agreement. But the legal amnesty from criminal charges offered to IRA terrorists as part of the peace process does not oblige individuals to abstain from moral judgement of their political wing. Especially when it continues to venerate those terrorists. The past year offered a grim reminder of this when the party’s leadership turned out in force, in the middle of lockdown, for a show of strength at the funeral of Bobby Storey, a Provisional IRA ‘volunteer’ who spent 20 years in prison for various offences. But yesterday offered an

Over the past few weeks and months, there has been plenty of focus on the Northern Ireland Brexit Protocol, and the impact it is having on the province. Less attention has been paid, however, to the equally serious problems in Northern Ireland which still need to be solved. It is an uncomfortable truth, but the problem with Northern Ireland is largely in Westminster. The institutionalised neglect over the past few decades has brought the region to where it is now. How do you know Northern Ireland has been neglected? Easy. Look up the time it takes to travel between just about any town in the province to Belfast by public transport.

The DUP’s departed leader Edwin Poots spoke in his valedictory interview of a ‘significant victory’ heading unionism’s way regarding its bête noire, the Northern Ireland protocol. The outright, irrevocable removal of the ‘sea border’ imposed by the protocol has become the fundamental objective of all shades of political unionism and loyalism.  Anti-protocol street art garlanded two deeply different citadels of unionism in the past week — the working-class heartland of Belfast’s Shankill Road and the affluent County Down village of Killyleagh. There is a sense of shared purpose.  The message implicit in the government’s command paper is ‘give us time’ Given the briefing that went before it, the good burghers of

There will be chaos at the borders. Food will run out at the supermarkets. Travellers will face long queues, and companies yet another round of disruption. As the UK lays the groundwork for breaking with the Northern Ireland Protocol, we will hear plenty of scare stories about how it might mean losing the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. There is an element of truth in that, of course. The EU may well decide that if we are not sticking to the Protocol then the free trade deal has to go as well. But there is a flaw in that argument, and it is not exactly a minor one. In

Boris Johnson’s approach to dealing with historical prosecutions in Northern Ireland has achieved that unique political feat in the Province: uniting both sides in revulsion at what is being proposed. Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis is expected to announce a statute of limitations ending prosecutions in cases which pre-date the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Reports suggest that this will apply not only to members of the security forces but also republican and loyalist paramilitaries. This was always a likely end point in Northern Ireland’s ‘process’, indicative of the British political class’ reflex instinct to wish the Province and its troubles away. Labour kicked this off with their mass release of paramilitaries and the issuing of