by RuthDE | Apr 2, 2024 | 2024, April, Belfast News Letter, Journalism
What a week it has been! The most urgent question is how to steady the political ship after disconcerting revelations about the two biggest parties in Northern Ireland politics. Published: 2 April 2024 The shock of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson being charged with historical...
by RuthDE | Sep 14, 2022 | 2022, Daily Telegraph, Journalism, September
Apart from a few extreme Republican trolls, Queen Elizabeth is being mourned in Ireland, north and south Published: 9 September 2022 Apart from a few extreme Republican trolls shouting on social media about colonial wrongs, Queen Elizabeth is being mourned in Ireland,...
by RuthDE | May 3, 2022 | 2022, Belfast News Letter, Journalism, May
I have more sense than to try to predict what will happen in Thursday’s election, but I do know what I want to happen. Published: 3 May 2022 First and foremost, I want the bad guys to lose. These, of course, are Sinn Fein, that cancer corrupting Ireland, and any other...
by RuthDE | Apr 12, 2022 | 2022, April, Belfast News Letter, Journalism
I’ve only been a declared unionist for a very short while and already I’m a Lundy. Published: 12 April 2022 Most recently this accusation has been levelled at me over a tweet I wrote the other day in response to the defaced poster of Doug Beattie showing him with a...
by RuthDE | Feb 15, 2022 | 2022, Belfast News Letter, February, Journalism
I apologise to those readers who hate Twitter, but awful though it can be, it’s a fact of life and like all political journalists I have to read it. Published: 15 February 2022 Last week’s highlights for me were not the usual entertainment of Shinnerbots spewing...
by RuthDE | Feb 1, 2022 | 2022, Belfast News Letter, February, Journalism
I don’t like being labelled, but after covering Northern Ireland as a journalist for almost 30 years, I can now formally announce I am no longer a political agnostic: I am a unionist. Being from a Dublin Catholic mostly-soft-nationalist background and living in...
by RuthDE | Jan 25, 2022 | 2022, Belfast News Letter, January, Journalism
Last week I was on Talkback disagreeing with the journalist Susan McKay about her charge that Kate Hoey was sectarian — one piece of evidence being that Hoey had attended “a barbecue for the extremist TUV party” (as she wrote in an Irish Times article on January 8)....
by RuthDE | Jan 19, 2022 | 2022, Belfast News Letter, January, Journalism
“What Kate Hoey says is not terribly important,” sneered Susan McKay in the Irish Times, after the furore over Hoey’s forthright foreword to the Unionist Voice Policy Studies report, Vetoing the Protocol: Restoring Cross-Community Consent Protections. Published: 18...
by RuthDE | Dec 14, 2021 | 2021, Belfast News Letter, December, Journalism
Having claimed for decades that the majority of the electorate in the Irish Republic just pay lip service to the idea of a united Ireland, I got a momentary shock the other day when I saw the Irish Times leading with ‘Large majority of voters favour a united Ireland,...
by RuthDE | Dec 8, 2021 | 2021, Belfast News Letter, December, Journalism
Doug Beattie, leader of the UUP, and Mary Lou McDonald, president of Sinn Fein, were in the United States last week. Published: 7 December 2021 Separately, they met many of the same people and addressed several of the same New York and Washington audiences, but they...
