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...
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)....
Nuclear option” is the new favourite buzz phrase used by many a commentator on the turgid Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations – particularly those cheering for the EU’s Maros Sefcovic, presently slugging it out with Lord Frost. If the UK government suspends Article...
Can the leader of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party arrest the demoralisation caused by the NI Protocol and a weak justice system? Published: 2 September 2021 There is movement afoot in Northern Irish politics. After years of a dispiriting stalemate, with two...
Last Wednesday was the second anniversary of the murder of my friend Lyra McKee, shot dead by a member of the New IRA who had been targeting police. Published: 6 April 2021 The alleged murderer is back in Derry and there is insufficient evidence to charge him. Friday...
Published: May 15 2020 When he was in his cradle, the Good Fairy promised Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson that he would become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the Bad Fairy chuckled malevolently and said “Wait till he sees what I’ve got in store for him.”...
Published: 19 October 2019 Having begun as a slightly reluctant Leaver, I have become very hardline over the last three years in reaction to the undermining by Establishment Remainers of attempts to implement the will of the people of the United Kingdom by getting out...
