Three Families and the truth about abortion in Northern Ireland (The Guardian, May 11, 2021) "Waiting,” we are told in the BBC drama Three Families, “is all there is to it.” That intense, fraught, prolonged suspension of time, during which everyday life somehow has to go on, is one of the main themes of the ...
(Irish Times, May 21) On Monday, Joel Keys, a 19-year-old part-time supermarket worker from Belfast, joined the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) which includes proscribed paramilitary organisations. On Wednesday he was sent out, dressed as if for a funeral in a black suit, white shirt and tie, to warn the British government that if it did ...
The DUP has wildly exaggerated the harms done by power sharing – and now Northern Ireland is slipping out of its grasp The Democratic Unionist party had a front-page ad in the Belfast News Letter yesterday. “This union works,” it declared. “Lets build for the #next100.” As the first minister and leader of the DUP, ...
(in The Guardian) Fearing democracy, the DUP and loyalist groups are retreating into a paranoid huddle A few of the boys and men asked about their alleged involvement in last week’s street violence in Northern Ireland spoke as if struggling to remember troubled dreams. A person was holding a plastic off-licence bag. They had already ...
(in The Guardian) With loyalists renouncing the Good Friday Agreement, the DUP must listen to others who share the country’s narrow ground Ian Paisley Jr did not inherit his late father’s brutal eloquence. Earlier this week, in protest at post-Brexit trade agreements for Northern Ireland, loyalist paramilitary groups wrote to the prime minister informing him ...
(Irish Times, March 1 2021) As the Proud Boys are to Trump, so the loyalist paramilitaries are to the Democratic Unionist Party. They are what you are left with when democracy lets you down. “We will fight guerrilla warfare against this, until the big battle opportunity comes,” the DUP MP for East Antrim, Sammy Wilson, ...
(for London Review of Books) Last month , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of ...
Do not underestimate the significance of the Northern Ireland rejection of the Tories’ ‘stay alert’ guidance for coronavirus The disuniting of the kingdom quickened pace this week, leaving the prime minister in freefall after his incoherent Sunday night speech, while the first minister of the Northern Ireland executive, DUP leader Arlene Foster, joined her Sinn ...