There was a fascinating piece from Miriam Lord in last Saturday’s Irish Times. She suggests, with the casual authority of the informed commentator, that Leo Varadkar, Simon Coveney and Pascal Donohue will all quit frontline politics at the next Irish general election. Big news if so, representing a clear-out of Fine Gael’s top table. They […]

Teachers are fond of telling their pupils to ‘show their working out.’ Even if they don’t arrive at the correct answer, there is still merit in understanding the way in which they calculated it. So, just for fun – and on the back of a napkin – let me try and sketch out the emerging […]

John Alderice is not known for hyperbole. In fact, the quietly-spoken former Alliance leader and speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, who now sits in the House of Lords, usually keeps a pretty low profile. Until the other day. ‘It’s all over bar the shoutin’’ was the title of a post on his personal blog. […]

‘Losers’ consent’ is definitely my phrase of the week.  Employed by the eminent political scientist, Professor Brendan O’Leary at an event in Cork recently, it refers to the desirability of placating Unionists if they find themselves on the losing end of a future border poll. ‘If Unionists lose, they will have to consent to that […]

It was the matter-of-fact tone that struck me. Sir John Major, when asked whether he thought it was time to set out the requirements for holding a border poll on Northern Ireland’s constitutional status, described it as a ‘credible demand.’ Those of us familiar with the former Conservative Prime Minister’s habit of linguistic understatement (things […]

1. Shinners on a roll This was a spectacular result for Sinn Fein, by any measure. The ambition of dominating Irish politics, North and South, as a prelude to national reunification, continues apace. A whopping 7.7% added to the party’s vote share, with an additional 39 seats, is also powerful testimony to their iron discipline […]

There’s something of an irony about Northern Ireland’s local elections taking place two weeks after the rest of the UK’s. So enraptured would municipal vote counters be with the King’s Coronation – so the argument goes – that they could not be expected to count votes AND organise communal screens for the Big Event 24-hours […]

‘I think it will happen and I think Britain will be pleased.’  So replied Liam Neeson to Sky News’s political editor, Beth Rigby, when she asked him in a recent interview what he thought about the prospects of Irish unity.   ‘I think it could happen, but everybody has to be appeased,’ he added. ‘The Protestants in the North of […]

486. The total audience at one of Jamie Bryson’s anti-Protocol rallies? The number of Catholics Kate Hoey believes work at BBC NI? The annual millions in EU funding that Northern Ireland now misses out on, thanks to Brexit? Plausibly all of the above, however it’s actually the majority in the House Commons this afternoon that […]

Amid the wreckage of the British economy, collapsing public services, sewage-strewn beaches, broken railways and interminable industrial action, Rishi Sunak has a glimmer of hope. A deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol inches into view. It’s not perfect, from his point of view, with a big chunk of his backbenchers grumbling about the residual role […]