|
The Irish News |
HOSPITAL campaign groups are absolutely right – but they may not like where their argument leads them. As The Irish News reported on Monday,...
SPEAKING during a debate on the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill in the House of Commons, Secretary of State Chris Bryant insisted it was not about...
APART from the most hardline elements in unionism, there was overwhelming relief across the board when the secretary of state, Chris Bryant, took...
SPEAKING in Stormont’s Great Hall on Monday morning, Gavin Robinson confirmed that it was not his intention to withdraw Emma Little-Pengelly from...
IF you ever wanted to present a model of weak political leadership to study, Gavin Robinson is your exemplar. His weekly (weakly?) email to party...
AS the fallout from the Drumcree dispute continues to dominate the north’s political bandwidth, a senior doctor has delivered a sobering reminder of...
They’re brilliant at many things, but you really do have to hand it to the French: they know how to protest. In the last few weeks, the media and...
He walked into our lives on All Saints’ Day, 18 years ago next month: a tiny kitten with a collar but no ID. He was no more than 10 weeks old and...
One of the thrills of Christmas used to be getting a wind-up toy and seeing it spin across the room: although it ran out of power very quickly, it was...
The racist rioting which broke out in Ballymena, Co Antrim, in the summer of last year had many deeply alarming aspects, with among the most serious...
IN the early 1960s, I stood with my mother at the bottom of Shipquay Street in Derry, watching members of the Apprentice Boys pass through Shipquay...
AMIDST the pouting, hyperbole, and shouting from loyalists last week, yet another report emerged regarding the transition of paramilitaries in the...
THE wedding reception for Jeffrey Donaldson and Eleanor Cousins at a quiet Co Down hotel almost four decades ago had a devoutly Christian atmosphere...
So, if you remember, I was at the till of a supermarket in a daze, after the cashier reprimanded me for not saying ‘please’ when she asked if I...
There are plenty of things I would expect someone to suggest when organising a night out in Belfast, but a lecture would not normally be one. Dinner,...
IN the halcyon days of childhood in our wee house in Donegal, we used to watch westerns almost every Sunday afternoon. We’d all gather around the...
PRESIDENT Joe Biden told the Munich Security Conference in 2021 that “America is back”, reassuring his audience that Trump was an aberration and...
IT is now 10 years since the Bengoa Report claimed to have solved the crisis in our health service. All Stormont’s main political parties supported...
AN unprecedented nurses’ strike in 2019 finally forced Sinn Féin and the DUP to end a three-year collapse of devolution. Nurses are balloting again...
The sentencing of Jeffrey Donaldson on Thursday for child sex offences, including rape, confirmed that the former DUP leader is by any standards a...
I’M now at that point of adulthood where many things from my childhood are making a comeback. Last year it was Oasis, but I couldn’t have...
THERE are a number of key takeaways from the premeditated revival of the loyalist Drumcree campaign by a faction within unionism. Responsibility for...
SOME of the most revealing images to emerge from the latest Drumcree dispute were of the ‘Let Them Home Festival’ in Edgarstown, Portadown, held...
THE full extent of the upheaval caused by the flawed processes of the Parades Commission is already grimly apparent, and there can be no doubt that...
NORTHERN Ireland’s education system is undergoing unprecedented reform, reshaping the curriculum, qualifications, attendance, inclusion, teacher...
FACEBOOK was invented in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates in a student hall in Harvard. Twitter was invented in March 2006. Ten...
THE last time the DUP withdrew a first minister – thereby collapsing the structures – was on February 3 2022. Jeffrey Donaldson told the media:...
THERE has been a lot of focus in recent months about the nature of a referendum on a united Ireland: when will it happen and what is the mechanism?...
TO placate the masses, Roman leaders served up bread and circuses – panem et circenses. Gladiators fought to the death, slaves were fed to lions,...
GIVEN Stormont’s inability to deal effectively with the urgent pressures on public services today, it is perhaps optimistic to expect it to...
At the end of the 1990s, I agreed to be a witness in a court case which an individual had brought against the RUC after suffering injuries on the...
WITH the Manchester City crest on their shoulders and the red seats of the Kop on their backs, the Sky Sports Super Sunday four-man panel settled in...
After the secretary of state, Chris Bryant, justifiably overturned the Parade Commission’s deeply flawed decision to facilitate an Orange march...
There are two types of actor, those who love the stage and those who love the stage and use theatre to tell their stories, inviting the audience to...
So, at last, common sense – that commodity so rare in the current Parades Commission – has prevailed as the Secretary of State has banned the...
THE scale of the strategic disaster inflicted on unionism by the Portadown Orange district during the Drumcree crisis is still unfolding, but by any...
THERE was a time, not all that long ago, when a person could go onto Facebook and write a status for the pure divilment of it – no filter, no ring...
“I HAVE of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.” Hamlet’s mopey quote was at the back of my mind the other day as between one...
WOMEN’S health is one of those subjects that periodically attracts attention, enrages the people affected, and then slips under the radar again. For...
SOMEBODY said that even high tragedy turns into farce when you sit down. If it be so, then the devastating tragedy of Northern Ireland had its moment...
Just when you think Stormont cannot get any worse, it generally does. You might believe that our political masters could sink no further than...
THERE is a difference between civil disobedience and setting yourself above the law. Sinn Féin may need to make that distinction clearer over its...
IAR-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, speaking last Monday night in Dungannon at a conference organised by Mid-Ulster council, said that when people talk about...
A decade after his blueprint for transforming Northern Ireland’s health system was announced, the public may be surprised by the verdict of...
The official recommendation that pupils and teachers should “wear more clothes” in an attempt to cut heating bills in our schools will cause...
SHOULD we be surprised at the resurrection of the Drumcree issue and everything that has, and might still, follow from that? Not at all. It was only a...
THE renewed Drumcree stand-off has revealed, arguably above all else, political unionism’s strategic ineptitude. Its leadership – whether in the...
The UUP is walking a trickier tightrope at Drumcree than is generally realised. Leader Jon Burrows has set his party apart from the DUP and the TUV,...
The last two weeks in the Assembly have been some of the most toxic we have seen since 2007. MLAs have been firing barbs across the chamber. The two...
IN moments of crisis, the unthinkable becomes thinkable once again, as the very words and ideas which tie society together unravel. These are moments...