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Brian FeeneyThe Irish News |
It has emerged that the former SNP leader in Westminster, Ian Blackford, has requested an investigation into the DUP’s conference clown, Sammy...
This week Sir Keir Starmer jetted off to the Cop29 conference in Baku in Azerbaijan to make a speech for home consumption. He announced he was...
Of course there’s an emotional, if not to say visceral, reaction to Michelle O’Neill’s attendance at Remembrance ceremonies from some people...
Today is the centenary of the first meeting of the Irish Boundary Commission, which met in London on the first Friday of November 1924. Established...
It looks as if the divided DUP – and their fiercest critics, the TUV – are going to work themselves up into a froth again about the Irish Sea...
You may not agree with Peter Robinson’s brilliant characterisation of Jim Allister as the unionist equivalent of Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese...
Sinn Féin’s downward trajectory in the south continues. The latest polls place the party at 16-17%, a far cry from the heady 36% in summer 2023....
The British and the French made a mess of reconstructing the Middle East out of the debris of the Ottoman empire, including committing the original...
Society here owes a debt of gratitude to Trevor Birney, Barry McCaffrey and their solicitor Niall Murphy (also solicitor for the families of victims...
The British laid the groundwork, literally in sand, which guaranteed instability in the Middle East until today. After the French had defeated an Arab...
Forty-odd years ago there used to be what were called ‘butter mountains’, ‘milk lakes’ and ‘wine lakes’. They were the result of the then...
Iran is big. At 636,000 square miles, it’s 20 times the size of Ireland. Its population is 90 million. It has the world’s third largest proven oil...
While all attention has been focussed on the kerfuffle in his Downing Street private office, which forced a reset at the end of his bumpy, clunky...
The League of Nations formally allocated the French mandate for Syria in September 1923, but like the British mandate in Palestine and east of the...
Yesterday’s bumper bonanza budget in the south only adds to Sinn Féin’s difficulties. They had a good ard fheis at the weekend. Mary Lou McDonald...
You might have learnt at school that the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I. It did settle the immediate peace terms between the US, Britain,...
Boring, boring, boring. That sums up the DUP conference at the Crowne Plaza hotel on Saturday. Incidentally, why does the party keep returning to that...
When World War I ended in 1918, the winners, principally Britain and France (for the US electorate had decisively rejected President Woodrow...
People have been queuing up to take a pop at the so-called Programme for Government: quite right too. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence and...
Keir Starmer is running around like a scalded cat: Berlin, Paris, Dublin and now Washington. We all know what he’s doing. He calls it...
Ian Paisley founded the DUP in 1971 as the political wing of the Free Presbyterian Church, the religious sect he had founded, and as a vehicle for...
So the downward spiral continues. It continues because neither the UUP nor the SDLP accepts it faces an existential crisis, now acute after a...
So far in these weekly looks at local parties the ones examined - People Before Profit, SDLP and UUP - have been irrelevant to the big picture. This...
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) published its latest report on August 23. It expresses a number of...
The duke of Wellington was appointed prime minister in January 1828. After his first cabinet meeting he remarked, “An extraordinary affair. I gave...
Not for the first time, Edwin Poots ended up with egg splattered all over his face. He had just finished telling the BBC that there weren’t enough...
On August 2, local BBC ran one of its Red Lines podcasts featuring Claire Hanna, MP for South Belfast & Mid-Down. The BBC thought, as you might...
Even this week as the media, print and electronic, reflected on last week’s race riots, newspapers and websites were still talking about “riots...
With Stormont’s toytown assembly on holiday, apart from special recall, it’s an opportunity to have a closer look at the parties over the coming...
For the US Capitol riots on January 6 2021, some people drove hundreds of miles to participate. It’s the classic example of the connection between...
There is a refusal to accept the inescapable truth that this place is the last remnant of England’s first colony. As such it ticks all the boxes of...
That’s it: the end of the ‘mad month’ when all the worst elements of unionism and Orangeism are on display for the edification of the public....
A couple of years ago, think tanks and economic experts in Britain began to agree that the country is in what they called a ‘doom loop’ in...
The momentum gathers, the pace accelerates. In June at the SSE Arena, Leo Varadkar told the thousands in the audience: “What I hope we’ll see...
Casement Park will be on the agenda when the taoiseach meets Keir Starmer at Chequers today. We know that because Simon Harris told us on Sunday....
Today marks the high point of unionist culture, or rather, that’s what it used to be. The Twelfth was the day when unionism displayed who it was and...
Monday’s exhibition of colonial forelock-tugging from some of the parties here was nauseating. What a privilege to be noticed by the great white...
Wolfgang Pauli, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 1945, had zero tolerance for balderdash, mathematical or any other kind. One of his responses...
As usual a British general election throws the anomalous position of the north into sharp relief. British general elections have nothing to do with...
The British-Irish Council (BIC) meeting on the Isle of Man last Friday was pretty much a non-event, partly because there’s a British general...
Leaving aside the relative party strengths shown in the latest LucidTalk poll, the rank order of which hasn’t changed, what is remarkable is the...
Taken together, Leo Varadkar’s remarks in his interview with Jim Fitzpatrick at the Ireland’s Future conference on Saturday constitute a game...
Jim Allister declared he was “disappointed” that Nigel Farage had endorsed two DUP candidates, Ian Óg and the party’s conference clown, Sammy...
The council and Euro elections in the south were in some ways uncannily like those in 2019, but in other ways different. The results raise more...
I’m afraid, Alex, you’re concentrating on what the Greeks called ‘adiaphora’ – inessentials, matters of indifference. You’re also...
Nominations of candidates for the Westminster election close on Friday so we don’t know all the runners and riders yet, but watching the parties...
We’re told self-styled ‘hard man of Brexit’ Steve Baker is on holiday in Greece. That brings to mind, though in entirely different context,...
Fighting a British general election in the north is an anomaly. Strangely, most of the parties here don’t realise that. They talk as if they’re in...
Delay, dysfunction, dereliction of duty. Stormont during the Covid pandemic? Yes, but Westminster all the time. Why does it take Britain so long –...