He also, effectively, rules out the possibility of any deal being reached by Friday, a day that had been, in some quarters, predicted as another 'deadline' - again.

Mr Ahern also told the Dáil he could not see an agreement being reached between the parties by Friday.

Unsurprisingly, neither Adams nor Paisley thought it worthwhile mentioning this in their statements to the media earlier in the day.

While it doesn't signal an end to the current round of talks, nor the continuing efforts to seek a deal, it should sound a wake-up call to the general media who, for the most part, have been parroting meaningless soundbites without analysis.

"Not since 1922 has a Sinn Fein leader discussed policing with an official representative of the Northern Ireland state.

"Craig met Collins and a Catholic recruiting committee was set up in Belfast, chaired by Bishop MacRory of Down and Connor to, if you like, select suitable Catholics for the police force. At that time this divided republican opinion in the north and the scheme was eventually blocked by the old unionist minister of home affairs who was in charge of policing, Sir Dawson Bates.

"He set out to disrupt the new scheme on the grounds that it would endanger the Protestant control of the police. Therefore the scheme collapsed in 1922. From 1922 until today there has been no republican engagement with the police authorities on the crucial issues of policing.

"It has taken 82 years to get to a point where a northern republican leader is meeting the head of the PSNI, the reformed police force, to discuss the broad issue of policing/demilitarisation".

And he's sanguine over the chances of a deal being struck:

"You have Sinn Fein recognising the reality that qualified Catholics are prepared to join the new force since Patten.

"You also have the Sinn Fein recognition of the requirement of the two governments that to be in government Sinn Fein must accept the existing police force – that is the bottom line of Blair and Ahern.

"Sinn Fein must be seen to support the law of the land. It is the acceptability of the realpolitik by the new pragmatic leaders of the republican movement".

From the briefings, which Frank Millar reports are coming from SF sources, the view is that there will be no devolved policing powers until 2006 - at the earliest.

Leaving aside the fact that the DUP are arguing that they, ultimately, will have a veto on whether that eventually happens, the prospect of the policing issue being resolved as part of a wider package in the next week is, IMO, unlikely.

Think about it this way - will SF join the Policing Board without their frequently cited demand for 'local politicians in control of policing'? Adams couldn't even admit to discussing policing with Hugh Orde yesterday.

Would the DUP accept SF on the Policing Board while refusing to vote for devolved powers because, presumably, of on-going party-political links to criminal activity?

The benefits for both parties in putting this issue on the 'long finger' is that they can both fight election campaigns pointing to further 'negotiations' still to come.. that's been the card they've successfully played to date and it's unlikely to be dropped out of the hand just yet.

The draw-back for everyone else is that, even if they say 'Aye' - and the schedule for the two governments 'calling it' keeps getting pushed back in the hope that it will be 'Aye' - there will remain at least one issue that will resurface, again and again and again.

There is one additional point to raise on the policing issue - should we actually have any politicians 'in control' of local policing?

The [edited] article reads -

SF insists on local control of policing timetable
Frank Millar, London Editor

© The Irish Times

In particular he hints at the diversity within the party, but the need to agree common policy positions:

"Not being a Sinn Féin member Tommy has no idea what positions people took or what work people did on this issue. He also ignores the fact that at the 2002 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis we agreed a substantial and radical policy, which clarified our opposition to privatisations. A position which is now binding on all the party’s elected representatives".

Anti-sectarianism is a very long word – can we spell it?
Paraphrasing the childhood word game underlines the strangeness of the word and our unfamiliarity with the concept. For me 'anti-sectarianism' is community relations in action – a positive, life affirming concept which promotes the acceptance of diversity in Northern Ireland's divided society. This paper hopes to examine the meaning of anti-sectarianism and attempt definitions of it and of sectarianism and non-sectarianism. In doing so the paper suggests that different levels of sectarianism must be identified and that there is a continuum from sectarianism through to anti-sectarianism.
Sectarian attitudes, behaviour and structures have been a feature of Northern Ireland life – and in cultures and societies far from Northern Ireland - for a considerable time. Writing in the 19th century, William Carleton summed up what he thought was the essence of sectarianism:
"If you hate a man for an obvious and palpable injury, it is likely that when he cancels the injury by an act of subsequent kindness, accompanied by an exhibition of sincere sorrow, you will cease to look upon him as your enemy; but when the hatred is such that while feeling it, you cannot on a sober examination of your heart, account for it, there is little hope that you will ever be able to stifle the enmity which you entertain against him".
That these feelings and these actions are almost endemic within Northern Ireland society, in spite of a respectable veneer at some levels within that society, is almost a truism.
Business and Public Life
Few, if any, parts of Northern Ireland life and society escape from the sectarian attitudes and behaviour which exist in this society between Protestants and Catholics. Many of those involved in business and public life would, however, seek in formal terms to distance themselves and their organisations from these attitudes and behaviour. That these continue to exist rather indicates that this distancing has not been successful against other trends in our society. Many organisations in business and the public sector seem to embrace the concept of 'non-sectarianism'. This document is an attempt to examine whether and how far non-sectarian attitudes and behaviour can be taken a step, or even a stride, forward into something we describe as 'anti-sectarian'.
Sectarianism and Anti-Sectarianism
The definition of what we actually mean by 'anti-sectarianism' rather depends on what we mean by 'sectarianism'. It is not fully possible to entrap the nuances of feelings, passions, intellectual nicety or gut reaction conjured up by a discussion of sectarianism. It is not just the bigotry and prejudice, the de-humanised, emotionless, ruthless cynicism that leads to sectarian murder. It is also the ghost at the feast of much polite society in Northern Ireland. While it can and often is the reality of life in working class housing estates, it is equally present in the leafy and apparently more 'civilised' suburbs. It is ingrained into the fabric of society – but what is it?
Roots of Sectarianism
Clearly, it is not possible to examine the roots of sectarianism in any detail here and what follows may thus seem somewhat superficial. However, the dispute is not, it seems to me, at heart religious. It is rather about allegiances – one community to 'Britain' and 'Britishness' and the other to 'Ireland' and 'Irishness'. Clearly religion is a major part of the identity of the two communities but it is much more important as what has been described at a 'stereotypical cue'. It is a major apparent difference between the two communities and the difference that conveniently labels each one. Religion is important in this context,
'…as a social marker through which conflict is articulated rather than as a source of conflict in its own right.... Sectarianism operates whenever religion is invoked to draw boundaries and to represent or reduce patterns of inequality and social conflict" (Brewer, 1991, p101).
Other stereotypical cues include: residence, name, school, personal displays of cultural symbols as well as beliefs about variations in language and pronunciation, physical appearance, dress and physical features. These cues are only possible because of the social significance that is placed on assumed or real differences in behaviour. In other words, attaching importance to them already constitutes sectarianism. Sectarianism thus depends essentially on a popular culture which invokes religion as a boundary marker between the two communities and hence this perception is itself already sectarian.
It is an almost universal practice in Northern Ireland that when we meet or come across a person for the first time, we want to know what 'side' he or she comes from. So pervasive is it that, even for those of us who believe that it is genuinely a matter of no practical or even theological interest, fall into the practice to some extent.
Crude definitions of 'sectarianism' are one of the signs – the stereotypical cues – of which side a person comes from, what his or her political perspectives are. For those of a unionist/loyalist bent, sectarianism is generally something to do with the personal – one individual Protestant discriminating in practice or in their attitude against individual Catholics. For those of a more nationalist/republican turn of mind, sectarianism is an integral part of state power – in Northern Ireland a Protestant state actively and inevitably discriminating on a sectarian basis against those whose loyalty is suspect. The truth is perhaps more complicated than that.
Sectarianism is not just a matter of economic, social or political consideration; nor is it simply a question of personal attitude or behaviour. It is an historical and cultural phenomenon arising out of religious and political differences and perpetuated by group and self-interests.
Non-sectarianism and Anti-Sectarianism
If sectarianism is a complex phenomenon what about the counters to it? Non-sectarian is the position adopted, usually formally, by most voluntary and community organisations and, more informally by public and private bodies in Northern Ireland.
Something apparently more pro-active has more recently, echoing developments in anti-racism and anti-sexism work, come to the fore – anti-sectarianism. Non-sectarianism is normally taken to be a neutral term referring to a neutral position, reflecting the fact that it is about staying in the middle and not getting involved. It implies that religion and politics should not be discussed in our workplaces and that 'normality' should not be disrupted by any unpleasant talk. We tend in this mode to stick to the things which unite us – and often have no difficulty finding lots of those – and avoid those which divide.
There are, of course, many individuals and organisations who would hold to this view, rather caricatured above, and there are compelling arguments that the sectarian differences which certainly exist in our society should not be allowed to invade every nook and cranny of our lives. There are, however, equally compelling reasons to suggest to us that while talking about different political and religious differences may not make sectarianism go away, not talking about them will certainly ensure that it does not go away.

Behind the Blue Door
In his book, The Glass Curtain, Carlo Gebler examined many aspects of life in the Troubles here. He tells this story which illustrates how, although we know sectarianism and other ills exist in our society, we often find it hard to pin it down or to recognise it in ourselves. He writes about the 'house with the blue door':
"If you believed what you read in the papers", she said. "you'd think civil war was raging everywhere in Northern Ireland. But if you live here, and you think of trouble, you think of it as happening in certain towns. And if you live in those certain towns, you think of it as happening in certain districts. And if you live in those certain districts, you think of it as happening on certain housing estates. And if you live on those certain housing estates, you think of it as happening in certain streets. And if you live in those certain streets, you know that the trouble is being caused by the man at the end of the road in the house with the blue door." (Gebler, 1991, p73)
It is all too easy to attribute the problem of sectarianism to somewhere safely 'elsewhere', behind the blue door. It is, unfortunately, not so easy and sectarianism in all its forms is something we in Northern Ireland – and beyond – must address.

Copyright Community Relations Council 2003

By Danny Morrison

More details have emerged on the proposals to deal with the issue of trust which has bedevilled the peace process from the very outset. Talks sources suggest that by the end of December General John de Chastelain could report that he now has physical proof that the DUP has put all its sectarian bigotry 'beyond use'.

In a secret location Ian Paisley has made or will make a video-recorded act of contrition, witnessed by the General and two other independents nominated by Sinn Fein and the DUP. This would open the door to a shadow Assembly in January. Sources say that under the proposals the video would not be shown immediately.

Sinn Fein is saying no deal will be made without a film of Ian Paisley apologising. The nationalist people need transparency, said Gerry Adams: "Any deal must be fair and must address to my satisfaction and my electorate’s satisfaction all the fundamental issues that have blocked progress for so long. We need acts of completion, proof of the sincerity of the unionists and that they have turned their backs on discrimination and triumphalism forever."

The video of Paisley apologising would be held by the head of the International Commission on Decommissioning until March. Paisley's film would then go on general release and Sinn Fein would agree to a new power-sharing executive with the DUP.

There is a real danger, of course, of the whole choreography being thrown into disarray should the Independent Monitoring Commission report adversely on the Reverend Ian Paisley’s activities. Just two months ago Paisley made an outburst against ‘Romanist journalists’ for not being truly concerned about his health and actually wishing him ill.

In the film Ian Paisley is expected to apologise for his contribution to the conflict, beginning with his threatened march into Divis Street in September 1964 to remove a Tricolour from the windows of Sinn Fein’s election headquarters. That sparked off rioting in which hundreds of nationalists were injured and scores arrested.

He goes on to express regret for his counter-demonstrations against the Civil Rights Movement which also led to violence; his founding of the Ulster Protestant Volunteers; the death of Jimmy Dempsey in September 1969, caused by his supporters trying to invade Iveagh and Broadway; his membership of the Ulster Workers Council's committee which organised the intimidation and bloody violence during the UWC strike against power-sharing (the irony!); his involvement with the UDA which provided paramilitary muscle during the second violent strike in 1977; the Carson Trail rallies and middle-of-the-night demonstrations of loyalist firepower; his establishment of the 'Third Force'; his support for the Ulster Clubs; and his involvement in founding Ulster Resistance, some of whose members imported illegal weapons to kill hundreds of Catholics.

Yes, Paisley says, 'Sorry'.

If only!

If all sides were required to prove their sincerity then the above precondition could be legitimately demanded of Paisley. On the other hand, there are demands which are designed to be impossible or mischievous or designed to stymie political progress whilst laying the blame for failure on one’s opponent.

I can live with unionism being in denial about its contribution to the conflict, either directly or as cheerleaders to state and loyalist paramilitary violence. Patronising as it sounds, unionists need our help, which is why republicans agreed to the amendments of Articles 2 & 3, the Patten Commission, and devolution, among other concessions.

I do not know if the IRA is prepared to allow an act (or acts) of decommissioning to be filmed as transparent proof that the act had actually taken place. I don't believe that this demand from unionists is legitimate, don’t believe that it is or represents actual proof of total decommissioning.

For that matter, I don't believe that it will be the end of unionist demands or that it will settle unionists given that it is the political project of republicanism and the trend towards Irish unity which ultimately unsettles them.

Filmed decommissioning only makes sense from the dispassionate perspective of cold logic – lubricating the stalled negotiations so that a power-sharing executive and all-Ireland bodies can be restored.

If a photo or video is taken it will certainly become public and be used by the DUP for electoral advantage and to lord it over the UUP in terms of, "Look what we got and you didn't!"

Republicans would be even more depressed than Ulster Unionists!

Despite all that Paisley says about not wanting to humiliate anyone, he will parade the photos as the symbol of surrender. However, that satisfaction would be short-lived and a one-off regardless of how many times he hits playback. It would be short-lived against the fresh and daily images of the DUP in a power-sharing executive with Sinn Fein, symbolising and signalling a dramatic betrayal by Paisley of his entire political life, radically changing the political complexion of the North and putting the union on a slippery slope.

But, as I said last week, I cannot see Ian Paisley sitting in government with the SDLP never mind with 'Sinn Fein/IRA'. (Or has the DUP dropped that phraseology in the past week?) The real stumbling block, as I am sick of saying, is not arms but the politics of power sharing: power sharing - the antithesis of the meaning of 'Northern Ireland'.

First published in the Andersonstown News on Monday 29th November 2004

Power and responsibility
There are no more excuses for intransigence in Northern Ireland

After 40 years of violence and an utterly dispiriting sequence of derailed peace initiatives, the odds against a breakthrough in Ulster in a given week will always be slim. Expectations must nonetheless be managed, and Downing Street has been managing them hard of late. This was the Prime Minister’s task yesterday when asked about talks held in London between Hugh Orde, the Northern Ireland police chief, and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president. Tony Blair affected an air of weary detachment and acknowledged that “all the possibilities are there” before insisting: “Whether it happens or not is not up to me.”

“It” would be an historic deal between Northern Ireland’s two largest political parties, encompassing the decommissioning of IRA weapons and the resumption of power sharing along lines set down six years ago in the Good Friday accords. Mr Blair’s weariness may be genuine; his apparent detachment is not, for the prize of such a deal, all bleak precedent apart, is perhaps closer than it has ever been.

For the first time since the elections last year that put the fate of the Province in the hands of the Rev Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein, both groups appear willing in principle to make the concessions necessary for an over-arching agreement. At Mr Blair’s request, President Bush has intervened with phone calls to Mr Paisley and Mr Adams over the weekend, urging them to turn their hints into actual compromises.

If they do, there is hope that a deal would hold: it is the defining paradox of recent developments in Northern Ireland that republicans are likely to have more faith in an agreement with their hardline Unionist rivals than one reached with David Trimble’s moderate, and now weakened, Ulster Unionist Party. Meanwhile, at the governmental level, London and Dublin have expressed their willingness to consider a “peace dividend” of as much as £1 billion in public funds to go towards much-needed infrastructure projects that the DUP and Sinn Fein agree have been delayed by sectarian strife. They may have had a hand in the strife, but their agreement on anything is welcome.

Mr Paisley’s willingness to trust potentially unreliable partners is to be lauded. The effect has been instructive. He has conquered a lifetime’s aversion to talks with Dublin, and although the elimination of the IRA as a terrorist organisation remains his — and London’s — chief, non-negotiable goal, he has shown a willingness to contemplate its continued existence as “an old boys’ association”. Mr Adams’s meeting with Mr Orde likewise breaks new ground, but a firm and unambiguous commitment from Sinn Fein to full and transparent decommissioning by the IRA is now long overdue. To demand that weapons destruction be properly recorded, and not just witnessed, is entirely legitimate.

The looming pressures of next year’s election make this window of opportunity for Ulster a narrow one, but a similar chance may not present itself for years. It must be seized.

That report in full -

Primate urges parties to 'grasp opportunity'
Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent

© The Irish Times

Feel free to disagree, but there are too many loose ends still trailing in the mud for a 'perfect solution', whatever that may mean, to be served from the current pressure-cooker. Even if the two parties say 'Aye', expect a couple of items to be delayed.. and delayed.. and delayed.. after all, what would they put in next year's election pamphlets otherwise?

Reading the story, of course, it soon becomes evident that the 'proper home' for the Quiet Man pub, or rather the props and fittings used in the original movie, is in a Hollywood studio -

Pat Cohan's in Cong, Co Mayo, was actually a shop in real life but director John Ford converted it into a bar for the Oscarwinning film starring John Wayne.

Interior pub scenes were cleverly shot in a Hollywood studio and the props and fittings have been lying in a dusty warehouse for over 50 years.[my emphasis]

Not that the "film['s] devotees in The Quiet Man Movie Club in Ireland [who] are transporting the pub [props] back bit by bit and aim have it open for business next year" are going to let that get in the way -

"Tourists who came to visit where the film was shot were always disappointed when they heard the pub didn't actually exist in real life," said Paddy Rock, who runs popular tours of the film's West of Ireland locations.

Hmmm... let's not disappoint those tourists. I mean, next thing you know they'll start thinking it was all a fiction... and then where would we be?

Ulster Unionist spin doctors at party HQ in Belfast's Cunningham House have been working overtime to explain the Lagan Valley association's 'strategy' in dumping the seemingly red-hot certainty for the Westminster nomination, Daphne Trimble, in favour of an unknown businessman who only joined the party a few months ago.

Beaten by a margin of two to one, the wind of change – no, make that a tornado – blowing through Lagan Valley has signaled the start of a fresh onslaught on the Trimble leadership – one that is expected to come to a head by March 2005.

March 2005 is a key time period. Next year sees celebrations to commemorate the centenary of the founding of the Ulster Unionist Council, the UUP governing body. The month has also been earmarked when visible proof of IRA decommissioning will be produced, and the green light given to the kick-starting of the power-sharing Stormont Executive with the DUP and Sinn Fein holding the leading roles.

Even the most enthusiastic of the Trimbleista spin doctors was admitting the rejection of Daphne Trimble as the runner against defector Jeffrey Donaldson has confirmed Ulster Unionism is now in the twilight months of her husband's leadership.

In spite of well-staged photocalls of a smiling David Trimble with the man who beat Daphne, they cannot hide the fact there was a deliberate strategy to dump the leader's wife – the only candidate who had at least a fighting chance of unseating Donaldson.

And even if Daphne didn’t manage to unseat Donaldson, she could at least have severely slashed his handsome Commons majority, in much the same way as the now almost defunct Northern Ireland Tories reduced the late North Down MP Sir James Kilfedder’s 14,000 majority in 1983 to around 5,000 in 1992.

The 93 delegates who voted against Daphne Trimble have to face reality that one of the major consequences of their actions has been to light the fuse for what will prove to be the most concerted leadership coup attempt ever on her husband.

Granted, Trimble has survived leadership coups in the past since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. But then, all the plotting was hatched by anti-Agreement dissidents loyal to the so-called Gang of Three – Jeffrey Donaldson, Rev Martin Smyth of South Belfast, and David Burnside of South Antrim.

But with Donaldson jumping ship earlier this year to the DUP, taking with him a number of key dissident activists, the anti-Agreement steam roller in the UUC has all but run out of puff.

This time, the leadership coup will be staged by those who would be classified as pro-Agreement and are feeling this icy wind of change from their grassroots. They believe the only way the party can avoid an electoral meltdown in May’s council and expected General Election is to dump Trimble in favour of Sir Reg Empey.

The UUP's 'strategy' to wrench Lagan Valley from Donaldson is simple (although many would view it as merely simple-minded). Take a newcomer to the party and pitch him against the sitting MP who has held the seat since 1997.

This newcomer will be able to topple Donaldson, in spite of the latter topping the poll in the November 2003 Assembly election with 14,000 first preference votes, and in the 2001 General Election, Donaldson received almost 26,000 votes – the highest figure for all Northern Ireland constituencies.

As well as that, the high-profile Lagan Valley Alliance Party MLA Seamus Close has also been nominated to contest the seat.

There has also been the equally daft suggestion that Lagan Valley unionists selected a newcomer to fight Jeffrey because they privately know Donaldson will wipe the political floor with whatever candidate the UUP selects. It's a case of – better the floor being wiped by an unknown newcomer than the party leader's wife!

However, the painful truth in Lagan Valley, once the safest UUP seat in the North, is that Daphne's demise will condemn the constituency to a generation of DUP rule. Donaldson will be MP for as long as he wants the seat.

Indeed, Lagan Valley may well be a Dail constituency in a European-imposed United Ireland before the Ulster Unionists have a pup’s chance of regaining what was once their jewel in the unionist crown under former party leader Jim Molyneaux.

With not having to worry about another Donaldson/Trimble showdown, Jeffrey can concentrate fully on his campaign to take control of the prestigious Lisburn City Council – the final bastion of UUP power in Lagan Valley.

The UUP will have to find another cockpit constituency in which to promote its battle for the heart and soul of Unionism. Eyes are already heavily focused on East Belfast, the political turf of DUP deputy boss Peter Robinson.

After the November 2003 Assembly elections, the UUP was within a few thousand votes of Robinson. If the UUP’s Reg Empey could lift 'the East', it would guarantee him the party leadership.

But Daphne’s defeat has further fuelled speculation the UUP will be left with two Commons seats in May – her husband in Upper Bann and Sylvia Hermon in North Down.

As for David Burnside in South Antrim, given what happened to dissident William Ross in East Derry in 2001, maybe the time has come for the PR guru to follow the lead of his pal Jeffrey and jump ship to the DUP as the only way to remain in the Commons.

Mar cainteoir Gaeilge na hAlban, biodh an cainiuint aitiuil seo go ana cosuil a cuid teanga fein, no is é sin an mead a duirt uncal do mo chuid agus mé i mo paiste beag, thartfa seacht bliaina d’aois. Cha raibh sé abalta an Gaeilge Atha Cliath den fear an phoist (mar a duirt sé) a thuigbheal chomh maith leis an teanga de iascairi Albanacha a bheas ag cuir isteach leis an cuan ó am go h-am.

Dun nan Gall

Far a bheil a’ Ghàidhlig sgrìobht air na creagan
an sin dh’fhan i,
is pàisdean luideagach ga caitheamh, a stiallan sgaoilte air na rubhachan an iar,
os cionn na mara
far a bheil grian na h-Eireann a’ dol sios,
is grian Ameireagaidh ag èirigh le èigheachd’s caithream

Cha bheathaich feur a chànain seo
chan fhàs i sultmhor an guirt no ‘n iodhlainn;
fòghnaidh dhi beagan coirce ‘s eòrna,
cuirear grad fhuadachachd;
chan iarr i ach, cleas nan gobhar, a bhith spoghail
os cionn muir gorm, air na bideanan biorach

Gus an tog a’ chlann luideagach leoth’ i
air bàta-smùid a Shasainn,
no a Ghlaschu, far a fiagh i bàs,
an achlais a peathar –
Gàidhlig rìoghail na h-Albann ‘s na h-Eireann
‘na h-ìobairt-reite air altair beairteis.

Despite the optimistic comments from Mitchel McLauglin that are also in the report, Adams claims to have promoted the idea of further White House intervention "I told him that we may need help at the White House to deliver".

But, as predicted yesterday by Mark Devenport, certain murals weren't mentioned, although I don't think diplomacy had much to do with their omission.

No mention either of Sinn Féin's recent call for US military planes to be barred from Shannon Airport

I would have thought it was a perfect opportunity to have a chat about that particular Sinn Féin policy.

28/11/2004 - 11:48:01

Outspoken anti-immigration leader Áine Ní Chonaill will debate immigration controls with Councillor Toireasa Ferris of Sinn Féin, the daughter of TD Martin Ferris at University College Cork.

The debate will be through the Irish language and a professional interpreter will be present on the night to provide Gaeilge/Béarla translations, which will be available to members of the audience through headphones.

Ms Ní Chonaill is the leader of the far-right Immigration Control Platform.

The event takes place on Wednesday at 7.30pm.

Gerry Adams: "I think Danny is being a bit cagey, since I don't think he owns a hat".

He goes back to the social activism of the sixties:

"The movements of the 1960s wiped out local injusticises, but they are a global phenomenon, and those local injustices are not why the 1960s happened. Its are not to be sought in ideas but in large social and demographic forces. That is why Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm have had better luck than most in explaining the 1960s, even if there is room to differ on which forces predominated (Education? Prosperity? The baby boomers sensing their future electoral might?)"

He quotes French Socialist Mark Baumel:

"The ideological coherence forged in the 1960s and 1970s - anti-liberal on economics and libertarian on social questions - corresponded to a society in which capitalist domination and bourgeois moral order seem to make up a coherent system. This coherence is no longer obviouos because capitalism has adapted itself easily to libertarianism".

Indeed he quotes a columnist from Suddeutsche Zeitung describing the plans of Germany's Social Democrat Chancellor as a "mishmash of McKinsey jargon, leftover inventory from the sociology of 1968, and psuedo-futurist visions".

And he finishes:

"Mr Blair has bet - and France's socialists are about to bet - that Europe's electorate is much more like the American one than many European leftists would like to believe.

During the week a number of short-term solutions to the Holy Lands crisis were proffered, such as the expulsion or suspension of the rowdiest and most violent from university. Others have suggested that the PSNI take a more heavy-handed approach to the nightly scenes of drunkenness, lewd behaviour and disorder. They point out, quite correctly, that if these people were working-class youths they would battered off the streets and demonised throughout society as a gang of worthless Chav scumbags, yet because the students are from nice, respectable middle-class homes in the country they are treated with kid gloves.
The only long-term solution to the blight in the Holy Lands is a cultural one - to discourage parochialism. At the heart of it lies the need to break up the pack mentality, to persuade students from rural Northern Ireland, especially nationalist areas, to think of other options of study beyond the North entirely.
Conversely, the two universities might consider putting a cap on the number of indigenous students they take in and vigorously canvass for more students from Britain, the Republic and further afield.

From The Irish News Article on Friday:

A representative of the Royal British Legion was one of the speakers at an event on remembrance organised by a republican ex-prisoners organisation yesterday.

The conference examined the theme of commemorating the Irish sacrifice in the two World Wars and the reasons why the nationalist tradition has difficulties in identifying with the wearing of the poppy and the traditional Armistice Day ceremonies.

Chris Carson, Northern Ireland chairman of the Royal British Legion, told the conference his group had recently arranged for northern ex-servicemen to attend a ceremony at the war memorial in Drogheda in memory of three hundred local men who died in the Great War.

and

”Sinn Fein councillor Tom Hartley said that in the changed climate of the peace process it was now possible for republicans and nationalists to remember the victims of Flanders and Gallipoli.

The conference at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast was organised by republican ex-prisoners group Coisde na Iarceimi.”

From the Sunday Times article:

“Eamon Phoenix, the historian, told how the support of Irish nationalists for British wars was undermined and transformed into outright opposition to the British link by events such as the treatment of demobbed soldiers after the first world war. Many nationalists who got jobs in the shipyards were violently expelled as disloyal infiltrators by sectarian mobs despite their military service.

That radicalised many but, even so, support for the British armed forces persisted within nationalism for years.Until 1925, for instance, a rally of the Ancient Order of Hibernians was addressed, each Remembrance Day, by Sir James Craig, the unionist prime minister. The tradition ended abruptly when he pushed his luck too far and alienated the avowedly nationalist group by telling them that they must support the principles of unionism.

That was a bridge too far and, as the DUP comes to grips with Sinn Fein, it may care to reflect on Craig’s mistake in pushing nationalist co-operation past what could be delivered. This is not the first time nationalists have been willing to work with unionists to achieve stability. There has always been a willingness to give practical support to the institutions of the state while fully intending to change them by democratic means as soon as they can.”

Also in the Sunday Times article, the moving story of How Roy Garland and Gusty Spence helped Martin Meehan find the grave of his grandfather, Camillus Clarke, who died in Belgium during WWI.

(In Bold A.U.)

the debate was part of the programme at a conference of the institute of healthcare management, and those who took part were paul berry (dup), robert coulter (uup), kieran mccarthy (alliance), carmel hanna (sdlp), john o'dowd (sf)

Based on the premise of a link between salary level and IQ (that's the 'leftist rag' we know and love!) it would probably be best to let that hangover subside first.

Personally, I'm looking for a raise... either that or a new job ;)

Your results

Wow. Your IQ is as far above the average for your salary level as the scale permits. What are you doing with your life?

"In 1998 revisiting that historical wrong, and truthfully rejudging the legal failures of the Widgery tribunal, seemed like a necessary step in the nascent Irish peace process. But six years later, after 16 million words have been spoken, 30 million words in documents, 921 witnesses and £155 million in lawyers’ fees, I am no longer sure".

Perhaps it's something like the rather cold pragmatic argument proffered for the retention of marriage: in a calling to witness of as many as possible so that when the vows are made, the two participant's are more motivated to make the relationship work for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health.

NB: our correpondent brings us a number of factlets: NI has a lower crime rate than Britain, the US Poland and Portugal (bet that's got to be traffic offences - scariest drivers in Europe last time I was there!).

It is believed that both main parties have completed consultations, and will make clear responses in the next day or two. we should know by Monday or Tuesday at the latest whether the party is back on, or off! Meantime we'll do our best to keep you posted....

The first act of Rhapsody in Stephen's Green was among Flann O'Brien's papers owned by the University of Southern Illinois. But no trace until now had been found of acts two and three and a prologue and epilogue.
The play is in the vein of O'Brien's columns under the name Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the Little Horses) for the Irish Times in the 1950s and 1960s, which played merry hell with his countrymen's pretensions, religious piety, political cant and official ignorance in the use of the English and Irish languages.
The first act deals with the beastly behaviour of bees and act two features avaricious beetles, greedy ducks and dopey crickets with a pronounced Cork accent. Corkmen are traditionally the butt of Dublin jokes.
But it is act three which has fascinating topical resonance. It features a colony of mindlessly driven Orange ants who work themselves into a frenzy against a colony of Green ants until finally their aggression pushes them into suicidal war with Blue ants.
The Orange ants mouth slogans such as: 'The Awnt State will fieght ond the Awnt State wull be rieght!'. They also declare themselves to be 'hord-headed ond ready to fieght for the rieght to keep in stap with the Awnt Empiere'.
The phonetic spelling leaves no doubt that we are dealing with Belfast men. O'Brien, a Catholic, was actually born in Ulster, but spent most of his life in Dublin. His real name was Brian O'Nolan.
Before the Southern audience could become too smug, enter a ludicrous figure known as Deevil, transparently the prime minister Eamon de Valera, who is leader of the Green Ants and ready to march across the border to recover his property, which consists of a dead beetle.
There is no mistaking 33-year-old Brian O'Nolan's bitter disgust with the 1940s world of carnage, greed and cant at home and abroad. But on the literary level the work is rather too parochial and simplistically exuberant to be classed as one of his major works. However it and the context in which it was born - and rapidly snuffed out - gives intriguing insights into neutral Ireland of the 1940s, suffocating in puritanism and insular politics.

An exam paper set for 11-year-olds in Victorian Britain was too difficult for most of today’s A-Level students, campaigners said.

They were aimed at the brightest 11-year-olds of the time.

Dumbing down: the proof

The questions are TOUGH!

eg:

ENGLISH GRAMMAR

1. Write out in your best handwriting:—

‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the sands o’ Dee.’
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.
The western tide crept up along the sand,
And o’er and o’er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see.
The rolling mist came down and hid the land —
And never home came she.

2. Parse fully ‘And call the cattle home.’
3. Explain the meaning of o’ Dee, dank with foam, western tide, round and round the sand, the rolling mist.
4. Write out separately the simple sentences in the last two lines of the above passage and analyse them.
5. Write out what you consider to be the meaning of the above passage.

How about these ?

ARITHMETIC

1. Multiply 642035 by 24506.
2. Add together £132 4s. 1d., £243 7s. 2d., £303 16s 2d., and £1.030 5s. 3d.; and divide the sum by 17. (Two answers to be given.)
3. Write out Length Measure, and reduce 217204 inches to miles, &c.
4. Find the G.C.M. of 13621 and 159848.
5. Find, by Practice, the cost of 537 things at £5 3s. 71/2d. each.
6. Subtract 37/16 from 51/4; multiply 63/4 by 5/36; divide 43/8 by 11/6; and find the value of 21/4 of 12/3 of 13/5.
7. Five horses and 28 sheep cost £126 14s., and 16 sheep cost £22 8s.; find the total cost of 2 horses and 10 sheep.
8. Subtract 3.25741 from 3.3; multiply 28.436 by 8.245; and divide .86655 by 26.5.
9. Simplify 183/4 – 22/3 ÷ 11/5 – 31/2 x 4/7.
10. Find the square root of 5.185,440,100.
11. Find the cost of papering the walls of a room 16ft long, 13ft 6in. wide, and 9ft high, with paper 11/2ft wide at 2s. 3d. a piece of 12yds in length.
12. A and B rent a number of fields between them for a year, the rent and other expenses amounting to £108 17s. 6d. A puts in 2 horses, 5 oxen and 10 sheep; and B puts in 4 horses, 1 ox, and 27 sheep. If a horse eats as much as 3 sheep and an ox as much as 2 sheep, how much should A and B each pay?

James Fitzgerald, in the Irish Times, reports that players' personal sponsorship deals with business competitors of the main West Indies cricket sponsor Digicel, owned by Irish businessman Denis O'Brien, has led to the dropping of, arguably, the West Indies best players from their national team.

The leading players in West Indies cricket have been dropped from the national squad over a row involving the telecommunications company of Irish businessman Mr Denis O'Brien.

Last June, when the sponsorship deal was finalised, Mr O'Brien said that Digicel would "add new energy into West Indies cricket".

© The Irish Times

Perhaps the Guardian is still smarting from their own Clark County Fiasco, but a more thorough look at Rather's demise would surely have dwelt on the influence of the blogosphere a little longer.

With references such as "distinguished and often aloof", "grizzled, patrician and often patronising" The Guardian also seems prepared to overlook the accusation that the decision to carry the discredited report on Bush's Texas National Guard service was politically motivated, "Despite all his adventures, all his gravitas, all his pomp, conviction and humanity, the obituary writers gathered around Rather's career had one thing on their minds: George Bush and the Texas national guard." - it refers to the report itself as an "error", an understatement of the actual charged levelled against Rather.

As it is the article does make some good points on "the last hurrah of a television age that is fast disappearing, replaced by a world where viewers are as likely to get their news from the internet and 24-hour rolling cable news channels as they are from the trusted main networks." - Tom Brockaw of NBC news is also stepping down, leaving "66-year-old Peter Jennings [ABC] hanging on, suddenly the only remaining member of the journalistic triumvirate that has shaped America's view of the world and of itself for the past 50 years."

Viewing figures are tumbling for news on the major US networks and the report raises the question of whether the commitment still exists among executives to follow a loss-leading news model of previous decades.

Marty Kaplan of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication provides the quotes, "The best one can say for the evening news broadcast is that they still have the largest town square in the country. To the degree that there is a common culture left, they command it."

And the lines that will resonate with media watchers here - "Network news is now a subsidiary of entertainment. The people really in the driving seat about whether the evening news will survive are the advertisers. If they decide there are better places to advertise then my guess is that the affiliates will be thrilled to have an extra half hour."

Meanwhile, politicians this side of the Atlantic still rely on Old World methods to pressurise the media. Conserative Party leader, Michael Howard has made an official complaint against his old nemesis Jeremy Paxman - just doesn't seem to carry the same resonance when a politician complains does it?

Not that any of the political parties in our little land would attempt such tactics, would they?

Twenty-five years ago, Shane MacGowan was given six weeks to live. But he's still here, and so are the Pogues - back to their original lineup for a new lease of life. Dave Simpson joins them in Dublin to relive the bad old days

When Stormont was prorogued on 25 March, William Whitelaw, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, had little clear idea of what to do next. The loquacious conspiracy-fan, Cecil King, recorded a meeting with Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, three days later:

“I was treated with the greatest friendliness and confidence. The gist of what he had to say was that in the end there had to be a united Ireland. With this in mind one must not say too often that the border is in question … I understood Whitelaw to say that he saw Paisley as the future leader of Northern Ireland.” [The Cecil King Diary 1970 – 1974 (Jonathon Cape, 1975)]

Will that wily old bird be proved right in the next few months ?

Nell McCafferty is quoted -

'Unionists are boring, though I will say this about them - you can throw everything you have at them, and we did, and they're still f****** standing there. It's like that film Zulu. You have to respect them for that. Yep, I salute them, the b******s.'

* The others were reported as Sean Farren (SDLP), Sir Reg empey (UUP) and Sean Neeson (Alliance).

But the alarm bells will be ringing in government, and DUP, circles following the statement by Gerry Adams that, on decommissioning, "he was not in a position to go to the IRA because no final deal had been reached". That's a tacit, and public, claim that the IRA have made no firm commitment yet on decommissioning, which the DUP have placed as their first requirement for any deal.

The prospect of the DUP taking the first step, at least publicly, and making a decision at their meeting tomorrow, in those circumstances, is looking less likely.

"Political campaigning in the modern era requires relentless focus on objective, strategy and tactics, and an ability to know the difference. Objectives are easy. Once you have a clear strategy, tactics are easier than when operating in a strategic vacuum. It is strategy that is hardest of the three, and that is where I analyse Howard as being at his weakest".

Interestingly, (for a man often viewed as the 'evil one of spin') he believes the Tories focus too much on the media and not enough on the real world conditions of the electorate:

"Modern political coverage in the 24-hour media age exposes a disconnection between the day-to-day media swirl and the reality of most people's lives. Howard makes a mistake in focusing too much on the former, with the result that he is not breaking through on the latter. His interventions in the public arena tend to be set not by a strategy of his own, but by the passing controversy of that day’s media. That has to change".

Indeed it is easy to see what the key election winning strategy has been throughout Labour's second term in Britain:

"Ask them [voters] if the education system or the NHS as a whole is improving and they are less certain. We're back to the disconnection. Real world good. Media world bad. But when it comes to deciding how to vote to decide the next election, the real world is the one that matters."

And how did Blair do it:

"One of Blair's great strengths was to highlight problems in the country without giving the sense that he was running it down the whole time".

It's almost certain that individuals within all four of NI's big parties have been watching (and learning) from this modern democracy game 'across the water'. But it's equally as certain that not all their parties have been listening to them.

Thanks to David for the tip.

Not that Feeney mentions this in his Irish News article - blogged here - but then when Feeney asks in that column "What was it [the last 30 years] all for?" he, keeping an eye on his regular audience, isn't asking Gerry Adams.

The line from the Irish Echo report to keep in mind amidst all the spin and speculation is this -

"However, Sinn Fein will not want to lose the inevitable blame game if a deal cannot be struck."

It's also true for the DUP, but that may not be enough to make them both move sufficiently.

It's also interesting that Colgan wheels out Mitchel McLaughlin to deny that SF have agreed the block voting change for the Executive - some bloggers have looked at this issue before.

For those who watch events closely, this would seem as clear an indication as any that a deal of some description is on the cards.

The relatively upbeat assessment by the DUP of the British and Irish Governments' joint paper, the much-changed language of the DUP, the flexibility of Sinn Fein on Executive formation, the 'regret' over the Birmingham bombs (such statements having come before big moves in the past), the statement by Peter Robinson about how the DUP proposals were not outside the fundamental principles of the Agreement, the refusal by the DUP to rule out greater North South co-operation on matters of mutual benefit, the confidence SF have to allow Bairbre de Brun to resign her Assembly seat, the offer of clergymen viewing decommissioned weapons, the friendly DUP visit to Dublin, the common cause of the two parties on negotiating a peace dividend and opposing water charges - are all meaningless on their own. But added together, and with a few more signals besides, they seem to strongly indicate movement towards a deal that is about to be made.

Much baggage has had to be dropped on this journey.

Will we get the Big Deal though, or an interim measure towards full restoration of the institutions? My guess is that we are still talking March/April before a full Assembly will meet (after the next IMC report, but before the May election) and I still think there will be certain issues left unresolved...

Interestingly, Goretti Horgan sees the problems based in the trajectory of economic development policies:

"...the whole concept of a 'renewed Northern Ireland' is based on a low-pay economy. People further up the social ladder have done well out of the peace - the gap between rich and poor is higher than in the rest of Britain, and is widening. The reality is that ordinary people are working for wages much lower than the rest of the UK. Invest Northern Ireland - the body that promotes investment here - even boasts on its website about wages being 25% less than the rest of Europe."

Also worth browsing is the UK Chancellor's Child Poverty Review for this year. It sets out targets to halve relative child poverty by 2010, and eradicate it by 2020.

There's a fascinating graphic in the Annex, which demonstrates some startling facts. For instance, couples in work are less at risk of generating child poverty (13%) than their single parent equivalents (18%). But in workless households the figures reverse, so that single parents are only 48%, whilst couples are at a staggering 71% risk!

A MINUTE'S silence will be held outside the Dail today in memory of the 107 women murdered in Ireland over the last 108 months.

Women's Aid has organised the public expression of solidarity, against the backdrop of a giant 'In Memoriam' card' in order to mark International Day Against Violence Against Women. Each of the murdered women will be represented by a white lily. Women's Aid director Margaret Martin said: "There have been 107 women murdered in 108 months - more than 80pc of them by a man known to them and almost half of them by a current or former partner. The seriousness of the levels of violence against women in Ireland today and the failure of the system to keep women safe cannot be over-emphasised, and the tragic reality is that women are paying the ultimate price of their lives."

Ms Martin criticised the Government's handling of the issue of violence against women, saying funding was inadequate.

Women's Aid is a voluntary body which provides information, support and advocates on behalf of women experiencing violence in their homes. The organisation operates a 12-hour, seven-day national freephone helpline service.

Grainne Cunningham

© Irish Independent

Meanwhile, the media is speculating that the 'deadline' of the weekend is to be put back until Monday or Tuesday, with Bertie Ahern speculating that the governments will have to "make the call" shortly.

Over the years they began to gather enough material to excerpt the funny stuff to make a two man show. I heard them briefly on the Pat Kenny Show on Monday. They are currently have a three night run with their Tribunal Show at Liberty Hall from tomorrow night through to Saturday.

We hear there are still seats to be got. It sounds like a good night out!

By Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary)

Will anyone notice or care? Well, of course, that west Brit stooge in the so-called Irishman's Diary will probably refer to it, but that's all right, because no one pays any attention to him anyway. But what about the rest of the media? What about that curiously incurious cadaver, the body politic? Can they all be relied on - as usual - to ignore the latest grotesque breach of the Belfast Agreement? Unquestionably!

Over the years, barely a week has gone by without some fresh violation of the IRA ceasefire, in spirit or in deed, and all have been ignored. Most recently, we had the million euro theft from Dublin Docks, the multi-million-pound tobacco theft in Belfast, the huge diesel-laundering and white-spirits stills being operated by Sinn Féin-IRA. Nobody really minds.

Government in neither Dublin or London says that this is unacceptable,
criminal behaviour which disbars the Shinners from power.

But what Niall Binead was found guilty of last week was of a different order from all that has gone on before. He is a senior activist in the constituency organisation of the Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh. He was arrested after gardaí investigated a van in Bray. The van had been lent to Sinn Féin - for "election purposes". Inside the van, gardaí found four men as well as a sledgehammer, a black balaclava, a pickaxe handle, radios, and a fluorescent jacket with the word "Garda" on it.

Some election.

In a nearby Nissan Almera car with false numberplates they found a blue flashing beacon, a Long Kesh baseball cap, a stun gun, a canister of CS gas and a roll of masking tape. A subsequent raid on Binead's home revealed that he had intelligence details on the movement of TDs, and on no fewer than three ministers for justice. Other documents found in the Binead home were regarded as too sensitive for disclosure - which is just marvellous. The IRA can know these things, the Garda Special Branch can know them, as can the Special Criminal Court - but the plain people of Ireland, who underwrite all this, may not.

What was Aengus Ó Snodaigh's response to the shocking disclosures before the Special Criminal Court? Why, it was to call for the Court's closure, of course. "There is huge outrage and anger that once again we have seen people convicted of IRA membership, not on any evidence, but on the word of a Garda superintendent." And he's right to be angry. The poor dear's confused.

For the entire Sinn Féin-IRA tribe has been given every reason to believe, almost time without number, that they are immune to the law. There was the Castlereagh break-in by the IRA, in which the IRA made off with the master-disk of British intelligence in the North, but there was no political price to be paid.

This was followed by the Stormont spying scandal, and instead of Sinn Féin being suspended from the Executive, the entire process was put into suspension. The unionists were thus punished equally with the culprits. Who then paid the electoral price for this? Why, poor dead David Trimble did, that's who, while Shinners dipped their digestives into their tea at Downing Street and nodded sympathetically while Tony Blair lamented about Gordon Brown.

So of course the Shinners believed they had the right to break the law
whenever they wanted, and on either side of the Border. What a hideous shock it must have been for them to run into dedicated, professional police officers such as Garda Michael Masterson, Chief Superintendent Philip Kelly, and Sergeant Joe Devine. It was men such as these - outstanding and conscientious individuals - who protected this State from fascist subversion and naked terrorism through the years, and do so still.

On the other hand we have Aengus Ó Snodaigh, whose high regard for An Garda Síochána is such that he - with three other Shinner TDs - grinningly posed in Castlerea prison with the killers of Garda Jerry McCabe. Sinn Féin-IRA never felt the cold breath of exclusion for this grisly post-facto endorsement of a vile and wicked deed, so naturally they thought that - for them at least - the rule of law and order simply didn't apply. They could, under the Munich - sorry, Belfast - Agreement, do pretty much as they pleased.

Which is what they've recently been doing in south Dublin. The Garda
operation against the Bray IRA gang also netted intelligence documents
naming drugs gangsters. These were not targets for IRA punishment squads; no, they were targets for extortion - which merely puts the IRA at the top of the drugs food-chain in the capital's working-class ghettoes.

The Irish and British states have watched in supine abjection as Sinn
Féin-IRA operated according to its own à la carte version of the law. Now even the political establishment of the Republic is open to terrorist intrusion and blackmail.

Will there be uproar? Will there be a frank declaration that Sinn Féin-IRA has put itself beyond all reasonable political dealing? No, there won't. Just read the Letters page of this newspaper, full of fulminations against the unionists and the Democratic Unionists. And our readers are "moderates".

Nationalist Ireland is already pointing the finger of blame at David Trimble's bobbing corpse, even as IRA activities make any deal with the DUP simply impossible. Who then will we blame? Why, the Prods, as always, of course.

First published in the Irish Times Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Noel MacAdam's piece which quotes party leader David Ford suggesting that he might have been backed for a peerage, where his candidates to back down in favour of the UUP in several key constituencies.

MacAdam mentions East and South Antrim, and North Down - three crucial battleground constituencies in the next Westminster elections. Though it's not entirely clear that these are the particular places concerned.

One Alliance source told Slugger that there was no longer a case for treating the UUP as a party of the moderate middle ground, and that it was widely considered (within his own party) that it had moved directly out to the extremes, even as the DUP was moving closer to a role as the voice of the moderate mainstream.

He's been getting up at about six every morning, seven days a week to put together a resource that were it produced privately and distributed only amongst MPs, politicians, PRs, business men/women and journalists would almost certainly have netted him a decent income for each of the eight or so years he's been running it.

As it is, he has made his resource publicly available. He's kept publications like the Irish News, Irish Times, and the Sunday Tribune in front of a global audience, after they all but disappeared from view overnight. And it is completely free to the user.

Don't be fooled by the amount of advertising on the site. As I understand it from John, the income this brings in does little more than defray some of the site's running costs.

Asking for donations is somewhat alien to our European culture. It makes us feel awkward, embarassed even. But it is also one way that ordinary people can make things happen that have nothing to do with government directives or policy initiatives. It is also a way that professionals who benefit from the likes of Newshound (and yes, Slugger) can put something back for what is given freely.

If you haven't done so already, make a contribution to Newshound in terms of its value to you, and what you can afford. Otherwise, we may not be able to count on John's early morning offices for much longer. And if you've anything left over, stick in our own donation button and help keep the craic going here at Slugger too.

The DUP leader was due to meet the Taoiseach in London's Irish Embassy at 8.30 this morning, then going on to meet Tony Blair. According to Tommy Gorman on Morning Ireland.

This morning's meeting may kick off a 72 hour choreography that will end in Dr Paisley's recommendation for or against the still secret government proposals for a deal at a special party conference. In interview, even Brian Feeney betrayed a sanguine attitude towards the prospects of the DUP signing.

What seems important about Paisley's words is the sudden sense of urgency about them. It may indicate that his party feels it has gained enough of what they set out for them to run with into next year's Westminster election.

There has been a certainty amongst some very senior levels of the UUP that their rivals were 'culturally incapable of striking a compromise'. And it may be that the party has been counting on the DUP not doing a deal before next May.

But if this deal goes through this week, then it would seem that game is off and they could be facing rivals that would not only hold the largest swathe of seats in the Assembly, but will be entitled to four out of the ten executive seats and the office of First Minister.

Formidable.

On the other side of the house, Sinn Féin's mind is likely to be less on edging out their nationalist rivals the SDLP so much as beefing up their governmental credentials sufficiently in advance of the next Dáil elections to raise their game on the ground amongst the Republic's poorest and socially excluded groups to the more influential middle class votes.

Clear agreement on the legitimacy of the North South bodies is unlikely to buy that many supplementary votes north of the border, but it will give relevant Sinn Fein ministers and party representatives the opportunity to raise the party's governmental profile in the Republic, and more pro-actively assert it's all Ireland Republican credentials.

However it pans out, this week may in retrospect turn out to be the winning candidate (amongst many) for the ultimate accolade of 'historic'. Insofar as it only represents an agreement to certain actions so that our two-year long hiatus can be brought to a close, it will hardly be the cause of popular celebration.

Fionnuala O'Connor (Ulster's queen of the erudite aphorism) had it in one recently in her Irish Times column, when she described these final moments as 'not a bang so much as a harmonious whimper'.

We wait to see if this week's events live up to their billing.

By Alex Kane

The Ulster Unionist conference went much better than many people had predicted. Numbers were up on last year and there was a much more convivial atmosphere. David Burnside's lonely walkout had the impact of a snowflake landing on a roasting Aga. It's not so much a case of the party regarding him as a dissident, as that it's entirely indifferent to him. He has no power base and poses no threat.

The most interesting speech of the day was from Party Chairman, James Cooper. He acknowledged that the party had had "a difficult year," admitted that the media wing was undermanned and underfunded, accepted that election campaigns had been fought almost on the hoof, that election results had been poor and that the party had "punched below our weight."

I use the word interesting, for this is the first time that a senior member of the leadership team has, in public, (the press was present for his speech) owned up to the scale of the problems that the party has faced. This column has devoted many, many words, to these same problems over the past year, and been rebuked in Cunningham House for so doing. It is good to know, at long last, that the party is ready to drop the pretence and face reality.

I have never doubted either the willingness or the ability of the UUP to get back on its feet and continue fighting for its core beliefs. There is a huge, untapped pool of pro-Union support, which can be won over to the party if it is reached out to and presented with policies which have a direct impact on everyday life for everyday unionists.

The party has won the constitutional battle and secured the Union. It's legacy is firm. It made the right decisions and never lacked political courage. It must now stop worrying about the DUP and, instead, get on with the business of making itself a modern and fully effective political and election machine.

And, talking about the DUP, how will they handle their first deal-breaking test? Will they sign up to the British/Irish proposals within the next few days, or hang tough and see if they can squeeze a little more? I have always taken the view that the DUP would do a deal with Sinn Fein, and I also believe that they would rather do it this side of the local and general elections.

There is, of course, the limit-the-risks option, in which the DUP would continue to play hardball, hope to increase their lead at the next elections and then do a deal - knowing that there would then be at least two years before the next election. But there is a danger in that option. We know that the next elections (definitely for local government) will take place next May, eighteen months after an Assembly election in which the DUP had promised a "Fairer Deal." What, exactly, would the DUP say on the doorsteps? "Look, we haven't delivered the deal yet, but it's all Trimble's fault, so give us another few months of salaries for doing nothing."

No, I suspect that the DUP would love to enter an election, asking people to endorse the deal and increase their mandate. From what I have seen, and conversations I have had with both sides, I think we are now looking at a deal sooner rather than later.

If that is the case, then the UUP will have to prepare itself for an extraordinarily difficult election. But, as it proved in Wednesday’s by-election in Larne, if it picks the right candidate and campaigns hard, it can still beat a triumphalist DUP.

First published in the Newsletter on Saturday 20th November 2004

Elsewhere in the paper Joshua Rosenburg reports on the Inquiry's huge cost and an apparent lack of concrete conclusions.

It also seems reluctant to apply to Northern Ireland Consolidated Loan Fund, run by the NI Audit Office to help NI Departments to meet necessary expenditure. It begs the question of how confident the Council is that the project will do what it says on the tin. Back to the business plan?

By Sean Farren

Co-operation between Northern Ireland and the South is a positive political, economic and cultural fact of life in Northern Ireland. North/South bodies are making a positive difference and cross border co-operation is clearly delivering change for the better and mutual benefit.

Contrary to Lord Laird’s claims, the £67 million spent on North/South arrangements is well spent. His campaign distorts the reality of North/South co-operation, is ill-founded and damaging to Northern Ireland’s interests.

North/South co-operation is a key plank of the Good Friday Agreement and the arrangements agreed were essential to reaching that accord.

Where there is clear advantage from deepening co-operation – such as food safety, EU funding, management of our waterways and loughs, tourism marketing and trade - agreed North/South co-operation is managed by public servants. There is intensive co-operation in a number of other areas - such as health, environment, and education as well - and the management of this co-operation is achieved by existing Civil Service departments.

All bodies are fully accountable to Ministers North and South in the North/South Ministerial Council. Their activities and expenditure are also subject to scrutiny by the respective Comptrollers and Auditors General. North/South bodies are accountable not to one, but to two legislatures!

The £67 million which Lord Laird sees as “wasted money” represents start-up costs, together with salary and pension costs over a four year period for seven public bodies and over 700 public servants. It is an investment over four years in public organisations that are delivering real benefits for Northern Ireland.

Take the case of trade. The huge growth in the Southern economy over recent years is a golden opportunity for Northern companies. Thanks in great part to the work of InterTrade Ireland, cross-border trade and investment links are growing at a major rate. Its Equity Network programme,which promotes the better use of venture capital, has been very successful in terms of helping start-up companies in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland businesses exported over €1 billion worth of goods to the Republic last year. Since 1994, trade has grown by 35%. This volume of trade is sustaining jobs and creating new jobs.

Lord Laird asks: "What has Tourism Ireland done for Northern Ireland?" The answer John is a lot actually. A highly skilled and dedicated workforce of 150 people is working hard to market the island of Ireland, including Northern Ireland, as an overseas tourist destination. Their efforts support the excellent work of the Tourist boards North and South.

As a result Northern Ireland has been among the best performing tourist destinations in Europe in the last two years. Tourist figures are up, with an estimated 14% increase in overseas visitors in 2003.

John Laird also complains about an alleged lack of attention to the Ulster Scots market. Tourism Ireland has identified the potential to grow tourism from the Ulster Scots population in North/America – or Scots Irish as they are called there, and has also undertaken a number of initiatives in consultation with the Ulster Scots Agency.

The argument about unification and North/South co-operation is a red herring. The question of whether and how a united Ireland will come about, based on the doctrine of consent, is fully settled in the Good Friday Agreement. Yes, in the meantime, the new North/South institutions help to provide an institutional expression of the Irish identity of Northern Nationalists.

In his haste to condemn what he opposes for political reasons, John Laird misses a vital point. Experience in Europe and elsewhere around the world has shown that institutions are a key to successful co-operation between states. If there is any waste involved, I suggest that it is in the time and energy that John Laird is expending on railing against reality – the reality that North/South co-operation and its institutions are good for Northern Ireland, good for the people of Northern Ireland and here to stay.

First published in the Newsletter

Statistics prompt a rethink on religious aggravation.

DUNCAN HAMILTON
AFTER a week in which Rangers have knocked Celtic out of the CIS Cup and narrowed the gap at the top of the Premiership to just one point, I shouldn’t have been surprised that my wife was sore.

A Catholic from Cork who has grown accustomed to the dominance of a Martin O’Neill-inspired Celtic was never to going to allow me, a son of the Manse, to enjoy the moment. "Ah," she said on my return from the pub, "it’s the Happy Hun."

On reflection, I should have reported her to the police. After all, it appears the latest figures show Catholics twice as likely to suffer from sectarian abuse as Protestants in Scotland, although a week in the Hamilton household might alter those figures beyond recognition!

THE serious point is that these Crown Office statistics show that of the 450 people charged with the new offence of religious aggravation, 63 per cent have been Catholics, as opposed to 29 per cent being Protestant. Those figures have stimulated a fresh debate on what to do about combating sectarian behaviour.First into the field has been the Bishop of Motherwell who condemns the marching season of the Orange Order for much of the violence. In fact, the report relates only 15 per cent of offences to this source. That is bad enough, but it is quite disingenuous for the Catholic Church to attempt to hijack this complex issue and provide simplistic solutions.

With respect, there appears to be something contradictory at the heart of the Catholic position. On the one hand, the issue of Catholic schooling is simply not up for discussion - the right of the Catholic Church to provide faith-based schooling predicated on the morality and teaching of the Catholic Church is apparently absolute. I actually don’t have a problem with Catholic schools - in fact I wouldn’t be at all opposed to my own children attending such a school, if it was the best local option.

But it is hard to sustain that insistence on the preservation of the Catholic tradition on the one hand with a total insistence on the diminution of a Protestant tradition on the other. I share the majority view that the Orange Order and the marching season are odd, dysfunctional and profoundly unhelpful, but that doesn’t mean I would seek a ban or to restrict the rights of those who embrace that tradition.

The fact of the matter is that the Catholic Church cannot campaign so relentlessly for the continuation of separate, distinct Catholic schooling and then throw up its hands in horror when that insistence helps to foster an impression of a divided community. Many Catholic schools offer educational excellence, vocationally driven staff and the guarantee of an element of Christian morality which is hugely attractive to parents. But if the very reason why Catholic schools are attractive is because they are different, it simply is not possible to ignore that deliberate, institutionalised diversity when we come to consider the tribal sectarianism in the West of Scotland.

The Catholic Church is in danger of displaying a paranoia on this issue. A spokesman for the Church responded to this latest report by saying: "Sadly, a situation exists in Scotland where constant attacks on Catholic schools by otherwise respectable commentators are given widespread media attention, and this has created a climate in which others consider anti-catholicism acceptable."

I don’t attack Catholic schools and I despise and condemn anti-Catholicism. But I reserve the right to ask the Catholic Church to look afresh at the aggressive promotion of a Catholic agenda through schooling, and indeed many other aspects of public policy, and ask whether the pursuit of that particular dogmatic world view contributes to a more tolerant, more inclusive, more Christian world.

Though he's likely to face some resistence in getting the necessary changes, Kelly argues that the context for the discussion at the next GAA's Congress has iself changed:

"For a start we received a €40 million grant recently, so the argument that we shouldn't discuss opening Croke Park until the Government honoured a commitment entered into back in 2001 is no longer valid. Secondly, we have put in place a number of safeguards to ensure that if counties propose motions regarding Croke Park, they won't be ruled out of order on technicalities. Thirdly, Lansdowne Road will be closed for redevelopment, so the use of Croke Park has become a national issue."

However changing the rule will not be easy as it requires a two-thirds majority to authorise any amendments.

Thanks to Maca for the heads up!

Scriobhain Lá, "anuraidh ní raibh ach £800,000 sa chiste seo - do na trí bliana romhainn beidh iomlán de £9.8m. Is é tuiscint Lá gur as an rannóg seo atá an ciste teilifíse don Ghaeilge le teacht nuair a thosóidh sé ag dáileadh airgid san athbhliain agus go bhfuil airgead d’acadamh úr don Albanais Uladh le teacht ón fhoinse sin fosta".

Ag am ceanna, rachfaidh a busead do ealaíon £14.5 milliuin sa bhliain go £13 milliuin in 2008/9.

Without the necessary consideration of financial prudence (to borrow a phrase) an escalation of a spending 'war' as parties promote themselves as 'building a new future for the people' is inevitable.

Difficult decisions, such as the prioritising of budgets, would become secondary to the promotion of pet projects in the scramble for a slice of that cash (while it lasts) for the various ministries - making the role of Minister for Finance even more pivotal than before.

And crucial issues such as the vexed question of water charges (or rather the first step towards privatisation of the Water Service) will no longer seem quite so controversial - with no infrastructure investment to fund the increases won't need to be quite so severe.

It won't be a pretty sight though and with, as is likely, a DUP minister in the Finance chair the allegations of bias are likely to come thick and fast - unless the 'dividend' comes ready-divided for use, but then wouldn't that just be 'direct rule'?

Just one other point. Why the raising of this now? Are the parties really saying that this is a 'deal-breaker'? What would happen if Gordon Brown says, "On yer bike"?

From Mark Durkan:

"The SDLP hopes that over the next few days we will see progress. Nobody is more frustrated than us at the slow pace of movement to date. But we have to be honest. We are still concerned that the DUP are getting too much and giving too little.

"We made clear our concerns to the Taoiseach about the lack of progress on North/South and the lack of a timeframe for the devolution of justice.

"Above all, we expressed alarm at the proposal that the DUP would have a veto over the appointment of nationalist ministers. Peter Robinson has been telling people for a year that he has a way of stopping Gerry Kelly from being Justice Minister. This is his way.

"For the first time in our history, the Agreement gave nationalists the right to nominate their own ministers without any veto from unionism. That's equality. Now it is being diluted at the behest of the DUP.

"Sinn Fein appears not to have recognised this danger. They claim that it does not matter and that nationalists can veto DUP ministers in return. But if nationalists do that, we can be hit with suspension. That's why this new veto gives the DUP the advantage.

"The SDLP refused to sign up to such a veto when the Agreement was
negotiated in 1998. Indeed, had we agreed to it, there might never have been an Executive. Instead, there would have been endless rows over Martin McGuinness's appointment as Minister for Education.

"If these proposals would not have worked in 1998, I cannot see how they will work now. They are a recipe for inequality and instability."

"The DUP’s satisfaction may be short-lived - and very dependent on the negotiating skills of the Sinn Fein leadership," said Martina Purdy, the BBC's political correspondent last Friday. She was referring to the initial and seemingly favourable response of the DUP to the proposals put to them in a document by the British and Irish governments on how to break the political deadlock and re-establish the Executive and Assembly.

The News Letter's political correspondent also thought that the "British and Irish governments' peace paper … had the makings of a good deal for unionism." SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, was worried: "They [the DUP] say they want power sharing, but don't practice it in the local Councils. They say they want North South cooperation, but won't name any areas where it should happen… We are concerned that the DUP have got too much and given too little."

Under the Belfast Agreement the First and Deputy First Minister had to be elected by two majorities – from 'designated' unionist and nationalist Assembly members respectively. Then each party, according to its numbers, could nominate Ministers in turn, without reference to a cross-party vote.

In practice, that meant that unionists could not stop Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Brun being nominated to the posts of Education and Health and Social Services.

However, it has been suggested, from various sources, though mostly by Sinn Fein's opponents, that Sinn Fein has agreed to a new type of voting arrangement. The fact that Sinn Fein made no comment until Saturday only added to the tale.

This is what the sources were claiming. Firstly, that the First and Deputy First Ministers (DFM) might be decoupled and no longer elected jointly but singly, thus saving the DUP the 'embarrassment' at having to vote, for example, for Martin McGuinness as DFM. Secondly, that the parties would then nominate their people to the remaining Ministerial posts and either the entire slate or each individual Minister – it is not clear which is the actual case - would be voted on.

In practice, this would mean that the DUP, as the largest party and leading representative of the unionist community, could exercise a veto over Sinn Fein's choice of Ministers not of its liking: for example, Martin McGuinness as Minister for Anything or Minister for Justice or Policing (if Justice and Policing are later devolved as two new Ministries).

But the DUP could ambush and frustrate Sinn Fein's nominees under only one particular scenario. That would be if all of the DUP’s Ministerial nominees were voted on first, and in the interests of goodwill Sinn Fein either endorsed them or didn't object. Then when it came to the turn of Sinn Fein's Ministers to be elected the DUP objected to particular choices.

This scenario presupposes that the Sinn Fein leadership is as thick as a plank and wouldn't have attempted to ascertain in advance the DUP’s voting intentions. In another scenario, if Ministers were being elected in order of rank and the DUP pulled the same stunt Sinn Fein could then retaliate by blocking the next DUP nominee, or, it could simply bring the Executive down by walking out.

At the time of writing, I haven't seen the governments' paper and have no idea of the status of this DUP-influenced proposal in relation to the Assembly. Sinn Fein's initial reluctance to talk about the rumoured contents of the paper – whether because it wanted to brief its membership first or because of the confidentiality or delicacy of the negotiations – was a bit of a misjudgement.

It allowed the SDLP to claim that they were better negotiators than Sinn Fein and allowed them to appear as the guardian of nationalist gains under the Belfast Agreement. (Of course, this was rich coming from the party which prematurely jumped on board the PSNI bandwagon before the requisite changes have been fully implemented, thus making it even more difficult to get those changes.)

Sinn Fein's negotiating position is doubtlessly as strategic and considered as ever. Its objective, said Conor Murphy, is to ensure "the faithful implementation of the Good Friday Agreement." On Saturday Martin McGuinness told BBC's 'Inside Politics', "One thing you can be sure of is we are not going to change that rule," in reference to the method of the election of the Executive.

So that's that lie nailed.

Now the method of voting in a new Executive is just one of several areas of major disagreement. The others, in relation to the unfettered operation and expansion of the North-South bodies, the workings of the North-South ministerial council, and unionist demands for a visible dimension to IRA decommissioning, all remain difficult and contentious.

The demand that the IRA put all its weapons 'beyond reach' is as absurd as ever. Unionists don't trust the IRA but the act of decommissioning requires them to trust the IRA when it says it is doing it or is pictured doing it!

Total decommissioning remains unprovable and has more to do with the DUP getting one over the UUP. (The UUP’s mistake is that had it worked the Agreement, peace would have bedded down, and it would have been more legitimately able to make the claim that its strategy had achieved that aim – though it does remain unprovable!)

The two governments insist that Sinn Fein and the DUP give definitive answers to their proposals before November 25th or else negotiations will be postponed indefinitely.

I am still of the view that the DUP under Ian Paisley cannot do a deal with republicans and I will be amazed the day he becomes First Minister with a Sinn Fein/Martin McGuinness Deputy First Minister!

First published in the Andersonstown News.

In UCD last week, Michelle Gildernew stated that Sinn Fein "support the right of people who have fled persecution abroad to find sanctuary here".

I am sure this policy shift will come as great news to those the IRA has forcibly expelled from Ireland, particularly since Sinn Fein representatives have occasionally been the forebearers of the bad news to the threat recipient in the past.

Meanwhile, Mary Lou McDonald has called for "tighter laws concerning arms exports and a tax levy on the arms trade".

Stop laughing at the back. This is a serious issue. Just ask Andrew McCann.

The article sets the scene [you'll have to scroll past the Bristol entry to find it though] -

Belfast was a byword for sectarian and rain-streaked urban misery. While the rain remains, things are looking up in every other way for the next generation which is benefiting more than any from the ceasefire agreements of the late Nineties.

At the last census, Northern Ireland had the youngest population in the United Kingdom. Belfast has a population of 600,000, one in 12 of whom are students at Queens or Ulster Universities. There are cultural festivals throughout the year. Northern Irish pupils consistently achieve the best results at GCSE and A-Level, a highly educated and motivated population are taking control of their lives.

...Rents are low enough for young people to afford and vast amounts of EU and Westminster money have got the economy booming. New hotels and businesses are springing up. The £750m Laganside development on the banks of the River Lagan has brought thousands of jobs.

A recent Europe-wide survey found Belfast residents were more content with their lives than those of any other UK city.

Personal testimony in support of the motion is provided by a law student at Queens -

My generation is less interested in talking about the Troubles. Everyone's got friends from both sides of the sectarian divide, and we're completely tolerant of each other. Talking to people who've been away and come back they say it's got so much better in so many ways.

Belfast is a constantly changing city, but it's undoubtedly cool.

Maybe.. but the best place to be young? Really?

Just a stone's throw from here it has been possible to see a fine collection of photographs of many different parts of our world. The exhibition is of the photographic work of Yann Arthus Bertrand, and goes under the title of "Earth from the Air". When looking at this exhibition, one of the printed comments caught my attention. It read: "From a distance our world looks beautiful. It is only when you take a closer look that the detail can shock you."
These words reminded me of the chain of events that hit this city 30 years ago today, 21 November 1974. I was not here, but many people have told me of their memories of that moment: a simple evening out shattered by explosions and chaos; the terrible anxious waiting for the return of loved ones, once the news of the explosions had broken; the sense of shock and outrage that had to attach itself to somewhere, even irrationally and unfairly; the seeping numbness that comes when news of injury and death becomes personal; the years of heartache and anguish that follow. Twenty-one people died that night; 160 were seriously injured.
The community of this city was deeply affected; some would say divided. I stand here as a Catholic bishop. I have no real links with Ireland. But I am aware that fellow Catholics, and most Irish people, knew that in the days and months that followed those bombs they were viewed with suspicion, sometimes treated with disdain and, at times, even threatened.
Today, I know, that many members of the Islamic faith feel aggrieved whenever they hear, on radio, TV or in conversation, the casual phrase "Islamic terrorists". Terrorists, yes. But let us not repeat the mistakes of years ago and include all Muslims in a sweeping condemnation that lacks both accuracy and respect.

It certainly helps explain the exchange below as reported in the Sunday Independent.

It would also appear that by at least May of last year, the Minister for Justice was aware of Bennett's relationship with Aengus O Snodaigh.
During a Dail debate on policing in the North on May 15 last year, McDowell had a sharp exchange with O Snodaigh during which the Minister referred to "certain company" kept by the Sinn Fein deputy.
O Snodaigh called on the minister to "withdraw the aspersion".
To which Justice Minister Michael McDowell replied:
"I am talking about the people with whom the Deputy is closely associated and he knows very well that I am talking about them. He knows exactly what I mean. I say again, if everybody was choosy about the past associates of everybody that they did business with, very little business would be done. I am saying that the Deputy, personally, should bear this in mind."
O Snodaigh: "I ask the Minister to withdraw the aspersion against my character that I keep bad company. That is what he said. He stated that the company I keep is unsuitable. I ask him - if he has information about which I do not know - to explain who those people are so that I might not keep bad company."

Ulster asks for a ‘peace fund’

The DUP have asked for a One Billion Pound peace fund, which will be paid for through savings in security spending, and Sinn Féin are backing them. Will Gordon Brown play ball ?

Parties want €1.4bn for peace deal

The third deals with attitudes to Bloody Sunday/Saville and the Birmingham Pub bombings/Omagh.

Comment: Liam Clarke: IRA demands truth when all it offers are weasel words

Ryle Dwyer writes:

“The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields,” Patrick Pearse wrote in December 1915. “Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives gladly given for love of country.”

Now I won’t suggest that the man who wrote that blasphemous twaddle about the First World War was “a blithering idiot”, but James Connolly did. And I wouldn’t disagree.

and among disturbing revelations about various murders and massacres, including Higgins’ agony at the execution of a former comrade, who had been best man at his wedding only a year before being shot,

He was authorised by the Dáil to execute those captured in possession of illegal weapons. Otherwise, he warned, members of the Free State army would take it upon themselves “to execute people in an unauthorised way”.

Allister spoke on the devastation suffered by families whose kids become involved in paramilitaries, a big problem in many loyalist and, increasingly, in mixed community areas.

De Brun concentrated on the importance of increasing early learning provision in order to tackle the problem of educational disadvantage.

I notice that most people have chosen not to input details on their typekey homepages. That's a shame, because it could be a means of finding out a bit more about where other posters are 'coming from' - without necessarily giving away personal details.

On my own homepage for instance, I've chosen to make my email available publicly. You don't have to of course, but it does allow people to have private, off site conversations.

I have also included a list of sites I'm involved in (I wish they'd let you change the order, otherwise you need to input the least important first and most important last). And I've just filled in a couple of the favourite sites list (a mini blogroll if you like).

I'd go further. Whatever progress, such as it is, that we have got has only come about by the gradually increasing acceptance that the issues here are political and, as such, can only be resolved through political dialogue - however tardy some may still be in fully grasping that.

The 'witness' idea that is being promoted suggests that the two governments haven't fully understood that themselves.

What, given the conditions in which progress has been made, could be more patronising and regressive than the idea that one Catholic and one Protestant clergyman could act as official representatives of the entire community here?

"Mr Kerry did mobilise the base. But it was not enough. The Democrats need to break out of their geographical bases in the old Union states of the north east and the west coast and appeal to a culturally conservative, churchgoing hinterland. A dwindling number of individual Democrats still do. But the party does not. Nor can the Democrats assume that demographics will come to their rescue. The shift in population towards the sunny south helps Republicans, while Republicans can contend for the growing Hispanic vote".

The days of lent votes are long over...

There are problems with petitions. For instance, Forest Gump turned up on a petition in support of the Arklow sewage treatment plant recently in the Republic. To be most effective any petition should follow Number 10's guidelines:

* A clear, brief statement of what people are indicating their
agreement to by signing;

* The full name and full postal addresses of each person who
signs, e-mail addresses would also be helpful;

* The petition should have a closing date and all signatures
should be submitted all in one go after that date; and

* The data should have been collected electronically.

Having said all that, if you are passionately opposed to the introduction of ID Cards, you'll need to sign this soon, as the deadline is today.

Thanks to Keiran for the heads up!

John Waters predicts a new dispensation that will see expectations increasingly failing to meet reality and, in the process, makes some good points on what he argues is "the last survey to include evidence of both old and new in a single graph. For now we move into a different grade, to be judged among our peers and by their standards.."

"Apparently, the Economist found that Ireland, unlike other wealthy countries, has retained strong "traditional values" rooted in family, and that, while Ireland is not immune to western lifestyle problems such as family breakdown and addiction, it is less affected than other societies. We rank less well, apparently, in areas such as gender equality, health and climate, but not even the Irish weather was enough to significantly retard our lead.

Strangely enough, the Irish national conversation had just begun to come around to an entirely different opinion, and signs that the Irish people are succumbing to debt, drunkenness and despair have returned to fashion those of us who make our livings from foretelling of doom."

Joseph O'Connor, on the other hand, reflects on the differences between the Ireland he grew up in and what he sees now - "The country has changed beyond recognition. Yet there is a certain streak of gloom among some of the Dublin commentariat, who refuse to accept that things are better now than they were in the Ireland of Frank McCourt" - "We're ungrateful auld sods. Little luxuries like artificial hips, that's what we want."

"That said, it is important that the grating note of self-congratulation that sometimes sounds through contemporary Irish life be questioned often. Irish lives have improved, for most of us anyway; but there is more to quality of life than smugness and caffe latte."

Additionally, he does point out, "We also have the Corrs - but nothing's perfect".

"The really good news — for Boris, a free press and, above all, for The Spectator — is that Michael Howard has sacked him. This is by far and away the best thing he has done since becoming Tory leader. Of course, I understand that Boris was about to give up being shadow minister of the arts in any case. He had seen the incompatibility of these particular two jobs. But Mr Howard has hastened the process, and now Boris is able to publish what he wants about the Tory front bench, and not be sent on ridiculous pilgrimages to Liverpool. He has been freed from his chains, and we will not forget Mr Neil’s assurance that he will remain free".

It's not quite that simple in Belfast, it would seem.

BTW, Peter Oborne's worth a read, on the strange optimism of the Tories, despite some evidence to the contrary.

It's a relatively small story (the seat is in a UUP heartland), but it comes at a good time for Trimble's party. Roy Beggs, the sitting MP, is expected to face a critical fight to defend his Westminster seat next year against one the DUP's strongest challengers, Sammy Wilson.

This result will not unduly worry Wilson's campaigners, but the UUP will take some heart that they've been able to 'stop the rot' in their own core vote in Larne and they may have some local momentum to build upon.

The Guardian review begins - "Who could resist a handbook about potential pets that has a little symbol for 'likes children' and a separate one for 'likes children to eat'. Who could not warm to warnings that private owners of Deinonychus and Velociraptor are legally required to trim their pets' disembowelling claws?"

One dinosaur's description reads as "agile, bipedal and good at making toast ('give it a hug and let it sit with you at the table')", while "Tyrannosaurus is 'the ultimate animal for a zoo with dwindling attendances'. But accidents will happen and 'unfortunately mean fairly large scale death and destruction'."

The Amazon synopsis, helpfully, describes the book "as essential to every dinosaur keeper as a stout shovel and a tranquilizer rifle."

Gimmee! Unless someone has a better suggestion?

In between times, and completely unrelated to the shift in emphasis by SF, of course, the SDLP's Mark Durkan made a speech at University College Dublin in which he claimed that the changes to the voting mechanism for the Executive gives a political veto on that Executive to the DUP - "[it]means that the DUP have a veto over any nationalist minister appointed to the executive. When the SDLP negotiated the Agreement, we ensured that no party could veto any other party’s ministerial appointments. Now the DUP can politically vet the lot. Nationalists won’t have the last say on who they appoint as ministers. The DUP will."

The Alliance party's David Ford may have hinted at similar thoughts when he said "that any new beginning for the Assembly will be on a very fragile basis".

The reality is that such a veto on the make up of an Executive is a recipe for further political stalemate, even if the Assembly is resurrected.

And let's not even start on how 'humiliating' it would be for the IRA if the public were to see photographs of decommissioning. Except to say that, if Mitchel's line is correct, some people seem prepared to accept anything to avoid that particular 'humiliation'.

For those not registered,

URBAN sprawl has devastated Ireland's former rural landscape, according to the first aerial survey of Europe's changing landscape.
The sprawl - consisting of blocks of houses usually seen in housing estates - has spread to most of the country's small rural villages and towns over a 10-year period.
The housing estates, which are often driven by generous tax breaks for investors, have shot up beside tiny villages to accommodate long-distance commuters working in towns. The Celtic Tiger has also contributed to the boom in second 'holiday' homes.
The extent of the urban sprawl has "surprised" the top scientists at the European Environment Agency (EEA).
The EEA used satellite photographs, which were published yesterday, over the past four years to examine Ireland's landscape and compare it with the picture in 1990.
Ronan Uhel, EEA head of spatial planning, told the Irish Independent yesterday that they were very surprised at what they found when they analysed "before and after" Ireland.
They expected to find urban sprawl around cities, such as Dublin and Cork, and key coastal spots.
Instead the digital aerial map showed how urban sprawl had also extended to most parts of the country, including many hundreds of tiny villages and former rural areas.
The EEA warned the urban sprawl in rural areas will pose major future problems in the provision of roads and infrastructure, such as water and waste facilities.
The digital map allows planners and policy makers to see where fragmentation of the landscape due to road building and infrastructure is getting worse. The fragmentation of land increases the risk of sensitive ecosystems and habitats no longer connecting with each other. The map also shows where major changes are taking place in the field of agriculture.
Mr Uhel said the agency had believed urban sprawl was largely confined to urban areas with big populations and their hinterlands as well as coastal areas. "To our surprise we found it had taken place all over Ireland in the 10-year period," he said.
Mr Uhel said the digital map was designed to allow policy-makers learn from how their decisions in areas such as agriculture and transport are impacting on the land resources and the wider environment.
Meanwhile, the EEA has expressed concern at the number of peat bogs in the west of Ireland now covered by forests.
The digital map shows how extensive areas in the West are now covered in forestry - with much of it planted in the wrong places.
Farmers originally received grants to plant forests on marginal farmland. Instead they planted on bogs.
The agency disclosed there has been widespread plantation of forestry on bogs over a 10-year period from 1990 to the year 2000.
The bogs act as natural filters for groundwater and the forests will severely change the composition of soil, the agency warned yesterday.
The EEA presented the results to officials in Brussels yesterday.

Treacy Hogan
Environment Correspondent
© Irish Independent

Stephen Pollard began by saying "I couldn't care less about blogs. I just get on and do it!" He argued that if UK blogs have not yet exercised the kind of influence, that their counterparts in the US have routinely had. "Given that most journalists are fundamentally lazy, we may see blogs have a fact checking function in the next general election." Stephen also had a bit of a ruck with one member of the audience which continued later on his blog!

Sandy Starr from Spiked saw a widespread desire on the part of the media to see some generic significance in blogs per se, "why can't we just wait for blogs to establish their own significance as websites?" He cautioned against the flash mob mentality. He argued that the use of new media techniques had led to a vacuity and lack of content in some apparently successful pressure groups; in particular the anti globalisation movement.

He also suggested that sharing thoughts in public, meant a loss of private time in which to think through problems, and come up with genuine solutions to problems. "Sometimes it's better not to answer the mobile, and to sit down and read yesterday's news rather than the latest news from five minutes ago."

Perry de Havilland from Samizdata, sees the easy route to publication that blogging enables ordinary people to give voice to their views, quoting along the way Henry Mencken’s pithy observation that, "freedom of the press is limited to those who own one". However he argued that political bloggers are not in competition with journalists. Although the ability to disaggregate news outputs and reconnect them with other contextual material may in some case constitute a challenge to editors.

Above all, Perry argued, blogging is conversation. What arises from it is a mix of affinities and disaffinities, a network of discussants who don’t necessarily share the same world view. Something that Long Peace co-author David Steven supported when he pointed out that the distinguishing feature of following the US election for outsiders this year (as opposed to four years previously) was the multiplicity of views and sources within the blogging community.

Brian Micklethwaite noted the "possibility of making politics much more global, as people discover they have more in common with someone in a faraway country than someone just living down the road". Other bloggers I met there included Times journalist Clive Davis, Peter Nolan, Abiola Lapite, the dissident Frogman, Mr Freemarket and Philip Chaston. Sadly I just missed Norman Geras and Andrew Dodge.

Good accounts from Jackie Clive and Brian.

Radio 4's Westminster Hour was there to cover proceedings, present and is due to be broadcast on Sunday evening at 10.45pm.

The Electoral Commission said: This was the first election to the Northern Ireland Assembly at which parties were subject to a new set of controls on campaign spending. As part of our role to promote transparency, expenditure returns submitted by parties and candidates have been analysed both to reveal trends and to examine how parties coped with the new controls.

East Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell said: "If churchmen were present it would represent some progress towards what we wanted to see."

But he insisted: "We need to have credible and viable decommissioning and there needs to be a visual aspect to it."

Barry McCaffrey quotes Mr Paisley: “It would have to be done in such a way that it be made visible to everyone. How will they know that they are going to do it? Independent observers could really only speak for themselves.”

It seems the DUP is holding out for a Kodak moment, so these statements are not necessarily contradictory.

Both parties blame each other and SF’s Gerry Adams has already launched his party’s campaign for an unconstitutional joint-authority to be imposed when, not if, no agreement is forthcoming. So forget about the BBC’s over-hyped ‘solution’ from yesterday – it won’t fly.

Just as the same exclusive SF-UUP dialogue last September, which was face-to-face, collapsed in the teeth of electoral considerations by those two parties, so will this.

And as we trudge towards more elections next year expect more of the same hype, demands, refusals and blame - déja vu all over again.

You know, there is more than one common link throughout this – see if you can spot them.

This seems to be what Alex Attwood was referring to yesterday.

Bob, later Sir Robert, Cooper was born in Co Donegal and was the first Joint Political Chairman of the Alliance Party with Sir Oliver Napier.

He was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 as a member for West Belfast. Afterwards, he was elected as Alliance’s Deputy Leader, a position he held until 1976.

He was appointed Chairman of the Fair Employment Agency in 1976, and also chaired its successor, the Fair Employment Commission, from 1990-99.

In other Alliance news, the party has announced it will run David Alderdice, brother of former leader Lord Alderdice, in the Westminster election in North Down. This could have consequences for the incumbent MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon.

By Tom Kelly

Last week I was in New York for the US-Ireland Council for Industry and Commerce dinner, when the guest speaker was Mary Harney. Speaking without a note she gave an engaging and entertaining speech. The evening was held in the prestigious Metropolitan Club of New York.

Given most of the audience were Irish American of either Irish or of Scots-Irish descent, the nearest most of their forefathers (or mothers) would have got to the place was as serving staff, porters and cleaners. But last Thursday without any sense of irony, the Paddies were wined, dined and served by a new wave of mi-grant workers from Eastern Europe.

As Mary Harney pointed out, Ireland, like the audience present, had been transformed. No longer at the back of the bus in economic terms, Ireland was now one of the richest economies in the developed world and is the EU success template for regeneration.

Of course, the tanaiste, like all good politicians, claimed the success was in part due to the involvement of the Progressive Democrats in government. Given the relative stability of the government given to Ireland through the Fianna Fail/PD alliance there is some truth to her claim. The seeds of economic success were most definitely sown by the transformation within Fianna Fail which started with Sean Lemass in the 1960s and carried through various administrations.

A quick glance through the magazine Irish America and it is not hard to see a direct correlation between the rise of the Irish in corporate America and the incredibly high levels of US overseas investment in Ireland. Irish America is not as politically inclined towards the north as one might imagine. Many of the great and the good of corporate Irish America are Republicans. To watch many leading members of Sinn Fein swanking it up and sipping Bollinger with some of the Irish corporate elite in members clubs is quite remarkable. It is very unlikely if Sinn Fein talks up their taxation policies, lest they cause their hosts indigestion post the lobster luncheon.

If the talks in the north bear fruit, it would be interesting to see a Sinn Fein economy minister. While interesting as an experiment, it may not be successful or sensible.

However in fairness, Pat Doherty as chairman of the economic committee proved a good tag team member with Sir Reg Empey when on overseas visits or if hosting inward investment prospects. If and when a local administration gets up and running, hopefully parties will find themselves questioned more on the conflicts between their manifestoes and their actions as ministers.

It is quite trying to be clubbed to death by constitutional politics while our economy stagnates and we are strangled by our over dependence on a massive public sector we cannot afford to keep.

But have our politicians the will to break that dependence? Or will they bottle it in favour of the status quo? As we go forward with or without local politicians driving the economy, what issues are likely to side track us? Well it is likely there will be less talk about job creation and more about the Creation as we are not immune from issues emerging in the Western world.

In the US we saw that 'moral values' was the defining issue in the election, more than the moral issues such as the justification of going to war or the immorality of President Bush having presided over more job losses than president Hoover during the Depression. As we go forward one hopes we can avoid the divisiveness of such issues taking centre stage. Somehow I doubt it. The uneasy coalition between fundamental Protestantism and reactionary Catholi-cism could make the entire north a Bible belt which would make one time segrationalist Mississippi seem tolerant.

The with or without God bit in the EU constitution will also prove divisive as referenda take place in Britain and Ireland.

Hopefully those who aspire to hold office in any administration in the north will fire their mettle in defending the human rights of believer and non believer alike. If the recent public response to attacks on migrant workers in our Health Service is anything to go by, I would not hold my breath.

The north cannot continue as an economic backwater. For nearly 60 years successive British governments were happy with the ‘seen not heard’ existence of the Northern Ireland statelet.

The blatant discriminatory tactic of unionists followed by the murderous activities of paramilitaries of every hue meant that existence could not continue. Now British administrations can hear us but wish they did not have too.

Selling the north is not easy and those tasked with the job deserve to get credit. Their efforts are undermined more by inertia than intransigence. How much more difficult would Northern Ireland be to market if migrant workers continue to be attacked? How much harder would it be to sell the north as an inward investment location if we regressed into a theocratic state?

After 30 years of violence, 60 years of discrimination and hundreds of years of hatred, can’t we take a leaf from our American cousins in economic terms and learn to move on?

As Albert Reynolds once asked: "Who is afraid of peace?"

From the early omens many are afraid of peace, but they seem equally afraid of success. It would be a pity to make the opportunity offered by peace no better than the oppression offered by partisan politics.

First published in the Irish News.

”Sean O'Casey's life was extraordinary and his creative achievements are immense. Christopher Murray's approach is chronological rather than analytical and though this has its merits, it makes for a less than exciting read. Nevertheless, he has assembled a very comprehensive biography which paints an affectionate portrait of a truly great and heroic figure in world theatre.”
The article makes one interesting point:
” “And there was always the struggle for money. It is ironic that what O'Casey was satirising in some of his later plays, the dancing colleens at the crossroads blessed by big bellied bishops, is what, in effect, is celebrated in that father of all cash cows Riverdance.”

After visiting the site of the bomb, he went to see the now demolished house of the bomber (a routine to discourage others), and then to Arafat's compound:

"For a final verdict on the motives of Amar al-Far, the teenage suicide from Nablus, I went to Arafat’s compound in Nablus. ‘I think he must do that,’ said a guard who showed me round. ‘They killed his father, they destroy his home. What else can he do? The Israelis destroy everything. They kill old men, women, children. What can we do? We can only stay and wait. Look at this,’ he kept saying, pointing to a kind of sculpture park of vehicles, flattened by Israeli tanks in 2002, ‘look at this. What would you do? What can a man do?’ he said, smacking his brow with his palm; and after a while I’m afraid I grew impatient, and wanted to suggest to him that since the damage had been done more than two years ago, it was time to clear it up".

"But that would be to miss the essence of Arafat’s approach, which is always to be a martyr. It is meant to be a sad but necessary fact of life that terrorists graduate to the role of statesman: Kenyatta, Begin, McGuinness, and so on — all have made the transition. The most glaring and pathetic global exception has been Yasser Arafat".

An echo perhaps of Harris' thesis of good and bad authority?

He finishes:

"It was his tragedy that — as he revealed in 2000 — he had no ambition to make that transition from terrorist martyr to grown-up politician. It was the Palestinians’ tragedy that he represented their aspirations for so long. His death comes too late for thousands who have died in the intifada, most of them Palestinians. But his imminent departure brings hope: that Israel will be demographically obliged to renew the Barak offer, and that the Palestinians will find a statesman with the wisdom and authority to accept it".

Phil Evans, principal policy adviser for Which?, said: "Bank customers in Northern Ireland are being ripped off.

"The big four in Northern Ireland are all offering similarly inferior products, leaving their customers with little choice, indeed a choice between who will rip them off the least."

The mother of an SDLP councillor in Larne has blamed the UDA - who have a track record in attacking her family - for intimidating her and her son last night. So, just to be clear, 45 minutes after the UDA was officially despecified, it was allegedly intimidating nationalists in Larne. Officialy, that is a ceasefire breach, and in breach of Paragraph 13 of the Joint Declaration. It won't be treated as such, because it would make the Government look stupid for trusting the UDA. I wonder if the Secretary of State referred to this in his speech to the Commons today?

Along the way he makes the case for the need for peaceful dissidence in any free society. Not least by his quotation of Kapuscinski:

"Today one hears about noise pollution, but silence pollution is worse. Noise pollution affects the nerves; silence pollution is a matter of human lives. No one defends the maker of a loud noise, whereas those who establish silence in their own states are protected by an apparatus of repression. That is why the battle against silence is so difficult".

He goes to make some sharp criticisms of his former colleagues, but he comes as near as he has done since leaving the 'Republican Movement', to acknowledging the positive change that Adams' and shi colleagues have wrought:

"Adams is not to be criticised for bringing to a conclusion the futile campaign of the IRA. In some respects it can be said that he faced up to the reality that the Provisional movement had articulated impossibilist and totalising demands onto a struggle that was much more limited in terms of what was needed to bring it to a conclusion".

Originally produced as a lecture, be warned it runs to 18 pages when printed.

He refers to the Taoiseach recent comments on the likelihood of the parties agreeing a way forward in the North by themselves -

He said the de Chastelain commission should be left to get on with its job but recognised - on account of the deficits of mistrust from the past - that additional elements of transparency were required.

According to the Taoiseach, for a number of reasons that were not spelled out, the window of opportunity for agreement is very narrow. He said the DUP has "an unprecedented opportunity to consolidate peace . . . If this opportunity is squandered, it will have consequences, both in terms of the time that elapses before we can again seek to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland and as regards the form and content of the political process during the interim period."

But he is critical of the enthusiasm with which any action on decommissioning by the IRA is being portrayed -

I believe everyone should welcome credible and definitive action on decommissioning. However I do not believe we need to hail such actions as concessions by the IRA but rather as the democratic duty it owes to the people of this island, a duty that should long since have been discharged.

What is missing, he argues, is an acknowledgement of

the history of delay, prevarication, demands for clarification, gnomic utterances, false trails, garden paths and double-speak by the republican leadership.

And in Gerry Adams' speech in NY he sees a party that is trying to skip beyond the collapse of the present talks

He [Adams] said that in such an event, direct rule would not be sustainable in the long term, and suggested "the two governments look to formal institutionalised power-sharing at government level".

As Rabbitte argues, this proposal undermines the Agreement's model of devolved government and calls into question SF's commitment to that devolved governemnt -

This proposed solution - a stronger role for Dublin in Northern affairs, badgering the British to go over unionist heads, joint authority as a substitute for devolved government - provides further evidence that Sinn Féin was never that pushed about devolved government in the North in the first place.

If devolved government was a high priority, would they not have given more consideration to recent proposals from the SDLP that advocate the recalling of the Assembly and the appointment of civic administrators to do the jobs of ministers until the parties can agree on the formation of the Executive?

He also sets out the argument that SF's proposed model of joint-authority would be unconstitutional

Joint authority is a non-runner because it would be unconstitutional. The present Article 3 repeats one aspect of the article it replaced in the referendum on the Belfast Agreement. Pending national unification, laws enacted by the Oireachtas apply only within the jurisdiction of this 26-county State.

The Supreme Court confirmed in 1975 that the Oireachtas is not free to legislate for Northern Ireland as though it were part of this State. The amended Articles 2 and 3 have abandoned the "territorial claim" and place that incapacity beyond doubt.

The only bodies that are exceptions to this contitutional position are the all-Ireland implementation bodies created through the Agreement, which operate under the aegis of the North/South Ministerial Council.

But there is no Assembly, no Executive and no North/South council at present. There is no umbrella under which all-island implementation bodies could operate.

With nothing yet in the public domain, he is pessimistic about the prospects of a workable Plan B being produced this close to the Governments' self-imposed deadline -

The two governments have often mentioned the need to move to a Plan B, yet they have never articulated what Plan B actually is.

In other words, the failure to reach agreement by November 26th will result in limited east-west arrangements, even less North-South, and nothing internal at all. Some Plan B!

And he is, rightly, critical of the very nature of the ongoing discussions -

important legal and constitutional questions are at the heart of talks concerning an agreement which belongs to all us all. Yet the debate is conducted on a secretive, bilateral, basis with only certain, "problem" parties.

The secrecy surrounding discussions has been an ongoing problem and it remains, with the tacit approval of an unquestioning media, primarily about controlling what we the public are allowed to know.

This would seem to be borne out by the reversal in fortunes of two of the two major stakeholders at the onset of our own peace process, the SDLP and the UUP. It is a moot point as to whether they inevitably suffered from the continuing existence of paramilitaries during supposedly peaceful periods, or an inability to establish and maintain a grass roots organisation whilst their opponents moderated their own previously extreme political positions.

"Representing your people, right or wrong, is simply bad authority. Bad authority is calling your neighbour's children to order. Good authority is calling your own children to order. Bad authority blocks the solution to any political problem. That is why RTE damages the NI peace process by being nasty to Prods and nice to Provos. That is why America damages the Palestine peace process by favouring Israelis over Palestinians".

The joint proposals are expected to include: IRA decommissioning by Christmas (though given the amount of broken deadlines in the most recent phase of the peace process, this would seem the least reliable element), the scrapping of elections for First and Deputy First Minister, and a review of North South arrangements.

It may also include minor adjustments in the accountability of Ministers to the Assembly. However, judging by the relaxed mood of Peter Robinson in his interview with Tommy Gorman on RTE Radio' Sunday lunchtime programme, it doesn't appear that the DUP is under any serious pressure to agree an early deal.

Though, famously, a week is a long time in politics.

It falls on the first day of Shawwal, the tenth month of the Muslim year, following the month of Ramadan, which is the month of fasting in which the Holy Qur’an was revealed.
The second is called `Eid Al-Adha (the Festival of Sacrifice). It falls on the tenth day of Dhul-Hijjah, the final month of the Muslim year. The Islamic `Eids are unique in every way. To them there can be nothing similar in any other religion or any other sociopolitical system. Besides their highly spiritual and moral characteristics, they have matchless qualities.
Each `Eid is a wholesome celebration of a remarkable achievement of the individual Muslim in the service of Allah. The first `Eid comes after an entire month of fasting during the days of the month. The second `Eid marks the completion of Hajj to Makkah, a course in which the Muslim handsomely demonstrates his renouncement of the mundane concerns and hearkens only to the eternal voice of Allah.
Each `Eid is a thanksgiving day on which Muslims assemble in a brotherly and joyful atmosphere to offer their gratitude to Allah for helping them to fulfill their spiritual obligations prior to the `Eid. This form of thanksgiving is not confined to spiritual devotion and verbal expressions. It goes far beyond that to manifest itself in a handsome shape of social and humanitarian spirit. The Muslims who have completed the fasting of Ramadan express their thanks to Allah by means of distributing alms among the poor and needy on the first `Eid before the Prayer.
`Eid also is a day of remembrance. Even in their most joyful times, the Muslims make a fresh start of the day by a congregational Prayer to Allah. They pray to Him and glorify His name to demonstrate their remembrance of His favors. Along with that course, they remember the deceased by praying for their souls, the needy by extending a hand of help, the grieved by showing them sympathy and consolation, the sick by cheerful visits and utterances of good wishes, the absentees by cordial greetings and sincere considerateness. Thus, the meaning of remembrance on the day transcends all limits and expands over far-reaching dimensions of human life.
Most of the imams when delivering the `Eid khutbah (sermon) will mention that `Eid is a day of victory. The individual who succeeds in securing his spiritual rights and growth receives the `Eid with a victorious spirit. The individual who faithfully observes the duties that are associated with the `Eid is a triumphant one. He proves that he holds a strong command over his desires, exercises sound self-control, and enjoys the taste of disciplinary life.
Once a person acquires these qualities, he has achieved his greatest victory because the person who knows how to control himself and discipline his desires is free from sin and wrong, from fear and cowardice, from vice and indecency, from jealousy and greed, from humiliation and all other causes of enslavement. Therefore, when he receives the `Eid, which marks the achievement of this freedom, he is in fact celebrating his victory, and the `Eid thus becomes a day of victory.
This is the proper meaning of an Islamic `Eid. It is a day of thanksgiving, a day of festive remembrance, and a day of moral victory. An Islamic `Eid is all this and is much more because it is a day of Islam, a day of Allah. Let’s celebrate this `Eid with the true iman (faith) and taqwa (piety). In sha’Allah, besides having enjoyment, we will be blessed by Allah.
Excerpted with slight modifications from www.islaam.org.

Quote

The IRA will be allowed to keep 15 per cent of its weapons for "self-defence" under secret plans to tempt republicans back into a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, Unionists said yesterday.
The deal was revealed to them by British officials during a private briefing at Stormont last month, they claimed.
Under the terms, the IRA would be allowed to keep handguns and small submachine guns suitable for close combat and deterring assasinations - despite the Government's Ulster peace plan which stipulates that paramilitaries must decommission all weapons.

Needless to say this has caused some upset.

Quote:

Michael McGimpsey, the senior Ulster Unionist Party negotiator and the assembly member for south Belfast, said that the retention of even a small number of guns was "disgraceful".
"It turns law and order and moral imperatives totally on its head," he said. "Nobody believes for a second that if they were allowed to keep weapons for self-defence they would be there for anything other than to threaten their own community and to ensure discipline in their organisation.
"If they need protection, they are going to have to be protected in the same way as the rest of us - by the police. There is no place for any illegal weapons. It would be an absolute disgrace and something that will be completely and utterly rejected by anyone with any sense at all."

"CONFIDENTIAL logbooks from an executive jet used by American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that routinely use torture reveal Shannon airport as one of the plane’s most regular stopping points.
The Gulfstream 5 jet, which is leased by Defence Department and CIA agents, has stopped in Shannon 14 times since January 2002, according to logs obtained by The Sunday Times and which cover more than 300 flights.
The jet, registration number N379P, can carry 14 passengers at a time. Movements detailed in the logs can be matched with several sightings of the Gulfstream at airports when terrorist suspects have been bundled away by US agents.
Analysis of the plane’s flight plans shows that it always departs from Washington DC and often stops at Shannon en route to other destinations.
Martin Cullen, the transport minister, said in the Dail recently that American authorities have told the Department of Foreign Affairs that Irish airports have not been used for the transit of prisoners to or from the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or elsewhere.
But peace activists have claimed that Ireland, as a signatory to the UN convention against torture, has an obligation to prevent human rights abuses and should arrest anyone on Irish soil who is suspected of facilitating torture, regardless of where it occurred.
The plane has flown to 49 destinations outside America, including Guantanamo Bay and other American military bases, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.
Witnesses have claimed that the suspects are frequently bound, gagged and sedated before being put on board the planes, which do not have special facilities for prisoners but are kitted out with tables for meetings and screens for presentations and in-flight films.
Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out “torture by proxy” — a charge denied by the American government.
Some of the information from the suspects is said to have been used by MI5 and MI6, the British intelligence services. The admissibility in court of evidence gained under torture is being considered in the House of Lords in an appeal by foreign-born prisoners at Belmarsh jail, south London, against their detention without trial on suspicion of terrorism.
The Gulfstream and a similarly anonymous-looking Boeing 737 are hired by American agents from Premier Executive Transport Services, a private company in Massachusetts. The white 737 has 32 seats. It is a frequent visitor to US military bases, although its exact role has not been revealed.
The Gulfstream jet is not used just for carrying prisoners but also appears to be at the disposal of defence and intelligence officials on assignments from Washington.
Its prisoner transfer missions were first reported in May by the Swedish television programme Cold Facts. It described how American agents had arrived in Stockholm in the Gulfstream in December 2001 to take two suspected terrorists from Sweden to Egypt.
At the time of what was presented as an “extradition” to Egypt, Swedish ministers made no public mention of American involvement in the detention of Ahmed Agiza, 42, and Muhammed Zery, 35, who was later cleared.
Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being forcibly given sedatives by suppository.
The Gulfstream flew them to Egypt, where both prisoners claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. Despite liberal Swedish laws on freedom of information, diplomatic telegrams on the case released to the media were edited to conceal the complaints of torture.
Hamida Shalaby, Agiza’s mother, said: “The mattress had electricity . . . When they connected to the electricity, his body would rise up and then fall down and this up and down would go on until they unplugged electricity.”
A month before the Swedish extradition, the same Gulfstream was identified by Masood Anwar, a Pakistani newspaper reporter in Karachi. Airport staff told Anwar they had seen Jamil Gasim, a Yemeni student who was suspected of links to Al-Qaeda, being bundled aboard the jet by a group of white men wearing masks. The jet took Gasim to Jordan, since when he has disappeared.
On another mission, in January 2002, a Gulfstream was seen at Jakarta airport to deport Muhammad Saad Iqbal, 24, an Al-Qaeda suspect who was said by US officials to be an acquaintance of Richard Reid, the British “shoe-bomber” jailed in America for trying to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami.
An Indonesian official told an American newspaper that Iqbal was “hustled aboard an unmarked, US-registered Gulfstream . . . and flown to Egypt”, where almost nothing has been heard of him since.
The CIA Gulfstream’s flight logs show it flew from Washington to Cairo, where it picked up Egyptian security agents, before apparently going on to Jakarta to take Iqbal to Egypt.
Another transfer involved a British citizen. On November 8, 2002, the Gulfstream took off for Banjul in Gambia. On the same day Wahab Al-Rawi, a 38-year-old Briton, was among four people arrested at the airport by local secret police and handed over to interrogators who said they were “from the US embassy”.
Wahab said he had previously been questioned by MI5 because his brother Basher, an Iraqi national, was an acquaintance of Abu Qatada, the radical London-based cleric.
When Wahab asked the CIA agents for access to the British consul, as required under the Vienna convention signed by America, the agents are said to have laughed. “Why do you think you’re here?” one agent said to Wahab. “It’s your government that tipped us off in the first place.” Wahab was later released but Basher was sent to Guantanamo and remains there. He has yet to be accused of any specific crime.
Some former CIA operatives and human rights campaigners claim the agency and the Pentagon use a process called “rendition” to send suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan. They are then tortured largely to gain information for the Americans who, it is alleged, encourage these countries to use aggressive interrogation methods banned under US law.
Bob Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, said: “If you want a serious interrogation you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear . . . you send them to Egypt.”
Among the countries where prisoners have been sent by America is Uzbekistan, a close ally and a dictatorship whose secret police are notorious for their interrogation methods, including the alleged boiling of prisoners. The Gulfstream made at least seven trips to the Uzbek capital.
The details bolster claims by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, that America has sent terrorist suspects from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan to be interrogated by torture.
The CIA and Premier declined to discuss the allegations over the planes. The American government, however, denies it is in any way complicit in torture and says it is actively working to stamp out the practice."

Now fresh evidence has emerged over how the IRA mole in the Garda was an open secret among police officers well before the Breen and Buchanan murders. One of their colleagues has come forward to reveal that RUC and Garda officers were well aware of an IRA agent operating inside the latter police force in North Louth for several years.

His comments on the changes being sought by the DUP are sure to cause a reaction.

"What is the gain if the DUP is not required to vote for a Sinn Fein DFM [Deputy First Minister] but it is prepared to accept a Sinn Fein DFM voted in by other means?"

"This is merely stripping out one of the few cross-community provisions of the Agreement to spare the blushes of a sectarian party."

He is also critical of the political cover being granted to Sinn Fein by the British and Irish Governments -

"Like other parties, we do not know what republicans supposedly offered to Blair. I suspect the offer was more a bluff than anything else

But that should not obscure the fact that the main responsibility lies with the government and republicans."[my emphasis]

But, just as the DUP and SF are dallying while assessing the electoral impact of any moves now, Trimble also has an eye on next year's elections -

Mr Trimble said that, with the General Election and local government elections approaching, unionism could not afford to have five years of the DUP.

Five years of their sourness will do unaccountable damage to the Union."

As well as commending Ferriter for his analysis of the enormous changes, both social and economic, Foster, in particular, points to Ferriter's "judicious and empathetic" approach in dealing with the experience of Northern Ireland as part of the larger Irish story

He is writing at a time when it is possible to isolate moments when attitudes began to change - as when a Dublin civil servant in November 1968 attached a note to a file on north-south policy for the taoiseach: "It is much too naive to believe that Britain simply omposed partition on Ireland" Ferriter also tells us that records released last year show Jack Lynch telling a British ambassador in 1972 that voters in the south "could not care less" about reunification. It was true but it had not been possible for a Fianna Fáil taoiseach to admit it.

The depth of the research and sources is noted throughout the review and Foster highlights the seemingly contradictary elements that the book examines

Many of the elements of Irish life may seem baroquely conservative; but these co-exist with a propensity to radicalism which receives its full due in this survey and should not be forgotten.

Although Foster does have a slight grumble at the "curiously late" analysis of Ireland's entry into the EU, he welcomes the provocativeness of Ferriter's analysis of the transformation throughout the century in question

Much discussion of the Irish question under the union during the 19th century revolved around the question of Irish poverty: prosperity and change, it was argued by nationalists, could only come with independence. Ferriter's rich and provocative study shows that this was far from the case: when these desiderata did arrive, it was only after Ireland once again joined a larger and more powerful union. And many of the failures of independence, as Ferriter argues in his characteristically well-judged conclusion, were inseparable from much that made up Ireland's fiercely held, and in many ways admirable, distinctiveness.

GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCES DESPECIFICATION OF UDA/UFF

Following a review of paramilitary ceasefires the Government has determined to despecify the UDA/UFF. There is no change to the status of other specified organisations.

Announcing this decision, Secretary of State Paul Murphy said: “I have reviewed the status of all specified and other paramilitary organisations, as I am obliged to do under legislation, and concluded there are sufficient grounds to despecify the UDA/UFF. Despecification will take effect from midnight on Sunday. I intend to lay an order to that effect before Parliament on Monday, and I will also be making a statement to the House.

“My decision, reached only after the most careful consideration, is based on a number of factors, in line with the legislation. They include the UDA’s reaffirmation in February this year of its Gregg Initiative, when it re-stated its commitment to its ceasefire; the organisation’s generally constructive approach during this year’s marching season; and some diminution in paramilitary activity by its members over the past six months, as reflected in the IMC’s recent report. But as that report also makes clear, the UDA continues to be involved in a range of unacceptable activities which must be brought to an end.

“In reaching my judgment therefore, another factor to which I have had regard is the positive political engagement by the UPRG, on the UDA’s behalf, in recent months. Based on my meeting with them and on the assurances I have received, I am persuaded that the UDA is now prepared to go down a different road, moving away from its paramilitary past. I will have more to say on this in my Parliamentary statement on Monday.

“It is important at a time like this to acknowledge the feelings of victims. While I hope this move will help in the process of building a future where violence is put firmly in our past, I want to reassure victims that we have not forgotten their suffering, or their needs.

“This is a positive step forward for those involved in this initiative and the communities concerned. I must make clear, however, that all paramilitary groups, whether specified or not, remain illegal organisations and any criminal activity will be pursued relentlessly by the police. I will continue to judge them not just by their words but by their deeds. The onus is now on the UDA/UFF to continue to show its good faith.”

The Secretary of State re-iterated that, for a peaceful and prosperous Northern Ireland, we need to see an end to all paramilitary activity, regardless of its source.

Not, you'll note, that there actually is a ceasefire in operation, Murphy points to "some reduction in paramilitary activity by its members over the past six months" and his belief that "[he is] persuaded that UDA is now prepared to go down a different road, moving away from its paramilitary past." - not has moved, but may move.

As the BBC report puts it - "The government has officially recognised the Ulster Defence Association's ceasefire in a bid to move the peace process forward."

So there you have it, a tacit public admission from the Government that such recognitions of 'ceasefires' are completely meaningless - they are simply political chicanery.

It is a fictitious statment by Paul Murphy and it further debases, if that is possible, the entire political process here.

How long now, I wonder, before we hear the excuse of "internal house-keeping"... again.

Equally, the DUP would be mad to unite with the UUP at a time when they are ripe for self-destruction. Even Burnside's article is a clear attempt to undermine his own leadership again.

The question is - would Mr Burnside, an experienced master of the policy shift, be so pleased with his 'new' idea if any voluntary coalition did not include his own party? I doubt it. His entire article seems to have one aim - to exclude Sinn Fein from office.

Anyway, the Review of the Agreement moved on from this ballpark months ago, although the idea of a voluntary coalition is unlikely to die completely.

Barry McCaffrey writes: [A] letter written by Orange Order Grand Master Robert Saulters contradicts the order’s denial that it is linked to the ULPC.

In the letter dated February 4 2002, Mr Saulters wrote to Orangemen, urging financial support for the company.

The letter, written on Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland headed paper and marked ‘confidential’, states: “You will recall that last year we had to postpone a major conference on the expansion of the ULPC.

“You will also recall at that time I referred to your invitation to attend as one of the most important letters I have written as Grand Master.”

In the letter Mr Saulters confirms that the ULPC had bought property worth more that £1m since its formation, claiming the purchases had “helped to build confidence in Protestant communities”.

He wrote that the order hoped to have an additional five per cent of its members subscribe to the ULPC by July 12 2002, adding: “The strategic importance of achieving this goal cannot be over emphasised.”

While Mr Saulters was unavailable for comment yesterday, an order spokesman defended the links to the ULPC.

“The letter was simply the Grand Master trying to recruit more subscribers for ULPC because he thinks it is something Orangemen might be interested in. The more subscribers there are, the more viable it is,” he said.

The spokesman denied that ULPC had been set up to stop nationalists acquiring land and added: “It is clearly there to promote Protestant culture and community but I can’t imagine it would base its loans criteria on preventing nationalists from buying land.”

The TypeKey commenting system is gradually running in, and we're beginning to see the return to the kind of vigourous debate (over 1000 comments per week) we saw before June, when we were completely overrun by spam.

We now have another upgrade to install to make this system even easier to use. If you'd like to donate a small amount to help cover this, and the ongoing server costs, then just hit the Donate button on the left hand side and send us what you can.

Particularly interesting is the policy preference differences between Catholics and Protestants, which may have some resonances at home:

"The Protestant traditionalists favour less government spending. But all the Catholics—traditionalist, mainline and modernist alike—favour more. Traditionalist evangelicals are usually the odd men out. Fully 81% of them say that religion is important to their political thinking—far more than any other group. They are the only ones to rate cultural issues as more important than economic or foreign-policy ones".

"Peace in Northern Ireland has helped to boost the economy of the whole island. A visitor to Dublin, so lively and cosmopolitan today, would find it hard to believe that only a few decades ago it was gloomy and depressed. In the 1960s Ireland's heavily agricultural economy, almost wholly dependent on exports to Britain, was only just emerging from the misguided protectionism that since the 1930s had been the main plank of Eamon De Valera's ill-advised economic policy. Ireland had missed out almost entirely on Europe's post-war boom; living standards were stagnating and emigration was in full flow. In 1960 the republic's population was down to around 2.8m, the lowest in two centuries and a pale shadow of the 8m (for the whole island) in 1840, when this was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. Many wondered if Ireland had a future".

The November 4 Independent Monitoring Commission report stated the following:

3.14 We said in our previous report that despite the so-called “cessation of military activity” the UDA had not decommissioned any weapons and remained involved in violence; it was responsible for half of the paramilitary murders committed between January 2003 and February 2004 and continued to be responsible for shootings, assaults and exiling. It was also heavily engaged in crime, including drugs and its feuds associated with criminal activity had contributed considerably to violence in Northern Ireland. We believed that these activities were known to the members of the UDA Inner Council.

3.15 Over the six months covered by this report the UDA has remained active. Though it has not been responsible for any murders it did undertake shootings and assaults. In August members of the UDA are believed to have undertaken a vicious sectarian attack against 3 Catholic men. Senior UDA members restated their intentions of holding to the terms of the 1994 loyalist ceasefire, and there is no evidence to suggest the organisation currently wants to engage in feuding with other loyalist groups. We believe the organisation planned to avoid disorder over the marching season. It nevertheless took preparatory steps, both to defend areas over that time and to identify rival loyalists should there be a feud in the future. We also believe that the UDA has not so far agreed to the free return to Northern Ireland of any of those it has exiled. The UDA remains heavily involved in many kinds of organised crime, and remains an active organisation capable of more widespread violence, with the will to commit it if judged appropriate.

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And if the UDA really does get £3 million to set up a 'security company', Securicor should definitely be worried - not from the competition, but money invested in weapons should make it easier for the UDA to rob more Securicor vans.

Speculation in the past that Blair's premiership difficulties over the war in Iraq, might quicken his appetite for an early deal seems to have been over stated. An early deal is certainly do-able particularly if Doctor Paisley sanctions it. But no one seriously doubts the patience of the folk at Dundela Avenue matches those in Sevastopol Street. It could be 2006 before the deal is finally done!

Interestingly he took the opportunity to round on Loyalist paramilitaries:

"Let me make it clear that what we demand of republicans, we also demand of loyalist paramilitaries. There cannot be one rule for one and one for another. The Independent Monitoring Commission's report last week made it clear that paramilitary activity was continuing by all the major paramilitary groups. This is totally unacceptable in a democratic society and is a vindication of the stance that we have taken."

“IT’S remarkable that when there’s a threat that the State might have to spend money on something other than a minister’s extravagance - like somebody’s rights - there are colossal implications for the exchequer.”

Of course these colossal 'implications' (estimate circa € 2 Billion ) are taken far more seriously than the far larger 'implications' of the tax breaks ( €8 Billion plus ) discussed for those who don’t actually need to count their pennies , and Mr Brosnan highlights the Justice Minister’s laboured scare tactics aimed at Married couples presently enjoying a “ very, very generous tax regime” that would have to be reduced if and when ….

He writes of Ms Zappone and Ms Gilligan :

“Well, I wish them the best in their endeavours to get equality on tax, but they will need a lot of love to sustain the challenge. Their case is not just about the fairness or otherwise of the tax regime here, but also questions the traditional notion of marriage in the country.

Already, there are rosary beads rattling all over Ireland as heaven is assailed to save this institution, and the Knights of St Columbanus and Opus Dei are assembling for battle.”

The cost to tax-payers of almost £10million is broken down as £3.3million in the cost of devloping the new system and £6.1million of savings that were supposed to be made, but never were.

Particular failings are pointed out in the Audit Office press release

Although economic appraisals were carried out by the Project Manager in 1995, 1997 and 1999, the Audit Office considers that an independent appraisal would have provided an opportunity for a fundamental examination of the objectives of the project and might have helped to ensure that better decisions were made as to the way forward.

and

The interdepartmental committee of senior civil servants responsible for overseeing the project was too far removed to operate effectively as a Steering Group and, as a result, it failed to provide effective strategic management of the payroll project

But perhaps the most damning example of incompetent bureaucracy at the heart of the civil service is contained in this line of the report -

"During the 13 years of the project, nine different individuals held the chairmanship of the main decision-making and monitoring body."

And, after all the time and money spent on developing this new payroll system, they're still using a computerised system introduced in 1986 - that should have been "scrapped 10 years ago."

Now I would have thought that at least one resignation was in order. But given the number of individuals who were placed in the chairmanship of the monitoring body throughout that time I think it's unlikely that any one of them will be singled out - how convenient.

The full Audit Office report is available online here

Debate his role in the Middle East all you want - whether he was an obstacle to resolution, or a figurehead that unified increasingly fractious elements in Palestine, or a major instigator of the continuing problems - but while various individuals here have taken to promoting their own view of that ongoing conflict, and their own favoured side, I'd be fascinated to hear what criteria Bertie used to arrive at that particular definition of a 'friend to Ireland'.

Meanwhile the BBC has a report on the missing millions in funds that have been poured into the Palestinnian Authority, or rather siphoned into bank accounts in Arafats name. The report points out that "aid to the Palestinian Authority has been running at more than $1bn a year since 2000" and "In 2003, Forbes magazine estimated Mr Arafat was worth $300m".

The report quotes Dr Gershon Baskin, director of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, "Very few people have the actual facts" but suggests that "the delegation of senior Palestinian ministers that went to Paris will have made it their business to find out more." and that "There has been speculation that the rift between Mrs Arafat and her husband's colleagues may be partly to do with control of the accounts."

According to an audit by a Palestinian Finance Minister, following pressure from the IMF and the EU, $900million of the aid they supplied, without taking into account other sources, is still missing.

By Rebecca Black

The annual Northern Ireland debate in TCD saw the Right Honourable Paul Murphy MP, Mark Durkan, leader of the SDLP, the Rev. Mervyn Gibson of the Orange Order and Daithí Doolan from Sinn Féin present opposing viewpoints in front of an audience of largely apathetic and largely northern Trinity students.

The motion for debate was "This house believes Politics has brought nothing but trouble to Northern Ireland". Predictably the speakers to cause the biggest stir were Mervyn Gibson and Daithí Doolan. Councillor Doolan took the opportunity to fiercely attack the Secretary of State for the bugging of the Sinn Fein offices in Belfast.

Mark Durkan of the SDLP brought a laugh round the room at the start of the debate when he defined politics as "poly" meaning many and "tics" blood sucking creatures!

The Rev. Mervyn Gibson spoke outlining his position as an anti agreement unionist, as is usual with unionist speakers in Dublin his comments sank without trace, like lead balloons. The Trinity News reported a second year student commenting, "I was raging, ready to sign up for the Shinners right there". Most of his comments brought gasps from the floor, gasps that seemed by the end increasingly stage-managed.

The Rev. Gibson suffered from the usual antipathy and misunderstanding that most unionist speakers face when speaking in the Irish Republic. When introduced as speaking on behalf of the Orange Order, most of the audience seemed to make up their minds about him and refused to listen to his arguments, which for the most part were well reasoned and perfectly understandable.

As a unionist living in Dublin I find this culture of pre-conceived ideas about individual unionists and unionism particularly challenging and sometimes infuriating. Looking around the room when the Rev Gibson was speaking, the faces looked bored and eyes were wandering around the room.

The Rev Gibson spoke about the Good Friday Agreement and the unionist perception of it, he spoke about how no real effort was made to convince the unionist people to support the agreement, he blamed this on the British Government and also on the Ulster Unionist Party.

It's an interesting question to ponder: why are unionists so frequently not taken seriously in the republic of Ireland?

That this is even the case in the former bastion of unionism, Trinity College, is perhaps the more alarming. Hard line unionists are laughed at and the moderates are simply not taken seriously.

The reaction to Councillor Doolan of Sinn Fein was more light hearted - he drew sniggers from the audience. He spoke vehemently about 800 years of British oppression. And, despite the fact he is from Dublin and had only joined Sinn Fein in 1994, he spoke passionately about life in Belfast in the 1970s and defended the Republican's right to defend themselves.

Where Councillor Doolan really came into his own was when he brought up the topic of the alleged bugging incident in Connolly House. He talked about how this had seriously damaged the trust between both sides in Northern Ireland. In the light of the findings of IMC report it seems that even if the British Government were bugging rooms in Connolly House they were perfectly justified.

The Secretary of State Paul Murphy talked about the reception of the people from his local constituency in Wales to his job in Northern Ireland. He made it clear that the people of Wales were very supportive of his role in Northern Ireland and frequently made a point of wishing him luck when he spoke to the people of his constituency.

After the debate it was clear that by a large majority the audience agreed politics has brought nothing but trouble to Northern Ireland. However it was equally clear that the topic of Northern Ireland in Dublin is an effective conversation killer.

Despite the fact that Trinity’s Historical Society organisea a Northern Ireland debate every October and have hosted high profile politicians like Martin McGuiness, Mo Mowlam, Jeffrey Donaldson, David Burnside and General John De Chastelin, it simply isn’t a topic that people take seriously. People just don’t engage with the problem here.

Rather like the attitude towards Sinn Fein in the Republic, people on the whole don’t take them seriously; especially problematic when it includes the majority party Fianna Fail. Will it only be when Sinn Fein becomes as big in the Republic as they have in Northern Ireland that people will start to recognise them as the serious political threat that they are?

When I heard the tragic news of John Peel’s death at 65 whilst on a working holiday with his wife Sheila in Cuzco in Peru I was also on a working holiday; a universe away from home on the beautiful and isolated west coast of Denmark. My wife and I communicated our shock by text.

I couldn't follow the Danish news reports. On the radio, his name is repeated over and over, cut with the names of bands he either inspired or gave a break to whilst the music industry was bent in other directions waiting, hoping or praying for the 'next big thing'.

He was a Radio 1 original, who remarkably held on to his late night slot long after his big name contemporaries had all been pensioned off to pastures less green. He was an icon to many of my Belfast school friends in the late seventies who were starting their own bands.

He kept his job (and more importantly his audiences) by doing what the sixties were supposed to be about and so often weren't – doing his own thing. And as conformity has increasingly taken the place of rebellion amongst the youth, he continued to exert an encouraging influence over his ever-young audience.

I remember a conversation I had with my young and almost entirely irreligious son when I was driving him into school a few years back. He'd contrived a fascinating analogy between the rank order of Radio 1 DJs and the hierarchy implicit within the Catholic Church – from sinners through believers, priests, bishops, archbishops, and the Pope.

Sarah Cox, who was hosting the breakfast show at the time, he had close to the bottom of the pile, since he believed that she was largely compelled to stick 'religiously' to the station's play list. As the day schedule progressed the DJs concerned would gradually climb in status as they appeared ot have greater conscious choice over what music they actually played on their show.

By early evening Steve Le Mac took the penultimate slot and was duly declared Pope. The only one perceived to be truly exercising free will by my 13 year old was John Peel, aka God.

It wasn't simply his originality, but his ability to encourage the exceptional from ordinary people that kept his audiences coming back for more.

More recently he began to speak to people his own age through his Home Truths programme. His shambling rough delivery belied a sharp intelligent eye for a good story and a keen interest in the real lives of those he interviewed – a journalistic value noted by its general absence elsewhere on radio or television.

He drew his interviewees out with a fluent combination of humour and empathy. One memorable instance was Scotsman Kenny Ritchie an inmate on death row in the US since his conviction in 1981 for murder, and his wife Karen, who shared the short time they were allowed by the state penitentiary to speak by phone with Peel.

Every so often Ritchie was cut out of the conversation by the automated reminder that they were talking to a prisoner held within a correctional facility in Ohio. It was simple, but compelling radio.

And then he was gone. To quote that eloquent master of parody, Flann O'Brien, "I do not think we shall ever hear from his like again."

I headed off that weekend to crack open an early Danish Christmas beer and remember one of the few genuine and enduring characters who found his feet and his voice that much hyped and much loathed decades - the sixties.

That's Mr Terry Moseley, chairman of the Royal Irish Academy's Astronomy committee and press officer of the Irish Astronomical Association.

"There is no guarantee, but there is a good chance and the best you will have for the next few years," he said of the opportunity to see the lights, known as the Aurora Borealis. "Make the best use of this chance."

Although we're past the peak of the 11-year cycle of solar activity, current observations indicate that conditions are favourable for a display visible from Ireland throughout this week.

According to Mr David Moore, editor of Astronomy Ireland magazine.

"We have been told things will remain so for most of the week. Get out tonight from dusk 'til dawn, because there is a very good chance there will be an aurora".

The Astronomy Ireland website has further details - and an email alert facility for those who wish to sign up. There's also the Space Weather website to monitor further developments - the red area of the Auroral Map indicates the strength of the aurora (Ireland is close to the 3 o'clock position).

If nothing else it could take our minds off more earthly concerns for a few days.

By Danny Morrison

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a President who was voted into office by inbred, hillbilly, Bible-thumping, ignoramous hicks. We just happen to live in a country with 58 million of them. That’s why the rest of the world is so confused by us…"

So wrote a despairing North American on a bulletin board during the week. But, amid the depression, the dark, the gloom, the probability of 'Four More Wars' resulting from the victory of George Bush, there was some measure of relief in the election of another politician, Barack Obama.

Forty-three-year-old Obama made history as only the third African-American to be elected to the US Senate in the past 125 years. He will be the only African-American in the 100-member Senate and although the Republican majority there and in the House of Representatives will be able to effectively block progressive legislation they won’t be able to silence Obama's remarkable oratory. He is a mesmerising speaker, confident, radical (relative to US politics, of course) and as a potential Presidential candidate many years from now he is streets ahead of Hilary Clinton.

Obama’s father, who herded goats, came from Nyangoma-Kogelo, a Kenyan village of several hundred. Obama’s grandfather was a cook, a domestic servant to the British, whose own father had become a Muslim convert. Barack Obama himself is a Christian. In the 1950s Obama’s father won a scholarship to a US university, left Kenya, qualified as an economist and married a woman from Kansas. They gave their son an African name, Barack, which means ‘blessed’.

After young Barack graduated (around the time we here in Ireland were going through the period of the hunger strikes) he worked as a community organiser in the toughest and most deprived parts of Chicago. He returned to university to study law and afterwards worked as a civil rights lawyer fighting employment discrimination cases in federal and state courts. He then successfully stood for the Illinois Senate and shone as a defender of the poor on issues such as education, day-care facilities, health coverage (including increased funding for AIDS prevention), investment in depressed areas and reform of the death penalty system.

It was his powerful address to the Democratic National Convention in July that brought him national and international attention as he wooed the audience with the story of his own life and his belief in equality and civil liberty.

"If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

"It is that fundamental belief – I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper – that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family."

He attacked the divisive use of faith "as a wedge to divide us”. He said that “in a dangerous world, war must be an option sometimes, but should never be the first option."

Last week, when news of his election to the Senate reached the village of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Obama’s 82-year-old grandmother, a devout Muslim, declared, "Praise be to Allah!" President Kibaki of Kenya sent him a message of congratulation which said, "You have proved to be a role model not only for the American youth, but the many young people in Kenya and indeed in Africa."

In Illinois 70% of whites and more than 90% of African-Americans voted for him. In his victory speech he reminded supporters of what the sceptics had said, that "there was no possibility that someone who looked like me could ever aspire to the United States Senate… someone named Barack Obama could never hope to win an election – and yet here we stand!"

Obama has that common touch that many politicians lack. But his real gift is to explain an idea or a passion or a conviction not through ideology or theory but by making it flesh and blood. He has an ability to tell interesting stories such as the one about the woman he met while canvassing who promised him her vote.

Her name is Margaret Lewis and she will be 105 next week. He said that for days afterwards he couldn’t get this African American woman out of his mind, "born in 1899, born in the shadow of slavery. Born in the midst of Jim Crow. Born before there were automobiles… [or] airplanes in the sky… before televisions and cameras… cell phones and the Internet. Imagining her life spanning three centuries, she lived to see World War I; she lived to see the Great Depression; she lived to see World War II; and she lived to see her brothers and uncles and nephews and cousins coming home and still sitting in the back of a bus…

"Finally, she saw hope breaking through the horizon and the Civil Rights Movement. And women who were willing to walk instead of riding the bus after a long day’s work doing somebody else’s laundry and looking after somebody else’s children. And she saw young people of every race and every creed take a bus down to Mississippi and Alabama to register voters and some of them never coming back. And she saw four little girls die in a Sunday school and catalyze a nation…

"She saw people lining up to vote for the first time and she was among those voters and she never forgot it. And she kept on voting each and every election… thinking that there was a better future ahead despite her trials, despite her tribulations, continually believing in this nation and its possibilities. Margaret Lewis believed. And she still believes at the age of 104 that her voice matters, that her life counts, that her story is sacred…"

Yes, Barak Obama, a name, a politician, to watch.

"In the ultimate equation we will not be measured by the margin of our victory, but we will be measured by whether we are able to deliver concrete improvements to the lives of so many people… We are going to be measured by the degree to which we can craft a foreign policy in which we are not simply feared in the world but we are also respected…

"We don’t just inherit the world from our parents, but we also borrow it from our children."

All of Danny's articles can be accessed at dannymorrison.com.

By Alex Kane

The happiest person on Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon was Hillary Rodham Clinton. Oh yes, she had waded through an ocean of crocodile tears to "share her profound sorrow" with John Kerry, but it was clear that her mind was fixed on February 2008, when the Democratic Party would begin the formal process of selecting its candidate for the next Presidential election.

I was glad that George Bush won, and won convincingly. Kerry had never struck me as Presidential material and I sensed that he was more concerned with the transitory demands of focus groups than with core, deeply held, fundamental values. In other words, he and his advisers didn’t really care where their votes came from, as long as they came. The price America would have had to pay for President Kerry would have been enormous.

But it cannot be denied that Bush’s victory was at the expense of unity. The United States is a divided nation. Divided by Iraq. Divided by moral perspectives on issues like Gay Marriage and stem cell research. Divided by the vision that each side has for the future.

A divided America is not good news for the rest of us. History indicates that the most powerful nation on earth works best when it works with a common vision and front. Or, as Ronald Reagan put it: "History is a ribbon, always unfurling; history is a journey. And as we continue our journey, we think of those who travelled before us…A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, fair. That’s our heritage, that’s our song. We sing it still."

America works best when the President understands that his influence spreads far beyond his party and his country, and extends across the entire world. More so than any other nation, America is personified, identified and judged by the actions and attitudes of its leader and Commander-In-Chief. For four years, the President is America.

And that is the challenge facing George Bush. He is stronger now than when first sworn in on a cold January morning in 2001. He has a clear mandate, borne of a clear victory. He doesn’t have the burden and restraints associated with any further re-election.

Like Abraham Lincoln, supposedly one of his heroes, President Bush must set himself to the task of healing a nation after what has been, in his case, a symbolic civil war. He doesn't have to abandon his beliefs, but he does have to bear in mind that they aren't infallible. An eagle with only a right wing will never fly, let alone soar.

He needs to think of his legacy. What he does in the next four years will determine his place in history. Will he join a hall of fame which includes Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt; or be as immemorable as Millard Fillmore (1850-53) and Chester Arthur (1881-85)?

What he does will also determine his likely successor. If he remains a partisan leader, leading a divided nation, he paves the way for Hillary Clinton. That prospect, more so than anything else, should steer him in the right direction. I don’t believe in deities, but for those who do, God Bless America.

First published in the Newsletter on Saturday 6th November 2004

The DUP wants a Government 'peace dividend' to compensate for the years of underinvestment in infrastructure.

So does the SDLP, who are advocating outright opposition to reform, which is seen as the thin end of the privatisation wedge (which it undoubtedly is).

Sinn Fein doesn't see a need for a separate water charge (as we already pay for water through the regional rate, despite what John Spellar might say).

The UUP seems to have shifted towards metering somewhat, as has Alliance (with safeguards).

Please link to any other groups that have responded, if you wish. Certainly, it is rare to see parties here so united on a single issue. Perhaps it's all part of the Government's great plan to get the Assembly restored...

Sorry - couldn't resist. ;o) Still, is it not a bit rich for a party that has benefited from tax avoidance in the past to criticise others on this issue?

Jeffrey Donaldson said: "It would be wrong to go into great detail because negotiations are at such a sensitive stage but at the moment we don't have sufficient progress."

Wonder what Jeffrey thinks of the DUP organisational structure - if he disagrees with the way forward, will he find it as easy to find enough support to call DUP executive meetings as he did Ulster Unionist Council meetings?

And are the electoral benefits of a more centralised party structure not obvious by now to the more loosely-knit - if not completely disunited - Ulster Unionist Party/ies?

I would take issue with this point though: "New legislation is being prepared in Dublin and, in a coordinated move, a review is under way in Northern Ireland."

This is anything BUT co-ordinated action. The Charities Commission is not a new idea, and there have been countless calls for one here. The Government is stalling until the status quo in England and Wales has been reviewed - whatever year that will be (the Government reckons next year... we shall see!) And is any of this going to be co-ordinated with the Irish legislation, to avoid any more loopholes? Errrr... is it ever?

As the NIO gears up for the launch of its annual Christmas counterfeit crackdown tomorrow, maybe someone should give Ron Goldstock a call...

A celebration of Scottish gloom

THE clash of civilisations said to be tearing the modern world apart is usually thought of as dividing East from West or Christianity from Islam. But a new interpretation suggests that the real divide is between California and north-east Scotland.

Disgusted by the detritus of “Little Books”—of Calm, Happiness, Wisdom, Confidence, Buddhism and anything that is good, kind and beautiful—seeping over from America, Bill Duncan, the head of English at Carnoustie High School in Angus, has produced a slim volume expounding an alternative philosophy. “The Wee Book of Calvin”*, a collection of aphorisms and essays celebrating the spirit of the foggy coastline around Dundee, seeks to drive out warm Californian optimism with a freezing blast of Scottish gloom.

Much of the reaction to Bush's election has at times verged on contained hysteria. However the campaign had some good news for all sides, not least the high voter turnout of just under 60% (it was 55% in 1992 49.0% in 1996 to 51.0% in 2000).

Much of the analysis has concentrated on the apparent polarisation of US politics. That's what we are supposed to have witnessed in 2000. The truth is much more prosaic.

The real success of Bush has been his ability to build coalitions of interest that have seen his party burrow, slowly but significantly, into some of the Democrat's key support base. From early in the year, Don King was at work trying to convince black voters that with two senior representatives in Bush's cabinet, their interests now lay with the Republicans, not the Democrats. His election night sound bite was something like, "the Republicans are out democrating the Democrats".

There's some evidence too that Bush's hard line on stem cell research, gay marriage and abortion is firming up a lead amongst the most statistically significant of the socially minded Christian groupings - the Catholic vote. At one time this was a unified and largely disaffected group. And it mostly voted Democrat.

Bush himself is born again and a Methodist. He has perhaps confounded a lot of his critics, because his actions don't quite conform to their image of him. His conservativism is obvious over the issues mentioned above. But two of his big policy intiatives, Education, which has seen a 59% increase in the funding available to public schools and in the case of AIDS his targetted funding of patients receiving antiretroviral treatment in the developing world, are at odds with his opponents' image of him as a rabid fundamentalist.

The truth is that Bush is one of a new generation of pragmatist politicians, who understand that their capacity to take and retain power in a democracy depends on an ability to build and maintain coalitions of interest. As David Aaronovitch points out in his customarily accute analysis yesterday, his appeal extends way beyond the bible belt and the so-called 'flyover states':

Twenty-two per cent placed 'moral values' as the number one voting issue, of whom four- fifths voted for Bush, making around 17 per cent of those voting. Eighty-three per cent of voters did not fall into this camp at all.

Furthermore, the percentage of voters describing themselves as evangelical was the same as in 2000. The proportions in favour or against abortion were no different - 55 per cent are broadly in favour of abortion with 42 per cent opposed. A majority supported either gay marriage (which we do not have here in Britain, or in most countries in Europe) or of gay civil unions. In fact, among these latter, there was a 5 per cent lead for Bush. (Equally unexpectedly, those most scared by terrorism actually voted for Kerry.)

Closer to home in The Blanket, Fred A Wilcox talks of the detachment of the left from the people whose interests they wish to represent:

Orwell marveled at the left’s extraordinary disconnect between its own rhetoric and daily lives of working people. It seems to me that in the aftermath of the 2004 election, the progressive would do well to stand down from its self righteous soap box and spend more time listening to people who do not attend ivy league colleges, may not read The Nation, do like to drink and go bowling and watch Fox News.

So what has any of this got to do with Northern Ireland?

What Bush (and to an extent, Clinton before him) was able to do was to extend the appeal of his party far enough into the heartland of his opponent to make all their best efforts at defending it useless.

In our own bicameral sideshow, the DUP have resoluted focused on moving out of their working class heartlands to take the middle class protestant vote. Sinn Fein has similarly beaten the SDLP, even if middle class Catholic votes may be fractionally slower in coming their way.

Both successful parties could not have succeeded without attracting the very moderate voters their opponents believed would never move to their 'unworthy' opponents. They have done this largely by professionalising their campaigns and, above all else, applying themselves to understanding the needs and wishes of the people they want to vote for them and articulating their own 'branded' solutions.

It's a million miles from the old approach politics which revolved only around one or two keystone issues - in our case the border, in the wider world the division between the interests of the indvidual vs that of the collective.

If we are ever to witness a turning back of the tide in Northern Ireland the minor partners in the nationalist and unionist houses will have to address their opponent's new appeal to the moderate voter, and offer them a more compellling alternative, rather than continue fight the simpler 'wartime' battles of yore!

PA reported Mr McClarty on the UTV site: "I am looking forward to the challenge and while I realise that there remains considerable work to be done to encourage Ulster Unionists to come out and vote, I firmly believe that together we can achieve success."

In the 2001 General Election the DUP`s Gregory Campbell captured the East Londonderry seat with a 1,901 majority from the sitting MP, William Ross, of the Ulster Unionists.

In last November`s Assembly election, the DUP stretched its lead over the Ulster Unionists, with a smaller turnout throughout the constituency.

The DUP secured a total of 11,091 votes, taking two seats at Stormont.

The Ulster Unionists received a total of 7,769 votes and also took two seats.

Sinn Fein`s Francie Brolly and the nationalist SDLP`s John Dallat also captured seats.

As an Irishwoman, I am not at all hostile, either, to the poppy-wearing Ulster Unionists. Indeed, if asked to name the most decent politician in all Ireland, I would probably cite David Trimble, whom I like, and who I truly believe is honest. Objectively and logically, I also like and admire the legacy of the British Empire. I have done some research on Catholic missionaries in Africa and Asia and I’ve been impressed by the enlightened attitudes that the Empire often helped to promote in these parts of the world. I thought Benjamin Zephaniah showed ignorance of history when he refused an honour because it was associated with the British Empire, denouncing imperial rule as cruel and oppressive: if he had read certain accounts of missionaries trying to stop little girls of 9 being sold into a dubious marriage or widows being saved from the funeral pyre by the intervention of the Imperial Crown, surely he would not take such an ill-informed view.The British Empire was often a force for good. This is the analysis of my rational mind.

Fifteen years on, the wall returns to haunt Berlin

‘Rebuilt’ partition captures German mood of cultural resentment and economic woe, finds Alan Crawford at Checkpoint Charlie

They’ve rebuilt the wall in Berlin. A 200-metre stretch of whitewashed concrete, three metres high and with the distinctive rounded top of the original, has been erected beside Checkpoint Charlie to mark the 15th anniversary of the fall of the wall on November 9, 1989.

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According to the Times chief political correspondent, Mark Brennock,

The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, said yesterday the plan would see the Northern Assembly restored first in "shadow" form, with the power-sharing Executive to be functioning by spring. This would be part of a deal involving a permanent end to the IRA's campaign and the resolution of the decommissioning issue which has plagued the political process."

That part of the deal has not fundamentally altered since 2002.

The Taoiseach said the elements of a deal had been outlined by Mr Blair in his speech at the Belfast Harbour Masters in October 2002, and had not changed.

If all of these things happened, "we would re-establish the Assembly and the Executive and get ahead with the North/South bodies", Mr Ahern said.

The Taioseach also repeated the warning that "Waiting until after the Westminster elections, which many expect next May, was "not an acceptable strategy", however."

There's no mention of what might happen if this attempt fails, "They hoped not to have to consider how to proceed if those efforts failed. 'We are looking at lots of suggestions but it is not the way we want to go.'"

And no mention of a blueprint for joint-rule that Gerry Adams has told the Friends of SF in New York he wants to see (and no mention in this more widely reported speech by Adams of 2016 either)... and unless that first phase resolves the decommissioning issue it's difficult to see the DUP agreeing to anything else.

Meanwhile General De Chastelain is reported to have departed.. but is due to return at the end of this month... oh.. and, of course, Violence levels 'still high'.

Quote:

Throughout this book, he argues that the growth of internet and related technologies is changing the balance of power between journalists and their readers; you can succeed in the coming decades only by acknowledging that shift in power and changing your behaviour accordingly. "Big media ... treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't. You might write us a letter; we might print it ... it was a world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable.

"Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone's voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win the government's permission to squat on the public airways."

Great quote from one of the regulars -

"We certainly tried out enough pints in Norwich and then Dublin to help make sure it was a fair test."

It may, or may not, be worth pointing out that, as the report states, Aidan was born in Cork

Let's be having youse then!

Nominations please!

Sir Reg said today: "The IMC, whose creation was our idea, is proving to be the useful instrument that we predicted and anticipated it would be. It is a pressure point on paramilitarism."

Not true.

The idea originated with a respected Washington-based lobbyist called Michael McDowell, who consulted with Alliance before Trimble became involved.

A 'ceasefire watchdog' was first proposed by Alliance to the two governments on 4 July two years ago at Hillsborough. A rather arrogant John Reid was not keen on the idea, as he believed that his judgement was sound on whether a ceasefire had been broken or not (though few believed him), so Alliance pursued it with Number 10, where Jonathan Powell was more receptive.

The UUP certainly didn't run with the IMC ball, and they made few if any public statements on the subject at the time.

Dean Godson's well-researched biography of David Trimble is categorical: "The [ceasefire] auditor had originally been the idea of Trimble's informal adviser in Washington, Michael McDowell, in consultation with his friends in the Alliance Party."

It was Alliance and McDowell that pursued the setting up of the IMC. The UUP did not, contrary to Sir Reg's statement, come up with the idea and did little of the 'heavy lifting' to get things in place.

The UUP was more concerned with the make-up of the Commission, and how it was going to keep the Irish Government from making any appointments to it. In addition, the UUP left it to Alliance to defend the IMC in relative isolation afterwards. Indeed, Trimble has criticised the IMC.

In my opinion, Sir Reg's statement suggests a degree of desperation to be seen to be associated with something that is having an effect on the activities of paramilitary groups. It also appears to be a rather feeble attempt to get 'one up' on the DUP, whose attitude to the IMC has shifted remarkably from its 'toothless tiger' description of the body after its inception.

Credit (or criticism) where it's due Sir Reg, eh?

Whatever the Government might spin to you, I can assure you that charity is more or less unregulated here. Generous people are ripped off every day by NI charities. Some charity workers take most of the donations as income. There is no Charity Commission, as there is everywhere else in the UK, despite the furore over the Children’s Hospice. When someone asks you to fill a plastic bag with old clothes to leave outside your door for collection, someone is making money. There is no control over profiteering, and this is badly damaging the income of legitimate, registered charities here, of which there are many.

The DoE was supposed to be in charge of listing which charities were legitimate or registered, but it doesn’t take these duties seriously, nor does it have any real powers. The authorities are complicit in this state of affairs. I remember the RUC lending trucks to one Ballymena charity to use to take goods abroad to those in need. The man who ran it was later prosecuted for breaking charity law, and – as far as I know - is still profiting handsomely from his ‘charity’ work.

Another Ballymena Red Cross worker went one step further, and gave trucks donated by the MoD to Serb forces during the conflict there in the 90s. The white and red trucks were simply repainted when they arrived, stocked up with handcuffs from other UK police forces. These were then used to hold political prisoners captive.

It sounds unbelievable, but is absolutely true.

So to discover that our local terrorists are profiting from your generosity is only to be expected. Don’t expect the government to do anything much about it soon though. It will continue to prevaricate with its review for many months to come.

But the paramilitaries needn't worry about losing money; Paul Murphy is about to offer the paramilitaries another carrot – he will drop the suspension of block financial assistance to the PUP and Sinn Féin that followed the last IMC report.

What a charitable act.

It would be difficult to argue with politicians – even those linked to the paramilitary/criminal mafia-style gangs that the UDA and UVF have become – about the need for investment in deprived ‘protestant areas’. However, it is not hard to see why that lack of investment exists – because of the UVF and UDA.

Why on earth would a business build new premises in certain parts of East Belfast, for example, only for a pink cardigan-wearing medallion-clad spide with a gun to come down in a big red BMW and demand a few grand for ‘security’? Why would anyone in their right mind risk the future of their business in an area where armed robbery, rioting or arson is a regular occurrence? Has anyone asked the thousands of Protestants who have left why they are leaving Belfast and empty houses in their wake?

Why would the Government fund schemes when it knows the money is being poured into the pockets of paramilitaries? Oh wait – it tried that already, enabling upstanding ‘community workers’ like convicted terrorism director Johnny Adair to enjoy a few more hours in the gym before signing on and flogging a few pills at the back of the community centre.

We all know paramilitaries benefit from Government initiatives, and news this week that the Government may now fund some form of loyalist ‘security’ company is concerning. Why do we have an Organised Crime Task Force and Assets Recovery Agency on one hand, if extortion and racketeering are being legitimised – if not legalised and supported by the Government and funded by taxpayers – on the other?

Anyway, are Ulster’s Young Militants or Young Citizen Volunteers really going to be drawn away from a lucrative career in dealing drugs, an exciting evening petrol-bombing Pakistani restaurant owners, putting up flags where they are not wanted and painting murals of gunmen with the promise of a job sitting in a shed on a building site all night for minimum wage?

But there are good reasons to treat the situation seriously too. Deprived ‘loyalist areas’ such as the Shankill have incredibly low educational achievement levels in the young male population. The heavy industries are disappearing, and many jobs in Harland & Wolff or Shorts are long gone. Long ago, nationalist leaders recognised that education is one important way forward, a point that loyalist politicians seem to recognise, but which little has been done about.

So I can accept that there is a need to improve opportunities and educational attainment levels in ‘loyalist areas’, and it would be wrong to label all schemes as dubious. Strange then how unionists in the UUP and DUP think retaining the 11-Plus exam will somehow improve the chances for the average Shankill teenager – it won’t. It isn’t working now and hasn’t done for many years. At least the PUP recognises this.

The thing is – the world owes no-one a living, and it is difficult to feel sympathy for politicians holding out the begging bowl when the reason they need to do so is at least partly because of the control and malevolent influence their infighting paramilitary friends exercise over their own community. There is no public confidence in schemes that seem to benefit paramilitaries at the expense of their own communities.

In her News Letter column, Suzanne Breen looks at poverty here more generally, but concludes that inequality should not be used as an excuse for everything. Yes, she writes, children on the Shankill are born into circumstances where they won’t have the same opportunities as kids in North Down. But when a Save the Children survey suggests that one in five children in NI doesn’t get fresh fruit or vegetables or basic clothing “then what on earth are their parents doing?”

Suzanne writes: “Are apples, oranges, bananas, cauliflower, cabbage, and carrots more expensive than other groceries?

“Of course, the more you earn, the more varied and interesting your family's diet can be. But a low wage or benefits doesn't keep fruit and vegetables off the shopping list.”

She adds: “That's not to blame the poor for being poor. But, unless a parent is a complete idiot or waster, there's no possible excuse for kids not having basic clothing, fruit and vegetables.”

I think her point can be applied to the situation in loyalist areas; if they are so deprived, then what are the paramilitaries doing about to change things for the better? Are they creating problems or solutions? Are they looking after number one, or the community they purport to protect? Would loyalists not really be better off without loyalist paramilitaries? Why, if the Government sees the need to invest in ‘loyalist areas’, will it put control of funding in the hands of terrorists who have proved time and time again their inate ability to cream off as much as they can for themselves, even if their community suffers as a result? It’s not like they have a mandate, even to benefit from this form of sanitised bribery.

Poverty, deprivation, unemployment, poor facilities and so on are often listed as the causes of many of the problems in ‘loyalist areas’. But until loyalist ‘paramilitarism’ is recognised as a root cause of the problems, instead of a means to address them, and until loyalist, unionist and community leaders begin to show real leadership, those areas will continue to suffer. Whether they like it or not, for many loyalists the biggest threat to their own communities’ future is loyalist paramilitarism.

Right, I suppose I'll have to sit back and get ready to read all the 'What about the IRA?' comments now...

While the BBC highlights the report's finding that "The IRA shows no signs of winding down its capability", there is another aspect of the report that I wanted to mention.

At the start of their conclusions the IMC state that "We want to do all we can to contribute to our objective[emphasis added] to 'promote the transition to a peaceful society and stable and inclusive devolved Government in Northern Ireland'."

Shouldn't they simply be fulfilling their remit, and monitor and report on paramilitary activity and, where necessary, recommend action to curtail that activity; regardless of any such political objectives?

Update - the BBC summarises the findings on paramilitary activity "Violence levels 'still high'"

Apart from the obvious hedging of bets Adams is full of quips, as ever, "Obviously, 2016 is an emotive date for republicans and nationalists, but I've never been taken up that much with it -- a United Ireland could happen before then".

Let's leave aside the attempt to use the calendar as a 'political' argument, he's already trying to pass the blame if he fails to deliver on that over-hyped possibility "If it doesn't happen by 2016, people shouldn't come complaining on Easter Monday because they'll only have themselves to blame."

Setting down a deadline for such a move is in every respect, contrary to the Agreement - which Adams and SF are so publicly supportive of. Worse still, it is likely to be counter-productive.. unless, of course, the aim is to further undermine the pragmatic elements in Unionism?

The sequence Adams puts his party's objectives points out where his priorities lie - "we have two big challenges. One is to persuade the British government that its duty lies in leaving Ireland. Secondly, we have to reach out to unionists."

So much for the principle of consent, then.

And how exactly does Adams see his target audience in the US working to "put the 'ending of the union' onto the U.S. political agenda" while Sinn Féin continues to call for an "end to the use of Shannon Airport as a staging area for US forces involved in the occupation of Iraq"?

Answers on a postcard please.

Favourite question -

26. Who or what did John Kerry shoot to boost his appeal to rural conservatives?

A) Rats
B) Geese
C) City folk
D) Michael Moore

It seems I may have blocked some memories to preserve my sanity -

You scored 34 out of a possible 40
You are candidate: Ronald Reagan in 1984 Politically astute and you made as clean a sweep as anyone ever has.

PA quotes Allister as saying: "The essentials for stable institutions are the following: "Executive office only for those demonstrably and irreversibly detached from armed paramilitary organisations and criminal activity.

"An effective mechanism to exclude any who subsequently breach the practice of exclusively peaceful and democratic means.

"The Assembly as the elected forum must have the capacity to call executive members to account, both in the exercise of executive functions and cross-border responsibilities.

"There can be no wild cat ministerial action which defies the wish of the elected Assembly."

Read past the bluster and rhetoric, and you'll see some room for manoeuvre there. However, the new 20-day deadline for reaching agreement was a bit of a laugh. So what if the Queen's speech is at the end of this month - if her Loyal Subjects in the DUP wish to delay things until next May, she will just have to bloody wait, eh?

Clamping is not something the car happy people of Norn Iron will take lying down, as they have in other parts of the UK, and this is obviously part of the great conspiracy by Labour to annoy/rip us off/irritate us back into devolution again, I can just tell...

Although traffic wardens are attached to the police here, they were never really a target throughout the 'Troubles'. Why start now(although they would be privately run, and so could more easily attract cross-community hatred)?! Or is this merely another cunning cost-cutting measure to compensate for the lack of resources provided to the PSNI?

So I guess my message to John Spellar is: "As drivers, we all detest traffic wardens, but we hate clampers more. We will fight them in the parking bays. We will fight them on the single yellow lines. We will even fight them when we are parked less than 15 feet from a street corner and possibly obscuring the view of right-turning traffic.

"And if all else fails, I suppose we will grudgingly pay the damn £90 to get home on that inevitable rainy night when we first get clamped by some over-zealous jobsworth on a power trip."

This is going to be as big as revenue-raising speed cameras.

I think Bush will take it, just. Ah well... we'll know soon enough.

A few paragraphs worth noting in the Belfast Telegraph -

..the DUP last night succeeded in pushing through an amendment [to an SDLP motion] which said majority rule was best for the area and that "power-sharing is not the best form of government as it provides less effective, weaker and demonstrably less durable administrations".

SDLP councillor Declan O'Loan had tabled his power-sharing motion at Ballymena's monthly council meeting saying they were putting the DUP "to the test" - after claiming Mr Paisley's party told the British and Irish governments they are committed to power-sharing.

The DUP council members voted down the SDLP proposals and also an Ulster Unionist amendment which asked for the posts of mayor and deputy mayor to be divided proportionally, although not by D'Hondt, among parties.

Instead, the DUP succeeded in passing a motion with the SDLP and Ulster Unionists either voting against or abstaining, which said that the DUP, in the review of the Good Friday Agreement, has never claimed to support enforced power-sharing.

So, despite the hype perpetuated by some political parties, both governments and the media throughout the entire summer, there seems to be no prospect of any movement by the political parties by that 25th November deadline. Which is a not very subtle way of passing the (political) buck.. again.

Now... about those 'options' you mentioned, Bertie.

Update - Sheesh, Bertie, make up your mind - 26 November target for NI assembly: Ahern

Readers are welcome to ask Ingram questions here, and we’ll see how things progress. I would appreciate it if people remember to play the ball and not the man, otherwise the thread could quickly degenerate and no-one will get anything out of it. If readers believe that a moderator’s intervention is necessary at any point, please email me – reclaim98@hotmail.com - or the boss, Mick Fealty, at mick@mickfealty.com

As I said, this is something new for Slugger. Injunctions have been placed on Ingram speaking in the past, so we’ll see how things go. Ingram will forward his answers to me, and I will post them, so don't expect immediate answers.

But then shrinks are cheaper than legal inquiries and lawyers, so lie down and tell me, in single words, only the good thngs that come into your head about your mother.

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