Brian Walker 
From his analysis of the Protocol bill, I want to pull out Rafael Behr’s comments on how little Northern Ireland registers in the wider media as itself, on merit . You can almost hear the groans from TV viewers,” Not Northern Ireland again” in a situation even more incomprehensible to them than the Troubles It isn’t every day that former prime ministers set old party enmities aside to deliver a unified message on a matter of national urgency. When John …
Political gaming has intensified as the Times and the FT report that the UK government will not proceed with the Protocol Bill unless the DUP promises to return to the Assembly. As the bill will at best take a year to pass Parliament are the DUP being invited to buy a pig in a poke? Can this ultimatum over ride the DUP’s demands for “action not words?. Is the briefing to the papers credible anyway except as short term pressure …
This week’s showing on BBC2 of the gripping Our Falklands War: a front line story will have forced comparisons and contrasts with the Troubles. When I reported the Falklands War from afar in Buenos Aires I used to wonder how those spotty youths in ill fitting uniforms would fare against the elite of the British Army like the Parachute Brigade. Not well as we saw when 1000 of them surrendered to less than 100 paras at Goose Green, although the …
What do you suppose Boris Johnson is up to with his on the face of it, kamikaze tactics over the Protocol Bill? By pursuing the most aggressive line he seems determined to court a confrontation with the EU. Can he be serious, even as a survival strategy? As Peston points out, where Johnson is on shaky ground is that within the Protocol there is explicit provision to suspend it, where there are ‘societal difficulties… liable to persist’ via its Article …
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
Is it really 20 years since I was present at the Queen Mother’s funeral in the Abbey and later in the year, looked on open mouthed as Brian May plucked out God Save the Queen from the roof of Buckingham Palace? Access like that went with the job then. This time, it was the street party outside my block of flats in Ealing. Time for an outing of my old Henry VIII costume I rashly thought, anything to liven up …
I think of the 1950s as the last time you didn’t have to be stressed out about identity. Maybe that’s because I was aged from between 3 to 12 at the time but I don’t believe that altogether explains it. Londonderry was a unionist town with a Catholic majority, a statement not only about the gerrymander but the atmosphere of the old walled city where most premises were Protestant owned, like the middle class suburbs. Working people on both sides …
Last week the Bishop of Derry dedicated a garden to the memory of a 15 year old Derry boy Manus Deery, shot dead by the British Army in the Bogside on the 50th anniversary of his death. As the Derry Now website reported: Manus had just started working after leaving St Joseph’s Secondary School and was eating a bag of chips and carrying a comic in his back pocket which he had bought with his first wage packet… At the …
In my last post, I was a lonely outlier when I argued that we had nothing to lose by giving Boris Johnson a chance to see what he can deliver. I did so in full knowledge of his record and reputation. I am unrepentant. At least equally irritating as Boris is the solipsism that assumes Northern Ireland is centre of world attention and reduces outsiders like the prime minister to bit players in what Churchill called “the fearful integrity” of …
Ahead of his day in Northern Ireland, much media comment is focusing on Boris Johnson’s announcement of draft legislation later this week to unilaterally amend parts of the Protocol. This is both inevitable and regrettable. Northern Ireland’s welfare is far more important than the abstruse game of higher politics. Boris Johnson’s article in the Belfast Telegraph deserves to be cautiously welcomed. It suggests a new level of engagement in all level of NI affairs even encroaching on Stormont’s competences. Much …
Is there any hope that Boris Johnson will at last begin to deal straight with all parties on the protocol? He arrives in Belfast on Monday without a coherent position. Without one, what has he got to offer? He has yet to pronounce where he stands. The cabinet is clearly divided on Liz Truss’s vow to go it alone unilaterally. However much he sympathises with their cause , he must oppose the DUP’s deep boycott of the Assembly. No 10 …
To use a well known term from political science, we seem to be in a right bugger’s muddle. Brinkmanship is the order of the day. Wobbling on the cliff edge is Liz Truss the foreign secretary, threatening to bring in legislation to allow business to disregard EU rules on GB-NI trade as early as next week. She argues that existing EU concessions would “ make things worse.” It focuses on the fact that grace periods mean the protocol is not …
The glasses of full and half full Assembly results have been poured and are being eagerly being digested according to whether consumers are convinced they amount to a breakthrough for the nationalist cause or leave things much the same in a slightly different shape. Each according to taste. What matters more immediately now are the bums on seats in Stormont. To allow Executive ministers of the old mandate to continue, MLAs will have to manage to elect a Speaker. …
I’ve just emerged exhausted from reading Fintan O’Toole’s magisterial “personal history” “We don’t know ourselves” on life and times in the Republic from his birth in 1958, a good 10 years after my own. I really should have made copious notes. But my snap reaction is that Northern Protestants were surely dead right to want to have nothing to do with the place. Indeed they didn’t know the half of it. O’Toole describes the political identity of a pure Ireland …
Photo courtesy History Collection Irish passports had special uses long before Brexit. Forty years ago, at the onset of the Falklands War when the Argentines were refusing entry to single passport carrying Brits, I had the original wheeze of using mine to gain accreditation to Buenos Aires for BBC TV News ( ok ,so did others who discovered they had an Irish granny). So with Roisin McAuley joining the Newsnight team and David Capper for Radio News, BBCNI was well …
We thought we had learned them in 1998 but we hadn’t really, or not enough. To find out why, we have to go back in time. Just over 50 years ago, Brian Faulkner the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland rang WD Flackes BBC NI’s political correspondent from an outer office in 10 Downing Street to inform him that the game was up for the Stormont Parliament. Billy’s scoop led the national 9 O’clock News. Ted Heath had made Faulkner an …
Photo, Moscow Military Museum A long time ago in 1985, in the dying days of the last Soviet gerontocrat Chernenko, just before Gorbachev came to power, I went to Moscow with a small BBC team to make radio programmes marking the 40th Anniversary of victory in what is to us the Second World War, but is still to Russians today the Great Patriotic War, a war of survival in which 20 to 25 million died. Events like the Battle of …
Good on the Derry Now website for going to town to commemorate the centenary of Fheis Dhoire Cholmcille Derry Feis is celebrating its 100th birthday this Easter. To mark the special occasion, we are publishing a series of articles titled: Mo thuras go Fheis Dhoire Cholmcille 2022. Today, Fearghal Mag Uiginn, head of the Irish at Thornhill College and presenter of BBC Radio Ulster’s Blas Ceoil, describes his personal journey to Derry Feis 2022. Describing Feis Dhoire Cholmcille as the …
Abortion, the legacy, the Irish language and now integrated education; why is secretary of state Brandon Lewis tossing out controversial policy ideas which are largely the prerogative of Stormont? Real action on any of these hot topics will be held in abeyance until the after the Assembly elections. Then we’ll see won’t we? Although his ideas lack shall we say, a certain sophistication, they are certainly provocative and seem intended to stimulate a more diverse debate than the same old. …
Last night I drafted a piece musing about the comparisons and contrasts between the imperial mindsets of Russia and Britain in history. This morning I threw it away. Instead my mind went back to a visit a decade ago to the border between Estonia and Russia In what seemed like entirely tranquil circumstances. We had taken a train from Talliin the capital of the tiny Baltic state of Estonia a couple of hundred miles to the old Russian imperial capital …
