Mick Fealty

A messy few days in, and some inside Sinn Féin must be questioning the party hierarchy’s decision to make its head northern spin doctor carry the can for what increasingly looks like a much wider screw up. In 22 years I don’t remember anything like it. The problem with secrecy, be it that of the Catholic Church or in more recent times Sinn Féin’s problematic handling of sex cases within its own ranks, is that eventually it gets hard to …

Read more…

It’s a sniper’s rule you only get two shots at the enemy. A third and they will figure where you’re hiding and you’re a goner. This is now Sinn Féin’s fourth scandal and it is very clear it just cannot deal with child sex abuse cases that involve its members. Being the fourth ‘shot’ the party can no longer expect to have the benefit of the doubt. Their defence on previous occasions was that they were historic, but policies were …

Read more…

There was a time when I paid more attention to polls than I have over the last six or seven years. To be honest I lost interest in trying to analyse them because with the increased frequency of each publication the variation between them became limited. In yesterday’s Inside Politics podcast from the Irish Times there’s a superb conversation hosted by Hugh Linehan with Theresa Reidy and Aidan Regan on the apparently sudden collapse of sentiment for Sinn Féin in …

Read more…

…they are no substitute for a small number of strong local connections. -Benjamin Allen, researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard I was asked on Nolan yesterday to comment on Lee Reynolds analytical piece in The Critic magazine (brutally titled “Unionism has to wise up”), timed no doubt ahead of this weekend’s DUP party conference and the new leader’s first big set piece speech. The focus was consideration of a name change, to signal to the Northern Irish …

Read more…

In The Irish Times Trevor Ringland challenges an oddly identitarian idea that’s been in vogue recently in ways it was not during the actual Troubles (especially if you had read An Phoblacht regularly) that it was the IRA that brought civil rights. This odd philosophy (which the comedian Andrew Doyle correctly acknowledges is present in both mainstream right and left discourses elsewhere) associates wrong doing, not by the individuals responsible, but layered for guilt primarily by identity. This has been …

Read more…

The Irish News’s John Manley breaks the news that Colum Eastwood is to step down as only the sixth leader of the SDLP since its establishment in 1970. It comes just over week after his UUP counterpart Doug Beattie also announced his departure. At first he put a brake on his party’s decline but in the 2022 Assembly election it suffered a huge anti DUP squeeze from Sinn Féin to which neither Eastwood nor his party had an answer. Now …

Read more…

A thneed’s a-fine-something-that-all-people need. -From The Lorax by Dr Seuss, 1971 Culture eats strategy for breakfast they say. I’ve long believed that Alex Salmond knew what a lot of his Scottish nationalist cohort never really did, ie that before movement was possible he would have to tackle the cultural barriers to his party’s appeal. Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland has only fitfully understood that reality, in figures like Curry, Hume, Fitt, McGrady and Mallon and those all plied their trade …

Read more…

In the doldrum life of Northern Ireland politics losing one seat is a misfortune, two careless, three criminally negligent. To have escaped two more potential losses is a serious warning from the future for the DUP that for too long played just one card. Since the writ of that one card trick (keeping the FM’s job for unionism) ran out in the last Assembly election in 2022 the party has been on notice that it needs to find another reason …

Read more…

Machiavelli in his famous handbook for democratic survival The Prince divided all states into either republics or principalities. The former were easily overrun, but hard to retain. With the latter once conquered, there is great ease in holding it.  This morning, Northern Ireland has two distinct political cultures. East of the Bann where voters will not tolerate any failure in their politicians, whereas in the west and south where no matter who is standing, the Sinn Fein brand has become …

Read more…

I don’t usually post at weekends, but the chatter about Jeffrey Donaldson’s interview on TalkBack in which he talked about “unionism shaping political change going forward”, combined with Micheál Martin’s remarks to the Alliance Party there is definitely something interesting afoot. The Donaldson piece is not a fade or tactical manoeuvre, although Kevin Meagher made a good point yesterday on Nolan when we were both on together, that Donaldson’s rhetoric repeated a note of reconciliation from Robinson in 2011 (and …

Read more…

Saturday was a big day for Nationalism, and few summed it up as well as the new Nationalist leader of the opposition, Matthew O’Toole: As we walked down the stairs into the Great Hall, we passed the figure of James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister — the man who built this Building and this state in his image. Whatever one’s view of him, Craig was a far-sighted strategist, but even he was unlikely to have foreseen today’s events. The …

Read more…