Help Santa bring the Toys For Tots
Posted by Jim on November 30, 2021
Bloody Sunday 50th anniversary programme of events unveiled
Posted by Jim on November 14, 2021
Special events planned to remember victims
Fourteen people were killed by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday.
staff reporter
The programme of events to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday was launched in Derry this afternoon.
Highlights include the screening of the film White Handkerchief and a special event in Guildhall Square.
Earlier, a Families Walk of Remembrance will leave Creggan at 9.15am, retracing the route of the January 30 1972 march, ending with a memorial service at the Bloody Sunday monument on Rossville Street.
Musical highlights include the Undertones and Damien Dempsey and special guests taking to the stage for separate concerts at the Millennium Forum.
The events, themed One World One Struggle, are being organised by the Bloody Sunday Trust who today also launched the new Bloody Sunday 50 website where details of the events planned can be found.
“acting in this manner means enduring the no-deal outcome that Johnson was unwilling to countenance two years ago”
Posted by Jim on November 10, 2021
I do wonder where all this talk of “war” is going to take us. Like the chatter about an imminent United Ireland, when the latest polling evidence indicates most people in Northern Ireland are happy enough, it’s largely just chatter. For now.
Ronan McCrea in the Irish Times today expresses real frustration on the Irish side with the way things are going:
With London walking away from the compromises it made and no good options available, Brussels may well conclude that its best option is to call the UK’s bluff and threaten to terminate the TCA.
The Northern Ireland protocol came into being in 2019 because the British were unwilling to endure a no-deal Brexit. With London repudiating the core provisions of the protocol, the only way to save it may be to make it clear that acting in this manner means enduring the no-deal outcome that Johnson was unwilling to countenance two years ago.
All of which, Frost’s command paper has already, painstakingly, put back on the table.
One unionist friend noted last week, the threat to invoke Article 16 is integral to the protocol. An alarm or a safe word to be uttered if the going gets too tough for one party or the other. Indeed the Commission were the first to invoke it.
And clipping onwards to a no deal is an outcome Johnson has played with before, and the Brexiteers have always been happy to consider since it complies with their view of primacy of sovereignty within the political-economy trilemma.
Tom McTeague of The Atlantic draws on Roderick Crawford’s essay for Policy Exchange puts a rather different, less complementary construction on the matter:https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NwYWNlX2NhcmQiOnsiYnVja2V0Ijoib2ZmIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1458078972877606921&lang=en-gb&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fsluggerotoole.com%2F2021%2F11%2F10%2Facting-in-this-manner-means-enduring-the-no-deal-outcome-that-johnson-was-unwilling-to-countenance-two-years-ago%2F&sessionId=cb446e919816351bd3365d14e0b0e6ea8ae3948f&theme=light&widgetsVersion=f001879%3A1634581029404&width=550px
The weakness of the UK position in the negotiations is another warning about the wisdom of going for a bust-out policy when you only have 52% of the UK population behind you. What’s changed is Johnson now has an 80 seat majority.
Domestically he can (and does) do almost anything he likes. The primary mandate from the 2019 general election was effectively to ‘get Brexit done’, and if he’s ‘forced’ to crack some Delft on the way out it’s something he will luxuriate in.
Tom then turns to another interesting piece, this time from Rory Montgomery, a former Irish diplomat who served as Permanent Representative to the European Union, in the Dublin Review 0f Books.
In it, Montgomery notes that although Enda Kenny at “the Magill summer school in July 2016, mused about smart technology and licence plate recognition”, he had dropped that position by January 2017 before Varadkar took over:
It became our firm position that any checks or controls anywhere on the island would constitute a hard border. The Commission picked this up and moved to make regulatory alignment the centrepiece of its approach.
One good reason for our changing our position was the emphatic way in which Theresa May had set out her red lines, which would clearly lead to very significant divergence between the UK and EU.
But another was that regular Commission officials (not Barnier and the taskforce) adopted a completely orthodox approach to the full application of EU law in any arrangement. We would have been banging our heads against a brick wall had we continued to look for more flexibility at that time.
That, for me at least, fills an important gap in my previous understanding of what was going on at the time. It also clarifies the nature of the crisis going forward and what the tensions are (and how horribly irresolvable they may be).
All of which takes me back to Dani Rodik’s observations made in the teeth of the Euro crisis in May 2010:
The crisis has revealed how demanding globalization’s political prerequisites are. It shows how much European institutions must still evolve to underpin a healthy single market. The choice that the EU faces is the same in other parts of the world: either integrate politically, or ease up on economic unification.
Before the crisis, Europe looked like the most likely candidate to make a successful transition to the first equilibrium – greater political unification. Now its economic project lies in tatters while the leadership needed to rekindle political integration is nowhere to be seen.
Dilemma or trilemma, it hasn’t gone away you know?
Tom Kelly: Reform of policing must go further
Posted by Jim on November 9, 2021
Former Northern Ireland Policing Board vice chairman Denis Bradley is pictured alongside then PSNI Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde in 2006. Photo Mark Pearce/Pacemaker
Tom Kelly 08 November, 2021 01:00
Tom Kelly
It’s hard to believe it is twenty years since the PSNI was established.
Even harder to believe it’s twenty years since allowing my name to go forward as a member of the inaugural Policing Board.
Taking the decision to participate in the reform of policing was not an easy one and was made more difficult by continued loyalist and dissident threats and violence.
Watching your family home being turned into Fort Knox, with bullet proof doors and windows, security cameras and panic buttons, was a wake up call as to the seriousness of my decision.
Full credit is due to the spouses of those who joined the new structures.
Following a bruising encounter with some unreconstructed militant republicans, my late boss, Seamus Mallon, asked if I would consider applying for a personal firearm. I didn’t warm to the idea. There were already too many guns in Northern Ireland. Gun possession ran against my non violent principles.
The first policing board was a serious challenge to the actual implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Mallon used to say: “Solve policing and the politics will solve itself”.
Thankfully the stewardship of the board was entrusted to an unusual couplet – the sober, considered and calm academic, Professor Desmond Rea, and the pastoral, enigmatic and sage-like, Denis Bradley.
Despite their obvious differences in background, culture and approach this was a leadership team which worked well.
A horrific and cowardly attack on Denis Bradley in Derry not only demonstrated his bravery but also the risks involved in peace building.
An early mistake in the construction of the board was the appointment of too few women. The board certainly wasn’t as diverse or representative as it could have been. That said, those on the first board were determined to make it work.
My own history of engagement with the RUC was wholly negative. I feared them as a teenager. Like others, I was frequently humiliated with their policy of stop and search. As a parliamentary assistant, I suffered the indignity of making constituent complaints from the streets through the Sangers at RUC fortifications. And worst of all, whilst being attacked by a gang of loyalist thugs who tried to pull me from my car, two RUC police tenders with mobile support teams sat and watched the episode without intervening.
As the grandson of a War of Independence veteran who was court-martialled, imprisoned and then exiled from the north after the Treaty, I was now sitting and working alongside Alan Brooke, grandson of the unionist icon Basil Brooke. Basil who never wanted a Catholic about the place.
That first board was forged in adversity but bonded by sense of purpose. Human rights were put at the centre of policing for the first time. It was to become a police service – not a police force.
As usual with political developments Sinn Féin were slow to get on the bus. Their ambivalence would not slow down the implementation of the Patten reforms. Unionists could sulk about these reforms but they could not change them. The RUC was no longer.
Whilst he may never get the credit, Alex Attwood, the former SDLP MLA, was tenacious in ensuring the Patten proposals were implemented to the full. It certainly cost him in the popularity stakes as a politician.
Without diminishing the sacrifices of those members of the RUC who bravely lost their lives during the Troubles, the RUC was not fit for purpose. It was wholly unrepresentative of the community it sought to serve and that wasn’t sustainable.
Increasingly many good and decent RUC officers were continually undermined by colleagues who were institutionally sectarian and actively engaged in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. The rotten apples were rotting the barrel.
Reform of policing is ongoing but now the challenge is to remove the dead hand of stale politics and partisan politicians from controlling the PSNI.
Politicians owe that much to those who wear the uniform of the PSNI.