2025 crying out for clear, decisive leadership from our politicians
Editorial
Wed 1 Jan 2025 at 05:00
Northern Ireland can do without another year of broken promises.
The carrots were waved in front of all who live here. There was the promise of a sack of gold on the restoration of the Assembly, the promise of upgrades to the A5 and A1 roads, the promise of an end to industrial disputes across health, education and the civil service, the promise of a Euro 2028 tournament to look forward to and the promise of multi-millions in investment from the US once the country showed it could commit to a political future.
There is, sadly, no surprise that many of those promises were as empty as the bank vaults at Stormont in 2024.
Northern Ireland in 2024 was potholed by a series of scandals, changes in leadership and political upheaval at a time when work needed to be done.
Every year comes with surprises in store. How you react to them is the key to progress.
For both our main political parties, times in 2024 were turbulent.
For the DUP, a forced change of leadership followed the decision to return to Stormont that in itself caused angst in loyalist circles.
For Sinn Fein, while Michelle O’Neill was delivered as First Minister, that came with extra scrutiny and a struggle to deal with scandals of their own making.
Changes too for the SDLP and Ulster Unionists, with new leadership for both.
Things do change, no matter how much you plan ahead. The year 2025 is crying out for clear, decisive leadership to see us all through what awaits.
In the short term, what awaits is a growing financial crisis with all departments in government calling for more help to do the things that need doing.
We need decisions on how the future of the health service will look, become more sustainable, reduce waiting lists, save local GP surgeries and give everyone the level of care they had been accustomed to.
We need an end to the constant threat of industrial action in education. We have schools to be proud of, but need buildings for them to be proud in.
We need progress on major road and transport initiatives, an end to the gridlock that’s strangling Belfast, a start to the A5 scheme, and, as Christmas has all too horrifically shown, improvements across the network to make our roads as safe as they can possibly be.
Politicians are entrusted with the ability to make the choices for everyone, and though the risk of every decision is that you will make the wrong one, decisions must be made nonetheless.
And what can we do except try to do better? And do what is needed to make good on promises made.
An anti-Irish campaigner behind a car leaflet campaign says he “despises” the language and plans more protests.
The head of Protestants Against Gaelic Language (PAGL) wants to protest against the use of Gaelic right across the island, as English is the “ancestral language of most Irish people”.
The group is preparing to increase its efforts against the use of Irish in the Republic with the upcoming launch of its new website, and in Northern Ireland where a revival of the language is gaining momentum following the Identity and Language Act 2022.
A number of attendees of the class at The Points bar on Belfast’s Dublin Road in December emerged to find the leaflets on their windshields.
The text on the leaflet opened with “Why 87% of Irish people should hate the Irish language” and warned the tongue “was always used to discriminate against non-nationalists”.
One attendee of the class said they felt the leaflets were “low-level intimidation” when speaking with the BBC.
The PSNI initially said they were investigating and treating it as a “hate incident”, but a spokesperson confirmed on Friday: “Police carried out a number of enquiries and determined that no offences had been committed.”
Although the leaflets featured the initialism “P.A.I.L” – understood to stand for Protestants Against Irish Language – the wording is the same as a leaflet produced by the PAGL group.
Mr Sinnott, who is 62 and from Co Dublin, says he “despises” the Irish language.
Despite insisting PAGL was not behind the leaflets in the Dublin Road area, he says his group has placed leaflets opposing Irish on vehicles in both Belfast city centre and at Belfast International Airport in November.
He said he has previously been interviewed by police over letters written to Irish language campaigner Linda Ervine and her colleagues at the Turas project in east Belfast.
Mr Sinnott said his group – which he claims includes around 30 members – has emailed the PAGL leaflet to elected members of the DUP, UUP, TUV and Alliance in the north in a bid to gain support for the campaign.
“I feel that religion is being targeted, and if it is, then the Irish language should be targeted, but not in a way that intimidates or causes anyone to feel it is a hate campaign” he told the Irish News.
“Our members are based in the Republic, where of course there has been a huge push for the use of the Irish language, but the language movement is very active in the north now.”
Mr Sinnott said historic moves by the British to oppose Gaelic, including bans on its use, was “just so they could make it that we would all speak the same language”.
His group’s leaflet states “Ireland’s Christianity is a more important part of Ireland’s heritage than the language ever was” and the government in Dublin “would do much more for the Irish people if they taught Latin in our schools instead of Gaelic”.
It adds the government has used “compulsion, bribes, grants and of course jobbery” to “force” people to speak Gaelic, but said Irish people have “resisted and refused” these attempts.
According to Census figures from 2022, almost 40% of people in the Republic said they had some ability to speak Irish.
In the north, around 4% say they can speak Irish according to the 2021 Census, while 12.4% say they have some ability with it.
Mr Sinnott said his group plans to hand out more leaflets in schools and colleges in the Republic.
However, Linda Ervine said there is a “great love” of the Irish language in the Republic, along with its rise in use north of the border.
“If you somehow removed Irish from its position in the south, there would be a terrible outcry,” she said.
“Because it is so accessible there, there can be sometimes be a lack of appreciation, but as the saying goes, ‘you don’t miss the water until the well runs dry’. As for Northern Ireland, in the work that I do, I see Irish as a medium of reconciliation that brings people together for the love of the language.”
And that’s not just the view of hardliners, but fact most people in the Republic are unlikely to budge over the issue is yet another barrier to change
Judith Gillespie is a former PSNI Deputy Chief ConstableThe Irish TricolourSinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald carry Ted Howell’s coffin
Sam McBride
Today at 02:38
“You can’t eat a flag” is one of the most brilliantly succinct summations of a political philosophy — and if John Hume’s telling was correct, it was a piece of instinctive fatherly advice rather than the product of spin doctors or focus groups.
Those five words convey a simple truth: neither tribalism nor patriotism put food on anyone’s table. And yet rarely is the truth quite as simple as a slogan suggests.
Flags — or rather, what they represent — feed many people. Armies which fight beneath flags enable conquest or defence from conquest, the grabbing of far-off riches, the protection of trade routes, and ultimately much of the food which ends up on tables in countries where we can philosophically debate (or write newspaper columns about) this in peace.
There are few people for whom the sight of their nation’s flag evokes no emotion whatsoever. Most people feel at least some sense of pride or belonging when seeing their flag; if not when seeing it emblazoned on a T-shirt, then certainly when seeing it on a national hero’s coffin or waved jubilantly at some sporting triumph.
Flags symbolise nations. They encapsulate identity. They are designed to include the native by excluding the foreigner. In doing so, a shared flag builds a sense of unity among those who live beneath it. These strips of coloured cloth can be powerful motifs for far deeper realities.
Gillespie spent five years as PSNI Deputy Chief Constable until retiring in 2014 and then became a founding member of the Policing Authority, which oversees An Garda Síochána. Recently she told the Royal Irish Academy that on her first day in the job saw a Tricolour in the corner of the room “and I had this almost visceral reaction in my stomach”.
She said it was an “in the pit of my stomach reaction — not something I actively thought about… I wish I could explain it; I don’t know why it happened”.
Asked to elaborate, she said it was “something I had no control over”. She grew up on the Catholic side of a sectarian interface in north Belfast as the daughter of a Protestant cleric known for his peace-building work.
Gillespie said: “My family didn’t tell me that the Tricolour stood for something negative; it’s just that in my upbringing the Union Flag was seen as the flag of the country that I grew up in. My parents would have watched Last Night Of The Proms, the Remembrance Service from the Royal Albert Hall, we would have watched the Queen’s Speech…but there was never anything negative instilled in me about the Irish Tricolour.”
Yet, just seeing the flag led to “an almost physical reaction”. Gillespie said the rational part of her brain quickly kicked in, telling her to “wise up” and “get over yourself” — this is the flag of the Republic whose government had appointed her to a role in which she was to serve the community by utilising her skills.
This is a rare and revelatory glimpse into the deepest reaches of what many unionists in Northern Ireland think. There are plenty of unionists who will openly express derision for the Tricolour, seeing it as the flag of the IRA, and some who will unrepentantly burn it on Eleventh Night bonfires. But, almost invariably, those are hardliners.
Gillespie couldn’t be further removed from their worldview. She espouses moderate political views. She embraced the change of the RUC to the PSNI, even to the extent of learning the Irish language. She worked with Sinn Féin on the Policing Board and was the target of smears from some loyalists for doing so.
If someone with that background, who is demonstrably neither small minded nor a bigot, reacts thus to the Tricolour, it demonstrates the impossibility of persuading almost any Northern Irish unionist this flag could ever be theirs in a united Ireland.
Many unionists will show respect for the Tricolour as the emblem of a foreign nation with whom they have good relations.
But such politeness shouldn’t be misinterpreted as seeing themselves in a flag designed to unite Orange and Green.
Just as the Union Flag was meant to unite all four nations of the United Kingdom, with Ireland present in St Patrick’s Cross, such gestures of compromise only work if they are accepted by those to whom the compromise is addressed.
Outside of support for the Union itself, few issues unite unionists as much as a rejection of ever being represented by the Tricolour.
Even if they could live with some form of Irish unity, they couldn’t live with the flag.
Yet polling consistently shows southerners’ deep attachment to the flag. This illustrates how misleading high polling support for Irish unity in the south is.
There is no way the creation of a new country could be achieved without drastic compromises, many of which would be far more tangible than symbolic.
Three years ago a poll found that only one in four southerners would give up the Tricolour and one in three would give up the National Anthem. A separate survey of TDs found just 36% of them would be open to changing flag or anthem. A year later research found 30% of southerners aren’t even open to a discussion about the flag and anthem — even where any change would have to be ratified by a referendum (in which there would be a massive nationalist majority).
Last year a poll found that northern Protestants’ overwhelmingly negative views of the Tricolour remain unaltered regardless of whether a symbol of reconciliation or republicanism.
Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald carry Ted Howell’s coffin
In some ways, these are wholly symbolic decisions which would have no practical impact on the lives of a single person. Yet they matter deeply to many people on either side of the debate — more deeply for some than questions of how much Irish unity might cost.
Clare Crockett, 33, was killed in an earthquake in Ecuador in April 2016.
Sister Clare Crockett died in 2016 (Home of the Mother order/PA)
By Cillian Sherlock, PA
January 12, 2025 at 9:56am GMT
A nun from Northern Ireland will be a step closer to sainthood on Sunday following a special ceremony in Spain.
Clare Crockett, 33, from Derry, was killed in an earthquake in Ecuador in April 2016. The building where she had been teaching music collapsed.
Ms Crockett, from Brandywell in Derry, was a larger-than-life character who had been an actor before choosing the religious life. She turned down a chance to present on children’s TV channel Nickelodeon to become a nun.
She said friends were in disbelief when she declared she was going to be a nun while holding a “beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other”.
