Ireland

Changing Ireland’s abortion laws would be a backward step

It will, as one pro-life campaigner told me, take an act of God to swing the Irish referendum for the No side tomorrow. I’m all for referendums but this one has been so wildly unbalanced as to make the Brexit campaign look almost effete in its regard for impartiality and fair play. The polls suggest a win for the Yes side, on repealing the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution which protects the right to life of the unborn – something around the 44-32 per cent margin, according to the last Irish Times poll. It’s a big deal, abortion. But there is not one political party that represents the No

Ireland’s abortion vote and the wild west of online adverts

It’s sometimes hard to know who’s really behind decisions at big tech firms. It could have been the PR team (‘we don’t want more negative press’), the policy team (‘the luddites in parliament want to regulate us’) or the engineers (‘we can’t stop it’). Whoever it was, a couple of weeks back both Google and Facebook announced measures to prevent foreign interference in tomorrow’s Irish referendum on the eighth amendment, which effectively outlaws abortion. Facebook is only allowing organisations based in Ireland to run ads about the subject; Google’s gone one further and banned them all.   I suspect it was a rare instance of everyone agreeing. After relentless stories about Cambridge

Ireland’s abortion referendum and the fight for female equality

Ahead of the abortion referendum in Ireland next week, there’s a newspaper advert doing the rounds on Twitter. Printed in the Irish Daily Star earlier this week, it reads: “Men protect lives. It is impossible to look away. As a parent, uncle, grandfather we have a bond that can never be broken. Vote No to abortion on demand” The implication appears to be that women are callous creatures who neither protect lives nor deserve protection. So men have to step in to do so. Next Friday, Irish voters will be asked if they want to repeal the eighth amendment, which gives unborn foetuses and pregnant women equal right to life.

Why should we give in to EU blackmail over the EU border?

In deference to public exhaustion, I’ve largely avoided Brexit in this slot. But a columnist’s output ought rightly to echo what she shouts at the television news. Big picture, the UK may have made an utter Horlicks of its putative withdrawal from the European Union because Britain should never have come to the EU with a begging bowl in the first place. Walking out first and reverting coolly to WTO rules, the UK might have negotiated from a position of strength. You don’t slap a party in the face, only to implore that same party for special favours while his face is still smarting. Big surprise, the strategy has been

The Spectator Podcast: Mayday!

In this week’s podcast, we discuss Theresa May’s impossible situation – how can she get herself out of the bind created by the Brexiteers and the Remainers? We also discuss the hostile environment policy, and ask, will Ireland appeal its Eighth Amendment? First, Theresa May finds herself in a real dilemma. Her cabinet colleagues, the EU and her advisors are all pulling her in different directions over the question of the customs union. While Remainers argue that a ‘customs partnership’ is the only way to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland, Brexiteers believe ‘max fac’ (a maximum facilitation agreement, which includes a technology based border in Ireland) is the

Could Dublin’s preachy liberals save Ireland’s abortion ban?

Could there be a Trump-style upset when the Irish vote next month on whether to repeal the country’s ban on abortion? That’s the question I discuss in the latest Holy Smoke podcast with my guest Tony Trowbridge, an Australian who became an Irish citizen when he was studying law at Trinity College, Dublin, in the 1970s. He’s watched the country’s transformation from something close to a Catholic theocracy into a society dominated by strident-but-smug media-savvy liberals. Irish political correctness is, if anything, even more preachy and joyless than the American variety. In that respect it’s reminiscent of Irish Catholicism, which paradoxically used to have an almost Calvinist feel to it.

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 April 2018

The Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, is not a peace, but a truce. This does not mean that it has no value. Most people in Northern Ireland wish to abide by its terms; it has helped them get on with normal life. But it does mean that difference, rather than being gradually dissolved, is institutionalised. You almost have to sign up to one side or the other. A friend sends me the diversity form of the Northern Ireland civil service which, as a candidate for the service, you must fill in. Unlike some such forms, it offers no ‘prefer not to say’ option. Each candidate must declare whether

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 March 2018

For almost as long as I can remember, Eurosceptic Tory MPs have been defined by the media as ‘head-bangers’. As a result, few notice that they scarcely bang their heads at all these days. The European Research Group (ERG), now led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, is surprisingly united, and makes most of its arguments blande suaviterque. The noise of craniums bashing themselves against Pugin panelling is much louder on the other side — Anna Soubry in the Commons, Andrew Adonis in the Lords. The Eurosceptic head-bangers are being particularly cautious about this week’s transition deal. Although they dislike most of it, they broadly accept the whips’ arguments that if the party can agree

Brexiteers, you were warned about Ireland

If you wished to get to an easy Brexit, well, this isn’t the starting point you’d choose. Once again, the Irish question complicates life for Theresa May’s government. Today’s EU proposals suggesting that, in the absence of a satisfactory deal of the kind proposed back in December, Northern Ireland should, essentially, remain within the EU customs union are both evidently unacceptable to the UK government and a reminder that this is still a negotiated process. What is put on the table today is not necessarily what will be on the table when it is over.  It is difficult to see how any UK government could agree to a ‘solution’ which,

Are the Brexit talks bordering on collapse?

The question of the Irish border has almost collapsed the Brexit talks once, remember Mrs May’s first abortive December trip to Brussels, and it is threatening to do so again. A leaked copy of the EU’s proposed legal text of the phase one agreement that was finally reached in December says that if other options cannot be made to work Northern Ireland would be considered part of the customs territory of the EU. Given the UK’s plan is to leave the customs union, this would—in effect—create an internal economic border within the UK. It is doubtful whether this would be acceptable to any UK government, but it is particularly unacceptable

Irish Herald’s headline fail

Oh dear. We’re only two months into 2018 and already the winner for ‘headline fail of the year’ appears to have been found. The Irish Herald today publishes a report on a man who ‘lived’ in a flat with his ‘dead wife’s body in a wardrobe for 48 hours’. Rather unfortunately the accompanying half page advert is for… discount wardrobes: And the winner of the 2018 most inappropriate product placement in a newspaper goes to the @Herald_ie pic.twitter.com/85qJUgqNSQ — Tony – Pod Guy – Groves (@Trickstersworld) February 19, 2018 Mr S hopes that this wasn’t advertising selling against the story…

Baby, the rock n’ roll spirit should be on your side

I am a rock ‘n’ roller by origin and inclination. I started off in rock journalism writing about bands and song and gigs. I wrote a book vaguely about U2, though not really. I loved the blues, where the whole thing started: the cry of the slave waking up to the theft of his life. I revered Lennon and Dylan because they tuned into that cry and sought to mobilise its power into the modern world. For a few years in my youth I nestled into the cool embrace of modern rock ‘n’ roll culture of protest and hope. But then I began to sense something amiss. Rock stars were talking

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 December 2017

I’m afraid I have a deep faith in the Democratic Unionist Party’s capacity to cede an issue of principle in return for more gold, baubles, Renewable Heat Incentives etc. It may well give in, after receiving some bung, in a few days. But its resistance, at the time of writing, to the idea of ‘regulatory alignment’ with the Republic, seems wholly justified. This is not a pernickety matter solely for the province — it should apply just as much to the entire United Kingdom. If we agree to align trade rules with EU ones (as opposed to each recognising the other’s rules), we are sacrificing the economic point of Brexit,

Ireland, the EU is playing you like a fiddle

The EU has no shame. It is a completely shame-free zone. How else do we explain the grotesque spectacle of EC President Donald Tusk cosying up to Ireland this weekend, and claiming to respect Irish sovereignty, as if the past 15 years of Brussels treating Ireland as a colonial plaything had never happened? As if the EU hadn’t time and again overridden the Irish people’s democratic wishes? As if the EU didn’t just a few years ago send financial experts to run the Irish economy above the heads of the apparently dim Irish demos? Tusk claiming to be a friend of the Irish takes EU chutzpah to dizzying new heights.

Crossing the line

When I negotiated the Good Friday Agreement nearly 20 years ago, no one foresaw a day when the -United Kingdom would be leaving the European Union. It was impossible to imagine how the issue of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, from which the barriers were removed as part of the agreement, would again become an issue of such political importance. We have the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, threatening to veto the Brexit negotiations unless Theresa May gives a formal written guarantee that there will be no hard -border, and we keep hearing the argument that a departure of the UK from the single market and the customs

Ireland’s domestic problems are overshadowed by Brexit

The Irish government has just survived a precarious wobble which would have plunged Britain and Ireland into further chaos over a future Northern Ireland border. Until the resignation of Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Frances Fitzgerald earlier today, there was a clear and present danger of Leo Varadkar’s minority administration falling apart – all because of a police corruption imbroglio nobody in mainstream Irish politics seems prepared to grasp with both hands. Hours ahead of a no-confidence motion Varadkar looked certain to lose, Fitzgerald declared she would be stepping aside ‘in the national interest’. Since May last year, the Fine Gael coalition, led by Varadkar, has been propped up by long-standing foe

Alex Massie

The government’s deeply cunning Brexit plan comes unstuck

So, Frances Fitzgerald, the Tánaiste, has resigned. It now looks as though Leo Varadkar’s minority Irish government will not face a vote of no-confidence that it would likely have lost and, consequently, there will be no Irish election before Christmas. That’s a matter of considerable relief in Dublin but also in London.  Irish political scandals are often esoteric but this, frankly, was no time for an election and that recognition, above all else, compelled Fitzgerald’s departure. In other circumstances she – and Fine Gael – might have fought this to the final furlong. But these are not ordinary times in Dublin. It seems entirely probable, as matters stand, that relations between

The EU helped bring peace to Ireland. Will violence now return?

The 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg is as good week as any to examine the power of sectarianism. Here in Britain we do not need to look far. Northern Ireland ought to be in crisis because a hard Brexit will wreck its economy. The Republic exported €18bn-worth of services to the UK in 2014, and €11.4bn went back. In 2015, it exported €15.6bn of goods. Britain exported €18bn in return. Meanwhile millions from both countries crossed borders we fondly thought were now just lines on the map to see the sights as holidaymakers, or visit their friends,

How to be good

Suffering, wrote Auden, takes place ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. His poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ emphasises the mundanity of pain (‘even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/ Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot’) and how irrelevant it is to all but the sufferer: ‘Everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.’ Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, is peopled by women who refuse to turn away from the disasters of others. The ‘untidy spot’ is Brooklyn, sometime in the first half of the 20th century, and the unsung heroines with no time for leisure are the Little

Ireland’s abortion debate will be next year’s big culture war

If you’re fed up with endless bickering over Brexit, spare a thought for the citizens of Ireland. The government here recently announced plans for a new referendum on abortion, currently prohibited by the Constitution with a few limited exceptions. So the starting pistol has been fired on what is sure to be twelve months of hyperventilating hipsters, jangling rosary beads and a stampede from both the pro-choice and pro-life lobbies towards the moral high ground. The majority of the population – broadly in favour of a liberalisation of the law but against abortion in all circumstances – is already donning figurative hard hats and bracing for the worst. The vote is