Ireland

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

Avoiding a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is the government’s top aim in Brexit talks. Brussels wants much the same: the EU Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt has insisted that there should be no return to a fixed border. This is an aspiration shared by the EU, which makes the issue one of its three priorities before Brexit talks can proceed to the next stage. The Tories’ new friends-in-government are also agreed – and so, too, is the Irish government. Rarely does Brexit generate such unanimity. So if all sides are agreed, you’d be forgiven for thinking things should be straightforward. Unfortunately not. While it’s clear what

The question of what kind of border after Brexit will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic will, I predict, become a very thorny one indeed as negotiations crawl into the autumn. Talk of ‘putting the border in the Irish Sea’ — somehow leaving the north inside the EU for customs and immigration purposes, but cut off from European funding — was a red herring that provoked DUP tantrums, but more significant was the weekend outburst from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. As far as his government is concerned ‘there shouldn’t be an economic border… and we’re not going to help [the British] design some sort of border that we don’t believe

There are three areas on which the EU insists that the Brexit negotiations must make progress on, before proper trade talks can start: the so-called divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens in the UK and the Irish border. Today, the Irish PM said that no progress had been made on this issue, that the Brexiteers had had 14 months to devise a plan and hadn’t come up with anything adequate. Implicit in the Taoiseach’s speech is a threat to block the start of trade talks this autumn. If Dublin doesn’t think any progress had been made on the border question, the European Commission is highly unlikely to recommend to

The question of what kind of border after Brexit will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic will, I predict, become a very thorny one indeed as negotiations crawl into the autumn. Talk of ‘putting the border in the Irish Sea’ — somehow leaving the north inside the EU for customs and immigration purposes, but cut off from European funding — was a red herring that provoked DUP tantrums, but more significant was the weekend outburst from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. As far as his government is concerned ‘there shouldn’t be an economic border… and we’re not going to help [the British] design some sort of border that we don’t believe

Dublin and London had been fairly tight since December 1993 and the Downing Street Declaration—until yesterday morning. The Times led with ‘Irish want sea border with UK after Brexit’. The DUP’s Sir Jeffrey Donaldson rushed breathlessly on to the Today programme to say there was ‘no way’ his party would accept it. The notion isn’t new.  The idea is that the customs and immigration checks move away from the land border, and are done on ports or planes reaching either island. It pours cold seawater on Downing Street’s preferred idea that a ‘frictionless border’ can just rely on nifty cameras. ‘We do not want to pretend … we can solve the problems of the

A political party barely known outside Northern Ireland now holds the balance of power in Parliament. Nobody saw it coming, but then that’s the new catchphrase in politics. So who are the DUP? And do they deserve the pillorying that has been coming their way since the general election catapulted them into the spotlight? I have been watching the party up close for decades. Yet while the DUP isn’t always a pretty sight to behold, the party is much more complicated than the hysterical stereotyping makes out. It’s true that the DUP has its roots in uncompromising unionism and religion. And for many years it was little more than a one-man’s fan club: the political extension of Ian Paisley’s hardline

Is Jeremy Corbyn really out to help the poor – or just to entice the middle classes into his big socialist tent? I ask because the more you examine the manifesto he keeps waving before the television cameras, the more it seems to be designed around giving benefits to the better-off. These won’t come without cost, of course – the better-off will also be paying for the benefits which Corbyn is dangling before their eyes, in the form of higher income taxes, and possibly new wealth taxes, too. But for the moment, it seems to be the potential handouts which are making Labour headlines rather than the prospect of higher

I suppose that if you are under thirty, Northern Ireland seems a place far away and it must be difficult to imagine a time when news from the province was a regular feature of the BBC and ITV nightly news bulletins. The Good Friday Agreement, for all its imperfections and awkward compromises, settled something that now belongs to something close to ancient history. A YouGov poll last month suggested only one in five voters thought they knew even a fair amount about Jeremy Corbyn’s history with Sinn Fein, the IRA, and the wider republican movement. The young can be forgiven their ignorance. But there are many people old enough to remember what

Amidst the apparent chaos in the days after the Brexit vote, one important story largely slipped under the radar. Now, the demand issued by Sinn Féin for a border poll on reunification of Ireland is resurfacing. Admittedly, back in June, it was difficult to know how much attention to pay to such a demand. Irish reunification is, after all, the entire purpose of the Irish Republican party. However, in the months since the referendum, the peripheral possibility of Irish reunification is starting to move centre stage. And the old platitude from Sinn Féin is morphing into a growing and credible movement on both sides of the Irish border. But it’s not only Sinn Féin who are pushing

We keep being incited to find it heartwarming that Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley were known as the Chuckle Brothers. But what were they chuckling about? Their shared success at outwitting the British state. Both, though for opposite reasons, had made their careers out of harassing Britain, and both, in their later years, had acquired money, power and status by doing so. In the case of McGuinness and his gang, Britain greatly underplayed its hand. Having militarily beaten the IRA, successive British governments could have marginalised them, but instead they accepted them as authentic representatives of the Irish people who had to be included in any settlement. The process for