Mick Fealty

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 …

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 …

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 …

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” – John Adams “Well, if the vote is for Brexit things will be more interesting.” “Facts don’t matter”. “When I offered them my contact book, none were interested. Young journalists these days are only interested in a 9-5 job job which involves taking no risks.” These are all off record quotes from local working journalists …

Away from the horse race politics of the latest survey published in the Irish News this morning is some fascinating [Excruciating? – Ed] detail for the DUP. Pete Shirlow is quoted in the FT… What comes out very clearly in our survey — and this is the first time I’ve seen this — is that people who are pro-union are stating that they will think about Irish unity if the assembly doesn’t come back. Unionist behaviour has driven away sectors …

Máiría Cahill begins and ends with an apt choice of words from Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming, both for the title but also a deft epilogue that references “the drowning of innocence” and closes the final chapter of her book Rough Beast. In the original the “rough beast” that “slouches towards Bethlehem” is the shadow that threatens the foundation of western civilisation. But the personal connotations lies in the violation of her young body at the rough hands of …

As Ryan Tubridy takes what may well be a last roll of the dice to save his career in front of a Dail committee today, it looks like he’s planning to tough it out, but while we wait for an outcome it is worth taking a look at a controversy closer to home. The Irish News over the last week has published a number of articles by commentators some of whom I like (£) and admire (£) on the subject …

“Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” — Heinz von Foerster Everyone (I hope) has a teacher upon whom they look back fondly and with gratitude for the good influence their teaching had on the rest of their lives. I can think of three, my P1 teacher Miss Farrell, who lulled me into the idea school would be fun. My O level Maths teacher Frank Kelly who taught me there’s never any such thing as a stupid …

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . .” -Jonathan Swift Newton Emerson had an intriguing theory in his column yesterday, one I’m not sure can be proven but it fit with a lot of evidence. I never subscribed to the idea that that SF were strategic in their mission, but they are geniuses …

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There’s a few things I was tempted to blog about tomorrow, but this is an occasion I would least have wanted to mark. Henry McDonald, late of The Observer (and The Guardian), has died. Henry was the first mainstream journalist to pick up our press release on the report that launched Slugger as a serious watering hole for Northern Irish politics. I wasn’t entirely happy with the angle he took, but then Henry and I rarely agreed. When we later …

Another poll in The Irish Times recently probes the unanchored certainties of those pushing an early unification without reference to the realities of the Belfast Agreement and the new binding articles of the Bunreacht na hÉireann. Fintan O’Toole comments: Those who want unity the most seem to see it is an extension of sameness: the North essentially dissolves into the South. But the survey shows how very far from Irish reality such an assumption remains. Any honest discussion of unity …

John Manley reported earlier in the week that whilst the timetable may not coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, there seems a seriousness about EU/UK talks that was entirely missing under the Boris Johnson administration. In today’s Irish News Newton Emerson notes that even the Restoring Northern Ireland’s Place in the Union report from a new think tank Centre for the Union, and coauthored by Jamie Bryson and Ethan Thoburn, editor of the Bruges Group… Unionism’s practical…

Stories for me kick in about the time I finally began to do some interesting things with my working life. I spent a large chunk of my 20s and 30s helping groups of kids mostly (in schools mostly) across Ireland, Britain and in what was then a carefully delineated western Europe from Lisbon to Wilhelmina in northern Sweden to Keady in south Armagh. In west Berlin, nearly four years before the wall came down, I vaguely recall gathering a story …

“When you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water.” — Alfred North Whitehead Last week we had the disturbing news that a Belfast academic had received threats t…

For all the obsessive public chatter about a prospective united Ireland, there are two questions that almost never get asked: why do we need one and how would anyone go about making it happen? Neither relate to the one that currently dominates: ie, what would it look like? It is a question that can…

Fionnuala O’Connor asks an interesting and usefully realist question in today’s Irish News: Is Michelle O’Neill expected to say IRA violence was unjustified? Fionnuala’s conclusion: history is not that simple. When you join modern Sinn Féin you conjoin with what was at the time an unpopular campaign…

I’m not sure where nationalism would be these days without the stereotype of the Orange bigot. The bonfire story is now a staple of the commercially problematic silly season, when papers are hard to sell. As Mairia Cahill noted last Sunday, “on Wednesday the PSNI confirmed this year was ’one of the…

As a follow up to this, here’s the video which contains presentation I gave on Thursday evening as part of the Imagine Belfast (the bulk of which is here). It’s worth watching the whole thing especially Ciarán O’Connor’s presentation on how new social tech is providing a safe space for hate crimes. …

This is an excellent (and fairly non judgemental) outline of the Brexit process and why and how it got messy quite so quickly from Professor Anand Menon, Director of the UK in a Changing Europe… I think the non judgemental bit is important if we are going to stand any chance of un-muddling things …