For a spy, a job requiring furtive anonymity, James Bond always did have an unusual side-line in mass homicide. Apart from The Man with the Golden Gun, where Bond dispatches only the eponymous Scaramanga, his body count almost always hits …
Northern Ireland’s anguish isn’t over
Northern Ireland’s unionists have agreed to do what the Conservatives could not: pay the price for Brexit. The magnitude of this moment should not be underestimated, but nor should it be particularly celebrated. Right or wrong, the DUP’s decision to …
Sinn Féin’s hollow Hamas stance
The torment of Thomas Hand, an Irish man originally from Dun Laoghaire in Dublin, speaks directly to the most visceral fear of every parent: that, one day, we may find ourselves powerless to protect our child. Mr Hand lived with …
Is anyone at home in Northern Ireland?
A few months ago, driven by some romantic impulse, I moved my family into a derelict farmhouse on a steep and remote Ulster hillside, recreating a rural Irish lifestyle my maternal grandparents eagerly fled at the first possible opportunity. Visiting …
The last King of Ireland
On the eve of his coronation, King Charles peered out from behind a giant union flag at the very loyalest of his subjects gathered below. Around 200 people had gathered outside the Co-op on West Belfast’s staunchly Loyalist Shankill Road …
Stakeknife’s final escape
Freddie Scappaticci died sometime last week, somewhere in his late 70s, somewhere in England. It is a death that defies obituary.
Obituaries give shape to a death and hold it in context, allowing us to extract explanations and lessons. But …
Joe Biden’s Irish fantasy
At the end of a winding country lane on the shores of Lough Allen in County Leitrim sits a beautiful little cemetery, seemingly all alone in the world. I discovered it while looking for the resting place of my grandad’s …
Ireland will always be divided
Sitting together in the small hours of Good Friday, David Trimble and John Hume slipped into sentimentalism, harking back to holidays spent in Donegal and, in particular, the rugged, rocky peninsular of Inishowen. Inishowen is in the Republic, but is …
Ireland is a Freudian dream
My fall from innocence happened at the age of seven. I was sitting with my mother on a Manchester bus when I decided to pipe up with an Irish rebel song. Even as a small child I knew quite a …
Larkin’s lesson for Northern Ireland
In May 1950, Philip Larkin was appointed sub-librarian at Queen’s University in Belfast. He knew little about the city, or indeed the university, but needed a change. His application for a job in London had been rejected. Belfast offered an …
What we forget about Northern Ireland
Outside of a handful of busy seaports, the population of Britain between the Norman Conquest and the Fifties was extraordinarily stable. But Irish migration to Britain was huge, even if it is usually left out of the noble lie we …
Will the Windsor Framework get Brexit done?
Could something positive have finally happened in Northern Ireland’s never-ending Brexit story? After years of diplomatic failure, yesterday a package of measures was unveiled by Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen which might actually resolve the border dilemma. The …
Were the DUP right all along?
Northern Ireland is the Brexit wound that will not heal. Britain’s fourth prime minister in as many years now finds himself in the same position as all the others: locked in a defining battle with Brussels, seeking an answer to …
Were the DUP right all along?
Northern Ireland is the Brexit wound that will not heal. Britain’s fourth prime minister in as many years now finds himself in the same position as all the others: locked in a defining battle with Brussels, seeking an answer to …
Idleness is the tool of the devil
Idleness is the strangest of Beveridge’s five Giants, an amorphous shapeshifter in comparison with the terrible lumbering colossus Want. It appears last in Beveridge’s sequence, a place usually reserved for the most baleful of adversaries — Death upon its pale …