Tag: Northern Ireland

It seems like no time ago that the DUP’s Sammy Wilson was loudly advising the British that “the blackmailing burghers from Brussels” and the “cheap political opportunists” from Dublin must be met with a “tough” response during the Brexit negotiations. Ian Paisley jnr likewise told the then Brexit minister that what was needed was to shout “No surrender” at the EU. The prime minister had bought its 10 parliamentary votes and, in defiance of her responsibilities to the Belfast Agreement, was acting as if the DUP was the one-party government of Northern Ireland. The timid have left you; your Lundys have betrayed you; but you have closed your gates.” He was referring, of course, to the siege of Derry in 1689, when the Protestant apprentice boys shut the gates of the walled city against the Catholic forces of King James. DUP leader Arlene Foster insisted that whatever else about Brexit, there must be “no border down the Irish Sea”. That, she said, was her party’s red line. Its British allies are the worst of the Brexit fanatics. He also claimed that this was “all about a punishment beating for the UK because they dared to leave the EU” and that the prime minister had permitted this. The party knew and had been told over and over that the Belfast Agreement made it inevitable that the backstop preventing a hard border would be included in any deal. All that matters is the old game of betrayal and defiance, the pathetic sectarian politics of “No surrender!”

A leading artist has said life in Northern Ireland will only be transformed once there are "liberally-minded" female politicians who have the courage to do "what they know is best". Belfast-born artist Rita Duffy said that while there are leading female politicians in Northern Ireland, women still have a "minimal voice". She insisted there needs to be change. ''As a community of people, we in Ulster are in serious need of oxygen and engagement with the outside world and so often lack that female perspective,'' she told BBC News NI. Learn more AdChoices Her two-month trip includes time at a former detention centre in the Atacama desert in Chile while in Argentina she plans to meet members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The group is made up of women who campaign for the return of the bodies of their children who were killed during the 1970s and 80s. She explained: "There are obvious social and political parallels between here and there; dirty war, armed groups, government mishandling of events, power and violence and the silencing of women. Ms Duffy said she was particularly looking forward to visiting the Atacama desert. "The dry desert under foot in this area is searched regularly by families of the Disappeared searching desperately for tiny bone fragments of loved ones. I will have the chance to accompany him on this journey."

He said: “I hope and I believe that we can secure that majority in parliament.” Lidington was speaking after the DUP’s Brexit spokesman, Sammy Wilson, said his party was prepared to vote against May’s deal. Brexit: Hunt says he is 'confident' UK and EU will reach deal within three weeks - Politics live Read more The Northern Irish party, upon which May upon for her Commons majority, had reacted angrily to suggestions in a letter from the prime minister, which had been leaked to the Times, that Northern Ireland could have a different regulatory regime to the rest of the UK if the Irish backstop comes into force. Wilson said Conservative MPs also had concerns about other aspects of the mooted deal. The DUP accused May of breaking a promise that she would never sign up to a deal that treated Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK. Secondly, it would be a legal agreement which the government of the UK could not walk away from – that could only be broken if the government in the UK and the EU agreed to it being changed.” The DUP leader, Arlene Foster, tweeted on Friday: “The PM’s letter raises alarm bells for those who value the integrity of our precious union & for those who want a proper Brexit for the whole UK. Under the EU proposals, UK officials would be “competent authorities” to conduct the checks, but it is something the DUP has said will cross its red line. If May can win the final backing of her cabinet for her negotiating stance, she hopes to strike a deal with the EU in the coming days. No-deal Brexit is only alternative to Chequers plan, says Lidington Read more That would include both a withdrawal agreement, governing the terms of Britain’s exit, and a political declaration about the future trading relationship the two sides hope to negotiate after Brexit. “I think that if we get the withdrawal agreement, and the accompanying political declaration, which I hope that we can secure in the weeks to come, that will create a new dynamic,” Lidington said. He continued: “It will no longer be a question of some hypothetical outcome, to which anybody might wish to add or subtract their own political preferences, but a pair of documents that will have been agreed and endorsed by the government of the United Kingdom, and by the 27 other governments of the member-states of the EU, led by politicians of left, right and centre.

Theresa May has been told that it is up to her to deliver a “creative solution” to break the impasse that threatens to leave Wednesday’s “moment of truth” Brexit summit of EU leaders collapsing around her. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, said the UK government had also failed to meet the conditions necessary for a special November Brexit summit to be called. “And as I see it, the only source of hope for a deal – for now – is the goodwill and determination on both sides. Tomorrow, I am going to ask prime minister May whether she has concrete proposals on how to break the impasse. The ex-foreign secretary’s suggestions that the EU was seeking to annex Northern Ireland or divide the UK were “of course, not the truth”, he said. Theresa May chairs Brexit cabinet as EU says no deal 'more likely than ever before' - Politics live Read more “Since there is no agreement on the Irish backstop there will not be an outline of joint political declaration on the table on Wednesday evening … [that] will not change before Wednesday,” a senior EU official said. Asked what his message to May would be, he said: “Take responsibility and be constructive.” A December summit is now being seen as the likely last chance for a deal, although senior UK officials have suggested that such a timetable could make it all but impossible to get the necessary Brexit legislation through parliament in time for 29 March 2019. In his update to the EU’s 27 EU affairs ministers, Barnier ran through the calendar, counting backwards from Brexit day on 29 March 2019. Barnier told ministers at the closed-door meeting he wanted to reassess the progress of Brexit talks in about two weeks. The option of a “no-deal” summit in November is still open and will be discussed by leaders on Wednesday.

In current plans, the backstop, under which the whole of the UK would stay in a customs union while Northern Ireland alone effectively stayed in the single market, would be enacted in December 2020 if a bespoke technological solution or trade deal could not be reached by then. Foster has insisted she will not accept any Brexit deal under which Northern Ireland is treated differently to the rest of the UK. There was alarm about the language used by Downing Street on Friday that Theresa May “would never agree to a deal that would trap the UK in a backstop permanently”. The plan to include an extension clause in the withdrawal agreement would be a way to assuage concerns. A senior EU diplomat said that the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, could arrive at the European commission on Monday, should a deal be agreed during intensive talks over the weekend. “Mr Raab has stated he might come to Brussels on Monday,” the diplomat said. The negotiating teams are back in their offices today discussing outcome of talks over the last few days.” May asked in September last year for a transition period, which she optimistically described in her Florence speech at the time as a period of implementation of aspects of the future trade deal, including migration controls. The prime minister’s spokeswoman said on Friday: “When we published our plans in June on a UK-wide customs backstop, we were absolutely clear that the arrangement would be temporary, and only in place until our future economic relationship is ready.” Mujtaba Rahman, a former Treasury and European commission official, and now head of Europe for the Eurasia Group risk consultancy, said an extra six months would be needed if only for a trade deal to be negotiated and ratified by all the member states’ parliaments. “The UK has no choice but to ask for a mechanism to extend the transition, not least to further mollify the DUP,” Rahman said. “But doing so is also a recognition of reality: both the UK and the EU’s political leadership will change next year, meaning substantive trade negotiations are unlikely to begin until September 2019 at the earliest.” Jacob Rees-Mogg, the chair of the European Research Group, said extending the transition “would not necessarily make the backstop redundant and would be very expensive” because of the expected additional contributions to the EU budget.

Karen Bradley has admitted that before becoming Northern Ireland secretary she was profoundly ignorant of the country’s political divisions and “slightly scared” of the place. She said she was unaware that nationalists did not vote for unionists and that unionists did not vote for nationalists – the most elementary fact about Northern Ireland politics. “I freely admit that when I started this job, I didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland,” Bradley told House magazine, a weekly publication for the Houses of Parliament. “I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa. “Actually, the unionist parties fight the elections against each other in unionist communities and nationalists in nationalist communities.” Minister announces pay cut for Stormont assembly members Read more Theresa May appointed Bradley to the post in January – succeeding James Brokenshire – at an exceptionally sensitive time because of Brexit and the breakdown in Stormont’s power-sharing government. Theresa May sent the former culture secretary to Belfast supposedly as a safe pair of hands. “That’s a very different world from the world I came from where in Staffordshire Moorlands I was fighting a Labour-held seat as a Conservative politician and I was trying to put forward why you would want to switch from voting Labour to voting Conservative. On Thursday she said their pay will be slashed after 19 months if the devolved government is not restored. Their pay would fall from £49,500 to £35,888 in November, with another reduction of £6,187 three months later if the assembly did not resume its work, Bradley told MPs. She ruled out immediate elections for the devolved assembly, which has not operated since power sharing between the DUP and Sinn Féin collapsed in January last year, and announced plans for civil servants to have more powers to implement policies.

His father, Norman, the Ulster Unionist MP for St Anne’s, Belfast, died in April that year and John won the seat in the consequent byelection. Son of Norman, a GP, and Margaret, he was born in Belfast into a unionist family. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and then went into banking rather than to university, owing to his dyslexia. In 1972, after the UK government suspended the Stormont government, Brian Faulkner, the last Unionist prime minister, triggered Laird’s political involvement with the Ulster Scots heritage of those who were descended, as he was, from the Protestants settled in Ireland after King William of Orange defeated the Catholic James II in 1690. He set up a successful PR agency, John Laird Public Relations, and remained its chair until 2001. He opposed the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement, voting in defiance of his party whip, and developed links with the Vanguard Unionist party, which had been founded in 1972 by the former UUP cabinet minister, William Craig, and which organised rallies against Sunningdale. In 1976, when a further political experiment, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention, was suspended, Laird left politics publicly but maintained links particularly with David Trimble, Craig’s deputy in Vanguard. In 1999 one went to Laird. During the Good Friday negotiations, Trimble sought parity for Protestant culture with Catholic Irish culture. • John Dunn Laird, Lord Laird, politician, born 23 April 1944; died 10 July 2018

Tory hopes of uniting the party behind Theresa May’s latest vision for Brexit faded as former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine dismissed her latest speech as just more “phrases, generalisations and platitudes” which had done nothing to make a deal more likely. We've gone from the fastest growing to the slowest growing economy in Europe and made a Horlicks of the Irish border A lifelong europhile, Heseltine conceded that the prime minister was in a difficult position, as rightwing Tory MPs held “a knife to her throat”. But neither the prime minister nor her cabinet had made any progress on the central Brexit problems, including the Irish border, because such issues were essentially not solvable unless the UK stayed in the EU. The only way forward, he said, was for the issues to be put back to parliament, and then to an election or referendum. “The downsides are becoming more evident as time passes. Play Video 2:01 “It is good to hear that the UK wants to stay in regulatory alignment but that doesn’t really solve any problems,” said one diplomat involved in drafting the EU’s position. Talks have continued between Labour MPs and Conservatives about how to push forward amendments on the customs union, single market, and the date of Brexit, on which May could well be defeated. There are also signs that worries about Brexit could hit the Tories in May’s local elections. Tory council leaders across the UK are among those who believe Brexit will damage their local economies, putting them under greater pressure to push up council taxes and cut yet more services, according to a new survey of local authority leaders and chief executives. The survey by the New Local Government Network (NLGN) showed only 12% of 185 respondents believed it would have a positive effect on their economies, while 26% felt the impact of leaving the EU would be neutral.