Tag: The Troubles

But Watchtower Adventures owner Mark Rice fears he could go bust if Brexit brings back controls along the currently free-flowing frontier. "You just don't know, you could wake up some morning the next day with the road blocked," he said. "It would probably close me down, that is the big fear, and I've put everything I have into it." Advertisement Where stag dos and hen parties trade luminous paintball volleys, British Army base "Romeo 21" once loomed during the conflict that tore the British province of Northern Ireland apart for three decades. Three watchtowers and a helicopter pad commanded a panoramic view of the border between County Armagh in Northern Ireland, and County Louth in the Republic. "You woke up in the middle of the night with the helicopters flying over your house," Rice remembered. The region's turbulent history is now part of the paintballing park's marketing strategy. At the same time, the haunting hidden remnants of the army base have surfaced again after a heat wave last summer that kindled gorse fires in the area. Coils of rusted barbed wire, heavy metal bolts and wiring are now visible - a reminder that the past in this troubled zone lies just under the surface. "We're now again talking in the language of orange and green, British and Irish, nationalist and unionist, republican and loyalist."

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.

The prime minister’s challenge is how to manage both the most important Canadian ally and his own domestic politics. “The charm offensive has produced little of what the prime minister hoped.” Even before Mr. Trump came to power, Mr. Trudeau, and his closest aides and cabinet members rushed to connect with the new president and his advisers. Now Mr. Trump is challenging Canada’s longtime dairy system, which uses high tariffs to largely exclude imports. The prospect of a full-on trade war is an alarming proposition; trade with the United States is the economic lifeblood of Canada. “We cannot win a trade war with 75 percent of our trade going to the U.S. We’re highly vulnerable to American actions. He has to deal with the survival of the Canadian economy.” In recent days, Mr. Trump has focused mainly on Canada’s dairy system, known as “supply management,” which is a longstanding irritant between Canada and several other countries, including the United States. Still, the United States sells about five times more dairy products to Canada than Canada exports south. Nonetheless, the supply management system riles up Mr. Trump, who says the Canadian market should be fully opened to American dairy farmers. “The U.S. position on supply management hasn’t changed since President Obama,” said Meredith Lilly, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa and the former international trade adviser to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Politicians of all political stripes have avoided pushing back, and Canada has won exemptions for the system in several trade agreements, including Nafta and, most recently, a free-trade pact with Europe.

AirTalk’s weekly politics roundtable wraps up the big headlines you missed this weekend and looks ahead to the week in D.C. and California. Washington Post reports Sessions warned WH not to fire Rosenstein DNC lawsuit against Russia, Trump campaign, WikiLeaks (this might be more current) Rudy Giuliani joining Trump’s legal team Cohen and Trump’s relationship moving forward North Korea latest (Kim says they no longer need missile tests, Trump says he hasn’t made too many concessions) Supreme Court to hear travel ban case Wednesday Emmanuel Macron & Angela Merkel visit D.C. this week Barbara Bush’s funeral (and possibly working in a mention of that Fresno State professor who tweeted some incendiary comments about the former First Lady) Guests: Lisa Garcia Bedolla, professor in the Graduate School of Education and director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley; she tweets @GarciaBedolla Jeremy Carl, research fellow at the Hoover Institution; served in an advisory capacity Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign; he tweets @JeremyCarl4