Léargas

The chaos surrounding Brexit reached new depths of confusion this week. Theresa May’s Plan B announced on Monday turned out to be no plan at all. She ruled out an extension of Article 50 and a second referendum. There was a lot of spin about talking to business, the devolved administrations, opposition parties and trade unions – all of whose views she ignored for the last two and half years. With a straight face May told the British Parliament on Monday that she wants to find out what MPs are demanding on the backstop! And then she will take that demand back to the EU. The EU has already ruled out any renegotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement. At the time of writing– there are 65 days left to Brexit. It seems to me that May’s real plan is to talk the process down to the point where some MPs – frightened of the consequences of a no deal scenario – will change their vote and back her Withdrawal Agreement. She is playing for time. The consequences of this shambolic Tory government...

Jer as Big Jim Larkin I have been at too many funerals since Christmas. Ted says it’s because we are people of a certain age. Former Dundalk Sinn Féin Councillor Harry Todd, Arthur Mullen, Armagh City Sinn Féin activist Dympna McCague (Corrigan) and actor and trade union activist Jer O’Leary all passed. I never got to the funeral of David Cullinane’s mother Bernadette. Or H Block escapee Seamus McElwaine’s mother. And my friend Jane Crane didn’t have a funeral. Instead her ashes were scattered on Errigal. Great human beings all of them. I am blessed to have known them. My condolences and sympathies to all of their families. I was at Jer O’Leary’s funeral along with Mary Lou McDonald, Micheál Mac Donncha, Lucilita Breathnach and many others from Sinn Féin. There were other political activists, people from theatre and cinema, trade unionists, friends and neighbours. Jer’s coffin was draped in the Starry Plough and the procession included some of his finest trade union banners...

2019 is already promising to be one of those year’s historians and pundits love to label ‘ seminal’ or ‘ watershed’ . There are big issues and big challenges coming down the tracks which will potentially shape life on our island for years to come. The most immediate and obvious is Brexit. England and Wales voted to leave the European Union in 2016. The North and Scotland voted to remain. Those democratic votes have been set aside as the Brexiteers rush lemming-like toward the cliff. British politics are in chaos. A deeply divided Conservative party is being propped up by the DUP. Theresa May says that she is trying to chart a course that will avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland and a calamitous economic melt-down of the British economy. According to a poll of Conservative Party members published this week there is a large majority – 64% - in favour of a no-deal Brexit. Only 29% would support the withdrawal agreement Theresa May struck with the EU. According to the Eco...

Mention the Sinn Féin office on the Falls Road, at its junction with Sevastopol Street, and most people will immediately associate it with the iconic gable wall mural of Bobby Sands that has been there for years. Along the front of the building are a number of plaques relating to Sinn Fein Vice President Maire Drumm and former H-Block hunger striker Pat McGeown, as well as of Pat McBride, Paddy Loughran and Michael O’Dwyer who were shot dead by an RUC officer in the building in February 1992. Less well known and just around the corner, alongside Bobby’s mural, there is a small round black plaque dedicated to Seamus Robinson. Robinson was born in Sevastopol Street in 1890. His story as a founding member of Na Fianna Éireann, a leading figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and his role in the Easter Rising of 1916, as a political prisoner,   and later in the IRA, Sinn Féin and in Fianna Fáil, are not as well-known as that of many others. Nor too is his central role in t...