Can’t help but notice how my view on this issue has hardened. A decade ago I didn’t like clocks going forward much it was what it was. Now, well, it feels like an imposition.

Difficult to believe it is one year on from Jeffrey Donaldson stepping down as leader of the DUP, having been charged with rape and historical sexual offences. A significant shock on every level. Most will recall where they heard this news that morning of March 29th.

But what of unionism. Where does it, in all its strands, stand after one year? Clearly the charges had impacts electorally and in other ways: desperately bad electoral results for a start and all that they entailed for the DUP’s position as the standard bearer for unionism, and the relative standing of unionism and republicanism within NI. Yet the institutions of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement have weathered this crisis and unionism in its own way has too.

Good podcast from the Belfast Telegraph with Suzanne Breen. It captures both the almost incredible reality of the charges, and then the ramifications.

The Irish Times politics podcast appeared to have come to a consensus that, all things considered, the opposition has a point about the speaking time controversy. Some will call this progress. And they focused in on one parliamentarian in particular as being essentially at the heart of it. A certain M. Lowry T.D.

But it was odd to hear them puzzling over why he was there. “Power but to what purpose?” is how one could sum up their general take on it. They nodded at ego but it might seem to many that there’s a much much simpler explanation.

Being at the heart of a government building process, central to it really, is in a way a legitimation. To hear Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil intone loftily that he had been returned by his constituents in order to explain why they were dealing with him must have been almost a vindication. They had come, if not as supplicants, certainly with a degree of acquiescence to his wishes. That they had then had to defend his role week after week after week must be remarkably sweet to see given the less congenial words that had been bandied around by personages all the way up to the current Taoiseach. Revenge. Cold. Dish. Etc.

That Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would allow themselves to be in this position – to allow someone to wield such leverage over them, to essentially see them on the back foot for months – that’s something.

And while this site has had quite a few posts on this topic, it’s not unimportant. It has (and here the IT and Irish Independent politics podcasts were at one) seen a coalescence of the opposition, on this issue at least. It has underscored the right-wing nature of this government. It has seen this government appear oddly unstable for all that it has the votes to push through more or less what it wants. It has seen a remarkable rupture open between the Ceann Comhairle and the Opposition. Four months in, that’s quite some record.

Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive. 

As noted previously the Spartacist Group Ireland, originally established as the Dublin Sparticist Group in Autumn 1990, was an Irish affiliate of the Spartacists / International Communist League. The Spartacists are originally a US organisation which split from the US Socialist Workers Party in the 1960s.

This document is a simple two pager which argues:

We in the Dublin Spartacist Group call for urgent mobilisations by the workers movement in defence of Traveller halting sites and to put a stop to racist cop and vigilante attacks on Travellers!Hands off the Travellers!

The government’s ”law and order’• ”anti drugs’1 campaign – kicked off in the first place by the ”Rainbow Coalition” with the full support of the Labour Party and Democratic Left – means the strengthening of the repressive powers of the capitalist state which-will be used against workers, women’s rights activists, Repubicans and Travellers. Youth Defence Blueshirts feel the wind in their sails and have targeted the Mary Stopes women’s clinic.

Notable is an attack on the Socialist Party. Also notable is the mention of the Spartacists group being founded seven years previously. 

It concludes with the appeal: For an Irish workers republic, part of a socialist federation of the British Isles. 

gregtimo proposed in comments recently the idea of a Culture Thread.

It’s a great idea. Currently culture is a bit strange, but people read, listen to music, watch television and film and so on – spread the net wide, sports, activities, interests, all relevant – and any pointers are always welcome. And it’s not just those areas but many more. Suggestions as to new or old things, events that might have been missed, literally anything.

All contributions welcome.

From the Business Post:

How Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil TDs can defend doing business with this individual is impossible to fathom. Their actions denigrate Irish politics, while showing contempt for everything we should value in politics – transparency, honesty and high standards. It is ironic too that the government seems willing to die in a ditch’ to defend the speaking rights, of all things, of a TD who is not exactly famed for his lofty oratorical skills.

Though apparently those opposing this ‘impossible to fathom’ ‘contemptible’ ‘denigration’ of Irish politics are no better?

The parties of the left, which proclaim to concern themselves with the maintenance (and expansion) of the welfare state, will be wilfully ignoring the imminent risk of a collapse in the tax revenues which fund Ireland’s social housing, health, education and social protection mod-els, so that they can vote to try to remove Ireland’s first ever female ceann comhairle.

How can any of these people ever suggest they want to lead the country, when they cannot get their heads out of the sand for five seconds to understand the economic carnage that a trade war will cause for Ireland?

They cannot even pretend to put the national interest first.

From the Sunday Independent this morning.

The row over speaking rights keeps bringing the Dáil to a standstill. 

What’s odd is how it has erupted between two sides who, when they do get time to speak, have precious little of interest to say.

You don’t have to believe electoral politics is the be all and end all of political activity to find that a characteristically dismissive take, and it raises the question just what the writer would think was of interest as the business of the Dáil? Reading the rest of the piece the answer would appear to be ‘views on gender’. Yeah, that’s the way to run a country.

A perfect example of the slippery slope theory in the Independent yesterday:

Who will blink first in this endless Dáil speaking rights row?

If the Government gives in, the opposition will think all it has to do to get its way is obstruct the order of business

Are Labour getting too close to Sinn Féin for their own good?

The horror.

Here’s a bleak analysis:

The country is in thrall to older, property owning, and usually pensioned voters. That is set to intensify as demographics change, and more heavy lifting must be done by fewer people of working age, paying higher rents while scrambling to get on the housing ladder.

Our system is the sow eating her own farrow. The cost of the inequity is borne by younger, unhoused, and under-pensioned people. A property charge that made a meaningful contribution to the Exchequer would also dampen the rise in property prices. Instead, even as public spending increases by a further 7 per cent this year on an unstable tax base, the system front loads the net benefit of increased value on to existing property owners. They then use political power to test the system they benefit most from, to the point of destruction.

The general election campaign last November was a raucous wake for an era that was already over. We cannot continue to spend like this and tax like that. The sums don’t add up. What cannot continue either is the lethargy of an administrative state that under-delivers at a cost we can no longer afford. We will meet events next week carrying forward the cumulative costs of our inefficiency and self-indulgence. The single most important next step is a reality check. The next step after that is to do something about it.

If only the author of the piece had been close to government in this state, in the 2000s for example, and able point out the problems and shout stop. If only. 

A voice of the nation, and regular feature of this post, offers this opinion on culture:

Fast forward to 2025 and the literary realm is in a depressing and depressive state. Now, 200,000 books are published annually in the UK alone. That is too many. Recent polling by YouGov found only 60 per cent of people there had read in the past year. That is too few. And while Irish teenagers’ technical literacy is second only to those in Singapore, there is scant evidence that this translates into them becoming high volume readers in adulthood.

Too many books being published is a problem?