Opinion

Newton Emerson: No soldiers in north but we're not immune to Isis threat

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

People observe a minute's silence in St Ann's Square, Manchester, to remember the victims of the terror attack in the city earlier this week PICTURE: Ben Birchall/PA
People observe a minute's silence in St Ann's Square, Manchester, to remember the victims of the terror attack in the city earlier this week PICTURE: Ben Birchall/PA People observe a minute's silence in St Ann's Square, Manchester, to remember the victims of the terror attack in the city earlier this week PICTURE: Ben Birchall/PA

THE decision to deploy troops on British streets in the wake of the Manchester bomb has been taken by a prominent Whitehall intelligence committee, rather than by the hapless Prime Minister, which is why even the furthest fringe of the Labour Party - i.e. its leadership - is debunking conspiracy theories to the contrary.

Instead, Labour and police trade unionists are pointing to manpower cuts and distracting mass-surveillance policies introduced by Theresa May during her stint at the Home Office.

This could be public sector special pleading - without knowing exactly what the threat assessment is, it is hard to know what troops are supposed to do about it.

Still, it is striking that PSNI chief constable George Hamilton has ruled out army deployment here in the same week he revealed he will lose 240 more officers from an already stretched force.

Although we have our own local difficulty to consider, that does not make us immune to other risks.

Irish and EU intelligence sources say Ireland north and south faces a "very strong" Isis threat and to some extent is "Europe's weakest link".

But in Northern Ireland, to paraphrase Brendan Behan, we know few situations cannot be made worse by the arrival of a soldier.

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Arlene Foster claims the Stormont parties were "very close" to agreeing a Brexit position before devolution was suspended last month.

However, the DUP leader's stridency still makes a deal sound as far away as ever.

Speaking to a pro-Brexit think tank in London, Foster said she was "prepared to be flexible about the precise terms and timings" of an EU exit, yet then called for an end to "the circular argument about some ill-defined and ill-conceived so-called special status for Northern Ireland."

'Special status' is of course the term used to cover all EU flexibility, so its lack of definition is the point - a point that continues to fly over unionist heads.

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The UK's independent Office of National Statistics has trialled a new way of calculating regional taxes and public spending.

Lo and behold, this produces around the same figure for Northern Ireland's subvention - £9.7 billion a year - as assessments by Stormont and the Treasury.

Sinn Féin has denounced those assessments as inflated by up to 300 per cent and called for Britain to "open the books", implying precise regional accounts are somehow being nefariously concealed.

In fact, there will always be a margin of error in such exercises and it is no more than 5 per cent, which can be said with a certainty of 95 per cent - precisely.

None of this means a united Ireland is unaffordable. It just means planning for it will take more than wilful denial.

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Blonde jokes have reached their split end. Addressing a unionist election event in a Fermanagh Orange Hall, Church of Ireland Canon Mark Watson said he was glad "the blondes" were using hydrogen peroxide for hair dye instead of bombs.

Sinn Féin condemned this as "disrespectful and nasty" but then the row fizzled out, because it had become unclear what everyone was complaining about.

For example, if you are proud of the IRA, are you not also proud of the bombs?

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First the Waterfront Hall was hidden behind a conference centre that looks like the back of a B&Q.

Now another Lagan landmark is to have its iconic lines obscured. Titanic Belfast is planning a single-story extension connecting its external pavilions to the main building.

Its aluminium-clad corners, modelled on a ship's bow, will no longer rise uninterrupted from the ground.

But perhaps that is no great loss.

When the attraction opened in 2012, those corners earned it a short-listing for Building Design magazine's notorious Carbuncle Cup.

Judges said it "plumbs new depths of inanity in [its] literal architectural expression."

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Queen's University Belfast has "reinforced its commitment to environmental sustainability by joining other universities across the globe in aspiring to disinvest from fossil fuels", a press release proudly proclaims.

Closer examination reveals this to highly aspirational indeed.

The "objective to disinvest" is "subject to this not materially impacting on expected investment returns".

In other words, it will only happen if it does not cost any money.

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The Troubles record of Jeremy Corbyn and his inner circle has attracted UK media attention, with predictable reactions all round, yet it was not at all predictable this would be the part of Corbyn's past that most came back to haunt him.

Many observers believed the Labour leader's Achilles heel would be his recent decade of appearances on Iranian-run Press TV, both as a host and a guest, earning £20,000 a year plus rebukes from Ofcom and human rights organisations.

Experts noted an almost inexhaustible mine of incriminating footage, with Corbyn nodding witlessly along to calls from the station's swivel-eyed viewers.

However, in the end it was much easier to find and search through newspaper records from the 1980s than television broadcasts from an obscure channel in the 2010s.

This has the makings of a great media studies thesis.

newton@irishnews.com