Opinion

Newton Emerson: Varadkar stands up to bullying DUP - and they are not sure how to handle it

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.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Picture by Niall Carson/PA Wire.

A new dimension has entered Northern Ireland politics in the shape of Leo Varadkar, who is in Belfast today for a Pride event. Actions may speak louder than words but this Taoiseach clearly believes in speaking loudly as well. Asked if his attendance might upset the DUP, he vowed to: “express my support for equality before the law for Catholics, Protestants, non-religious people, men, women, gay people and straight people - and I won’t be making any compromises about that for anyone”. It has been decades since Dublin rebuked the leadership of unionism quite so bluntly, yet the DUP response is oddly muted. With an Irish general election possible in the autumn, numerous political games are in play. However, it is hard to avoid the immediate impression that Varakdar has simply stood up to a bully and the DUP does not know how to handle it.

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British and Irish tourists have been caught at lengthy queues in European airports as a new regulation is phased in requiring security checks on everyone entering and exiting the Schengen zone - the EU’s 26-country common travel area - including EU citizens of non-Schengen states. The UK and Ireland are the only EU states not in Schengen or planning to join - a decision taken to preserve their pre-existing common travel area. It has always been assumed this would survive Brexit because painless entry to Schengen promised the Irish the best of both worlds. By October, once the new regulations are rolled out to all Schengen zone airports, things might look rather different.

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The PSNI was wrong to stop a Historical Enquiries Team (HET) investigation into overarching state collusion involving the Glenanne Gang, a judge has ruled. Victims group Relatives for Justice (RFJ) has welcomed the ruling, which it describes as “devastating”. Yet RFJ led the campaign against HET that enabled former chief constable Matt Baggott to shut it down - a decision criticised by the judge. Investigations into the Glenanne Gang were continued by the Pat Finucane Centre, which initially shared RFJ’s scepticism about HET but came to see its work as better than nothing - the only alternative in the absence of a Stormont agreement on the past. HET was always intended as a purely interim measure. The lesson to be learned as Stormont finally inches towards that agreement is that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

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Violence is spiralling out of control in prisons in England and Wales - that was the finding of a Council of Europe report four months ago. The Prison Governors Association has just conceded the crisis is only getting worse. Yet barely 18 months ago, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales, Nick Hardwick, described Maghaberry as “the most dangerous prison I’ve ever been to” and “the most dangerous prison in the UK”. These headline-making remarks were statistically unsupportable at the time and sound even more bizarre now.

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Belfast’s Victoria Square shopping centre is hosting museum exhibits throughout August in collaboration with National Museums Northern Ireland. The centre works well as a gallery but this falls far short of what its developers initially promised. When plans were first submitted for the £400m regeneration project in 2002, Belfast City Council was assured there would be a privately-financed public library. Once Stormont approved the plans this was dropped without explanation - to be replaced with assurances of a “cultural dimension” that turned out to mean a multiplex cinema, a bookshop that never materialised and the heroic description of a fountain as “sculpture”. One month of museum exhibits 15 years later almost seems like adding insult to injury. If Victoria Square cannot be compelled to meet its pledges on a permanent basis, Belfast’s new £400m Royal Exchange regeneration project certainly should be.

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Four out of five manufacturing firms in Northern Ireland say they cannot recruit enough staff, with 71 per cent of service sector firms saying the same, according to a survey by the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Firms blamed a lack of the right skills and “attitude” for the results. The most basic laws of economics would identify this as a market signal to offer higher wages but nobody involved in the survey appears to have picked that up. Perhaps they lacked the right skills and attitude.

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Is it acceptable for a unionist to make an English-Irish pun? There is obviously a rich and perhaps even unifying vein of humour to mine, albeit not with a sledgehammer. DUP MP Gregory Campbell, infamous for “curry my yoghurt”, has struck again by mocking Derry’s Gasyard Feile as the “Gasyard failure”. Sinn Féin’s Raymond McCartney called this “crass, offensive and completely lacking in respect”, although he did not go as far as Martin McGuinness, who said the curry my yoghurt remark “bordered on racist.” If we are all Irish, as republicans insist, how could it have been racist? If Irish belongs to us all, as Gaeilgoiri insist, can we all do what we like with it? It might be advisable to think these questions through before an Irish language act puts even more temptation in the way of punning Protestants.

newton@irishnews.com