Ireland’s president Michael D Higgins is an Irish language scholar.

No doubt some readers will not have heard about ‘Exercise Cygnus’.

The growing indications that loyalist groups are planning to resume their street protests from tonight, after the weekend funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, need to be met with a measured but firm response by the authorities.

AS riots flare up Northern Ireland once again, Arlene Foster and her party cast aspersions on a chief constable in an attempt to divert attention from their political failure in believing Boris Johnson.

THE significant and enormously welcome package of lockdown relaxations sends a clear signal that the fight against Covid is being won.

If there was one thing more depressing than the recent loyalist violence, it was the dismal quality of the political reaction.

Loyalists intend to resume disruption next week after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, by holding unnotified band parades and ‘pop-up protest’ road blocks.

FOLLOWING a long, difficult winter dominated by Covid-19 restrictions, there is a feeling that brighter days are ahead after the Stormont Executive agreed a package of lockdown relaxations.

ALMOST every day for a year I have walked past the road where a 15-year-old boy was murdered longer ago now than his short lifetime.

This time last year I'd chosen the hammock as my place of refuge.

IN his recent statement, Lord Morrow, chairman of the DUP, claimed that compared to the 1974 Workers Council Strike and the 1985 loyalist protests against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the recent unionist protests were of “equal seriousness”. He went on to claim that the authorities have continued to “show total and absolute capitulation to the demands of militant republicanism”.

HEALTH minister Robin Swann has set out in the starkest terms the scale of the task that lies ahead for our health and social care service as it looks to a post-pandemic future.

I am a strong believer in the Law of Unintended Consequences.

One of the most extraordinary political moments of the Covid epidemic in Northern Ireland was when the churches ignored Stormont’s plea to make church buildings available as classrooms.

IN the letters column, Friday April 9, Paul Laughlin, Doire, argued that a border poll held under the Good Friday Agreement would constitute an exercise in self-determination by the people of Ireland. In this, however, he is wrong.

There’s one aspect of the chronically defective unionist leadership through the decades that you have to admit: consistency.

While most of us spent last week worried that the north was going to have to endure weeks of violence not seen since the loyalist flag protests, Boris Johnson was preoccupied with doing nothing.

While there will be a sense of relief that the rioting and disorder that erupted last week has not continued over recent days, there are fears that this will be merely a brief respite.

MANY political analysts, newspaper columnists and unionist political leaders are suggesting that loyalists mistakenly believe that the Good Friday Agreement was borne out of the use of violence, something that could not be further from the truth, but it has left the false impression that by violence others’ aims could also be achieved.

I have been patient. I have been compliant.