Northern Ireland’s biggest party could be a kingmaker in the 2015 Westminster election. And keeping tight control over abortion could be a condition of support.
When a baker refuses, on religious grounds, to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, the right to freedom of religion comes into conflict with the right to freedom from discrimination.
The arts scene in Northern Ireland is under serious threat as the government gives the appearance of placing less and less value on culture. The announcement before Christmas of funding cuts of up to 50…
The accomplishments of Winston Churchill have been widely publicised and reported over the 50 years since his death. Viewed as one of the 20th century’s great politicians and tacticians, he was also a…
Israel is a deeply divided society, a fact reinforced by separate schools for Jews, Arabs and Christians. In 1984, the Hand-in-Hand movement began working to build peace via a network of integrated, bilingual…
Northern Ireland is engaged in another round of high level talks involving the British, Irish and US governments to resolve the latest political impasse at Stormont. In the shadow of these sensitive discussions…
Failure by the two main Northern Irish parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, to agree on how to address the legacy of a violent past has been one of the main factors in the current political…
In the wake of the Scottish referendum, Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, renewed his party Sinn Féin’s call for a “border poll” to decide if Northern Ireland should leave…
In the closing lines of my book, The Scots and the Union: Then and Now, I wrote: The union has been a fact of life for Scots for more than three centuries. Union is a habit, which, currently, large numbers…
From anarchists in the 1920s and radical leftists in the 1960s, to fringe, extreme-right Christian bombers or gunmen in the United States in recent decades, or radical Islamists such as Islamic State today…
Ian Paisley, the firebrand face of Unionism in Northern Ireland for decades, has died at the age of 88. While he won’t be remembered as the Nelson Mandela of Ulster, his important role in the peace process…
The death of the Reverend Ian Paisley is occasion for reflection upon the United Kingdom’s most famous religious firebrand, and certainly one of the most memorable and divisive political figures of modern…
As students across the UK and Ireland consider their next steps following publication of this year’s exam results, news outlets have been quick to produce whimsical comparisons to determine the top performing…