Northern ireland

Readers will know that I am interested in the subject of post-Good Friday agreement 'justice' in Northern Ireland. Having been one of the few people to have followed the possibilities of justice over Bloody Sunday, I also recently wrote about the apparently one-sided amnesties which the last Labour government appears to have given to Republicans not convicted of crimes but counted as 'on the run'. It has long been my contention that justice cannot only be applied to one side or one group of people. Investigate the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment for what happened in January 1972 and you have to investigate the leadership of Sinn Fein – IRA for their activities.

So, the IRA terror suspect, John Downey, will now not face a trial for his alleged involvement in the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings of 1982, in which eleven soldiers (as well as seven horses) were murdered by nail bombs. The former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain seems to be delighted about this and expressed his astonishment that Downey had been arrested in the first place. Downey mistakenly received a so-called ‘comfort letter’ as part of the Good Friday Agreement, informing him that he was now effectively immune from prosecution. For what it’s worth, Downey denies the charges. It wasn’t a very good Friday, was it?

I know this is not exactly breaking news but Gerry Adams is a vile man. Since no-one devotes much attention to Northern Ireland these days it is easy to forget this. Easy to file Adams and his Sinn Fein comrades into a musty drawer marked Ancient History. But the past is not another country. In Dublin this week the Smithwick Tribunal's report into alleged Garda collusion with the IRA in the murders of RUC officers Harry Breen and Robert Buchanan in 1989 was finally published. The report confirmed long-held suspicions that the IRA had a mole or, less dramatically, a simple informant inside the Garda station in Dundalk, County Louth.

The establishment has a target in its sights; you can always tell from the tone of the Today programme. In this case, it's Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The occasion is the genuinely tragic case of Sarah Ewart, who travelled to Britain this week in order to abort a foetus with the most severe case of spina bifida, which meant it didn’t have a head. She didn’t want to carry the pregnancy to term and Northern Ireland’s abortion laws at present don’t allow for abortions where the foetus does not actually threaten the life of the mother. Not unlike the intention behind the 1967 abortion law here, then, which is meant only to sanction an abortion where the risk to the mental or physical health of the mother is greater than if the pregnancy continued.

There can only be one winner when you play the Game of Thrones. Any fan will tell you that. The victor, though, always comes as surprise: witness below Tory backwoodsman Alec Shelbrooke resplendent on the Iron Throne. The bombastic MP for Elmet, who is the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, visited the set of the hit HBO series, which is being filmed in Ulster. He's been proudly flashing the picture around the conference bar. It's the closest thing to leadership speculation that I have picked up on, so far.

This all looks terribly good fun, don’t you think? Spectacular towers which will make wonderful bonfires: it must have taken them ages. My only caveat is that they are all in Northern Ireland. Is there no enterprising alliance over here which might do something similar to celebrate the glorious military success of King William of Orange? One looks in despair at the Church of England, which would almost certainly cavil at such a celebration – but perhaps some of our more Presbyterian churches might set something up? It is important to remember at a time when there’s all this nastiness going on between the Sonny and Cher Muslims (“I got you babe – boom!”) that we can do this sort of internecine vindictiveness rather well too, on occasion.

Monday morning in dreich late October. What more appropriate moment to ponder the questions of corporation tax and Northern Ireland? The question of whether the Northern Ireland Assembly should control the rate of corporation tax payable in the two-thirds of Ulster for which it is responsible won't go away, you know. Nor, despite the fact that the London press has paid little attention to it, is this some local matter of no importance to the rest of the United Kingdom either. On the contrary, David Cameron's decision on this seemingly-arcane or merely local matter is more important than it seems and, in fact, one of the more significant questions demanding his attention right now.

In 1997 the Labour government tampered with the UK constitution. They then vetoed anyone reading the minutes of the cabinet meeting where it was agreed a parliament for Scotland would be implemented. Now Gordon Brown, one of the architects of the Scottish Parliament, is about to start spreading the Scottish nationalist view in a lecture entitled 'Scotland and Britain in 2025' at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today. This raises the question: is Gordon Brown a Scottish nationalist? Kim Howells' 'smoking' gun statement to the McKay Commission on 24 July 2012 revealed that Labour knew they would be creating an unstable UK. He acknowledged that the party knew the West Lothian question could not be answered without establishing an English Parliament.

‘God speed’ was apparently what Martin McGuinness said to the Queen when they met a short time ago. I wonder what she, and the Duke of Edinburgh, would have liked to say to him? Of all the things that the Queen should be asked to do in her Jubilee year, perhaps the most cruel has been to expect her to shake the hand of the former IRA commander and now deputy first minister of Northern Ireland. Many people bereaved by the Troubles have made gestures of almost super-human forgiveness, but few can have been so pushed towards doing so. And McGuinness is a particularly difficult case.