Northern ireland

Theresa May has been continuing her UK-wide tour to convince voters in all corners of the country to back the Conservatives. This weekend saw the Tory campaign machine make a whistle stop tour in Belfast. The Prime Minister attended a local agricultural show and talked to farmers and families about why they must support the party. So far, so uncontroversial. All Prime Ministerial candidates seeking election or re-election make the customary stop on the far side of the Irish Sea to make a pitch to Northern Irish voters. This time, however, Theresa May's trip has unleashed anger among both voters and politicians in Northern Ireland. Her attempt to charm locals has backfired spectacularly.

Theresa May's awkward dinner date with Jean-Claude Juncker stole the headlines, but there was another Brexit development that passed with much-less fuss: the European Union's plan for Ireland to reunite after Brexit, which it inserted quietly into its negotiating guidelines. Few in Britain paid much attention to it. Across the Irish Sea, it was a different story. Among Catholic communities, there is growing hope that Brexit could be the issue which finally sees partition end on the island. Yet within Protestant communities, there is a growing fear that the EU is using Brexit as a tool to sneak through Irish reunification. The British government appears to be doing precious little to stop it.

When David Cameron called his Brexit referendum, the potential difficulty of Northern Ireland was not uppermost in his mind. Nor does it seem to have worried Theresa May greatly when she announced a snap general election this week. Even before this fresh electoral battle, Northern Ireland’s politics were already — to paraphrase Sean O’Casey — in ‘a terrible state of chassis’. Perhaps May thought the existing chassis in Belfast couldn’t get any worse. On reflection, I’m not so sure. The last Assembly election in March left the DUP and Sinn Fein, the two tribal behemoths, delicately balanced on 28 and 27 seats respectively. Unionists lost their overall majority.

There's little enthusiasm just about anywhere for this summer's snap general election, and no more so than in Northern Ireland where voters' growing apathy is mixed with a feeling of dread. Saying that politics in Northern Ireland is rarely straightforward or smooth is something of an understatement. But the timing of this summer's election could not be worse for the country: the peace process is currently navigating its way perilously through one of its most difficult periods since 1998's Good Friday Agreement. While the stasis which is paralysing Stormont shows no signs of ending: four months on since power-sharing collapsed in the region, the parties are yet to resolve their issues and agree to return to government. Attempts at resolution have had next to no success.

Amidst the apparent chaos in the days after the Brexit vote, one important story largely slipped under the radar. Now, the demand issued by Sinn Féin for a border poll on reunification of Ireland is resurfacing. Admittedly, back in June, it was difficult to know how much attention to pay to such a demand. Irish reunification is, after all, the entire purpose of the Irish Republican party. However, in the months since the referendum, the peripheral possibility of Irish reunification is starting to move centre stage. And the old platitude from Sinn Féin is morphing into a growing and credible movement on both sides of the Irish border. But it's not only Sinn Féin who are pushing for Irish reunification in the wake of Brexit.

There is a saying that whoever the Prime Minister hates, they appoint as Northern Ireland Secretary. James Brokenshire, Theresa May's unlucky pick for the job, had three options yesterday: a new election, direct rule, or a fudge. When the clock struck 4pm, three weeks after Northern Ireland's election, there was only one option: it was always going to be the Irish fudge.  James Brokenshire had tried valiantly to maintain the fiction, which no one believed, that at 4:01pm yesterday he was prepared to fire the starting pistol of Northern Ireland's third assembly election in a year. It wasn't a credible threat, and people in Northern Ireland have a way of telling the one from the other.

You’d think, with Brexit talks starting sometime after Wednesday, that Northern Irish politicians would have something better to do than engage in the amusing party politics that leave everyone else in Ireland and Britain stone cold.

You don't earn a nickname like 'Spreadsheet Phil' for being a showman. But is Philip Hammond's powder-dry demeanour and unwavering focus on the numbers actually his strong point? Yes, says the Sun, which suggests the chancellor’s cautious approach is exactly what Britain needs right now. The paper says that whereas Hammond's predecessors would use their Budget announcements to reach for ‘popularity-boosting giveaways’, not so the current incumbent at No.11 who takes a more sensible approach in saying ‘now is not the time for a spending spree’. ‘We couldn’t agree more,’ says the Sun, which warns of ‘greater challenges’ ahead.

Visiting Northern Ireland last autumn, I met a very prosperous man who enthused to me about the Renewable Heat Incentive in the province. It paid him to install wood-pellet boilers and heat his rural business. After the political scandal broke, I understood why he was so happy. The RHI, as managed in Northern Ireland, had no upper limit, so there was no cheating involved in getting as many non-domestic boilers as you could manage. If you installed the boiler you got paid £1.60 for every £1 of pellets you burned, without limit. I gather there was particularly massive take-up by members of the Democratic Unionist Party, and their Free Presbyterian churches glow red day and night in consequence.

The English tradition of dissenting judgments in important civil cases is a good one. They are often better than the majority view, because they tend to be advanced by judges who resist the self-aggrandisement of their profession. In the Miller case on triggering Article 50, before the Supreme Court, Lords Reed, Carnwath and Hughes dissented from the other eight. This is what Lord Reed says: ‘…the argument that withdrawal from the EU would alter domestic law and destroy statutory rights, and therefore cannot be undertaken without a further Act of Parliament, has to be rejected even if one accepts that the 1972 Act creates statutory rights and that withdrawal will alter the law of the land.