Northern ireland

Let’s say you’re a rising minister put in charge of the department for enterprise. You have the great idea to incentivise businesses to invest in low-carbon energy by offering a subsidy for renewable fuel used. Unfortunately, something goes wrong in the planning or execution of the scheme, with the result that claimants are paid more for low-carbon fuel than the amount the fuel actually cost them. Market forces kick in, businesses use as much fuel as possible to gain the maximum profit, the fancy renewable energy scheme ends up £490 million over budget. The opposition, the media, and most importantly the public are understandably very upset, and call for you to resign.

In Northern Ireland recently, I sought out the Mass times of the local Church of the Immaculate Conception. Its website duly listed them, but I was surprised to find roughly half its web-page filled with a picture of a young woman’s all-but-naked torso and the invitation to click for more ‘Diva pics and videos’. I couldn’t tell whether this was a viral invasion or an Irish parish’s highly unimmaculate conception of how to make extra money for its good causes. When I met the priest, I was about to ask him, but he looked so young. I remembered that this is still the Year of Mercy, and stayed silent.

My late father was a pottery maker, and very good at it. Question is, if a Northern Protestant had come to his studio to request that he produce a teaset decorated with the legend: 'Taigs Out of Ulster!' or 'Kick the Pope!' perhaps with decoration to match, would my daddy have been obliged to oblige him on the basis that he was offering to make ceramics for all comers, regardless of their religious persuasion? Would the production of Protestant ceramics have been part of his offer to the teaset-buying community? Or could he have declined on the basis that this was offensive to his beliefs as a non-practising Roman Catholic?

When an old friend X came to dinner in London, I sampled what it must have been like during the American Civil War, when families were split asunder from aligning on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon. Lo, this warm-hearted, well-read, intelligent Midwesterner is backing Donald Trump. This was my husband’s introduction to X, whose electoral preference clearly queered the first impression. Our threesome didn’t talk long on the matter. The disconnect being so absolute, there was little to say. X is the only Trump supporter I wittingly know. But I was chilled by the difference between this and countless heated-but-civil suppers of yore, at which a dinner guest plumped rambunctiously for a candidate I opposed — Romney, McCain, even George W.

Here in Dublin, Ireland is busy marking 100 years since the Easter Rising of 1916. It is being celebrated, but with far less chest-beating and bombast than met the 50th anniversary in 1966.  And this is a good thing entirely. The Rising lasted for six days.  Its leaders seized key buildings around Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic.  It started a series of events that led to an independent Irish state in the south, but also to the partition of Ireland and a bloody civil war which claimed between two and three thousand lives. Emblematic of this year’s commemoration was an event on Good Friday, at a Unitarian church on St Stephen’s Green.

Well, the High Court in Belfast has driven a coach and horses through Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) sought a ruling to allow women to have abortions in local hospitals in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities, rape and incest; today, it got it. This judgment is plainly at odds with the opinion of the democratic forum in the north, the Northern Ireland Assembly, where every attempt to have abortion introduced upfront, in law, has been thrown out. Instead abortion seems likely to be brought in through the courts, that weaselly, undemocratic method of choice by the human rights lobby, whose concept of human rights never seems to extend to prenatal life.