Ian Acheson

On this day, 25 years ago, not long after the ink had dried on the Good Friday Agreement, a car bomb exploded in the market town of Omagh in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland. The bomb had been set in the town’s busy main shopping area by dissident republican terrorists styling themselves as the ‘Real IRA’. The group had rejected the acceptance by Sinn Fein, the Provisional IRA’s political mouthpiece, that Irish unification could not be achieved by violence, and instead bathed a community in blood. Twenty nine people were killed that day. It was a busy and sunny Saturday and the town, nestled in the foothills of the Sperrin mountains, was packed with shoppers and tourists.

This evening, activists will gather under Haytor, Dartmoor's iconic landmark rocks, to celebrate what feels like a rare victory for the right of citizens to roam. Today, the court of appeal has overturned an earlier decision that ended an assumed and ancient right: that which allowed you to lay your hat and your home without permission more or less anywhere on the park's 368 square miles. I declare an interest as someone who both lives on the moor and who often disappears with my tent into southern England's last wilderness for a natural mental health spa — and I am one of many who have been waiting for this appeal outcome for far too long.

The ingloriously-named Bibby Stockholm has weighed anchor in Dorset's Portland harbour to a storm of protest. The vessel is intended to house up to 500 single male adults who have arrived in this country by illegal means. Rishi Sunak's pledge to 'stop the boats' has morphed into a need for bigger boats to contain a small fraction of those asylum seekers still arriving every day on our coastline. A rare but conspicuously uncomfortable alliance of activists and local Nimbys have united in protest against this move. The former assert that conditions will be inhumane; the latter fret about overwhelmed local services.

Taking my son for a walk yesterday, we passed HMP Dartmoor, where I served as a prison governor. Unknown to us, a dramatic and serious incident was unfolding just behind its austere walls. A prisoner had taken an officer hostage in the establishment’s segregation unit. I understand that the officer was overpowered while letting the perpetrator out into the unit’s exercise yard. I’m told that this prisoner was armed with a bladed weapon and that the officer was overpowered with his own handcuffs. We won’t know whether all these details are accurate from the Ministry of Justice because they were only forced to reveal the scantest of details after the event was broadcast on social media.

A fortnight before the signing of the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998, 25 years ago tomorrow, two republican terrorists were waiting at the back of a supermarket in Armagh city, Northern Ireland, for Cyril Stewart. Mr Stewart was a former police reservist, medically retired the previous year after a heart attack. He was well known in the city and in local football circles where he was an official. He was executed in cold blood in front of his wife at the back of a Safeway's in pursuit of Irish unity. Barely three weeks earlier, the future inaugural First and Deputy First ministers of the Northern Ireland Executive stood together in a small village, 20 minutes’ drive from where Mr Stewart was murdered.

The BBC have reacted to the Manchester Arena bombing, carried out by an Islamist maniac, by providing us with a cautionary tale of how easy it is to be radicalised by…the extreme right. The fifteen-year-old boy, named as John, who is featured in the online article describes how he was manipulated into ‘hating Islam’ by consuming hours of dodgy online content and eventually attending some demonstrations.  'To see Manchester attacked – a city where I spent a lot of time – really fuelled my anger,' he said. 'I stopped caring who knew about my involvement and moved from mainly speaking online to actively trying to recruit people and sharing propaganda.' John was a plainly troubled young man in need of some solid parenting and guidance.

Rishi Sunak and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen hailed a 'decisive breakthrough' as they unveiled their updated version of the Northern Ireland Protocol deal, but will it wash with the people of Northern Ireland? For those just back from Mars, the Protocol was an attempt to reconcile the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union with the indigestible fact of a land border between the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. It was incorporated into the Brexit withdrawal agreement after months of torturous negotiations.

An off-duty senior detective in Northern Ireland’s police service was ambushed last night by masked gunmen as he helped at a football coaching event in Omagh, Country Tyrone. Two assailants fired at least four bullets into Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, shooting him on the ground as his terrified son looked on. He remains critically ill in hospital. PSNI detectives investigating his attempted murder are pursuing dissident republican terrorists in the ‘New IRA’ as a strong line of inquiry. Three men have been arrested. Twenty five years ago, this sort of casual barbarity gained not much more than a sidebar in a local newspaper.

In Northern Ireland, the dead are being eradicated. This week marks the 35th anniversary of the IRA bombing of a remembrance service in my hometown Enniskillen. In an attack so barbarous it was condemned at the time by the Kremlin, a bomb planted the night before slaughtered 12 of my neighbours standing around the town’s cenotaph. No warning had been given. The chemist, the teacher, the nurses, the retired police officer, the housewives, the house painter, all standing around a war memorial with the names of Catholic and Protestant locals on it who fought and died in the trenches, were cut to pieces. My father, one of the first responders, discovered his colleague and wife dead in the rubble. It was an image that haunted him to his death.

For the first time in Northern Ireland's history, Catholics now outnumber Protestants. Census data on national identity and religious from 2021, which was published today, shows that Catholics born into or practising their religion make up 45.7 per cent of the population, with Protestants at 43.5 per cent. In the bleak zero-sum world of Irish confessional demographics, that translates into a headcount victory for those champing at the bit to end British rule there. There’s no denying the figures are momentous. They will be gleefully weaponised by those who have no interest in a truly shared or reconciled future. But the headline numbers don't reveal everything about the state of play in Northern Ireland.

Nearly 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, the embers of sectarianism in Northern Ireland are still glowing bright. This week thousands of young nationalists at a west Belfast community and music festival ended the night by chanting pro-IRA slogans. They were seemingly oblivious to the fact that the IRA murdered more Roman Catholics in the Troubles than any other combatants. The spectacle of kids, born after the guns went silent, gleefully venerating terrorists who brought such pain and suffering to the whole community was depressing enough. But it gets worse. The West Belfast based Féile (festival), where the chanting took place, is publicly funded by Belfast City Council, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and NI tourism board.

No amount of extra counting later today can undo the seismic shift that has taken place in Northern Ireland’s politics. The first preference votes in Northern Ireland’s devolved assembly elections are in and Sinn Fein are the clear winners on 29 per cent. Sinn Fein – once the political appendage of a terrorist organisation that wrought 30 years of havoc and misery – is set to win the most seats in Stormont. It will then be able to nominate the first ever Republican First Minister. Before Unionists panic though, it’s worth examining the facts. On total votes cast, there will likely be a Unionist majority hidden by the byzantine calculus of the Single Transferrable Vote system which benefits smaller parties.

Johnathan Hall QC has done the state a service. His cogent report on prison terrorism, published today, compliments and advances work I started in 2016 to alert the government to the profound problems in how we manage ideologically motivated offenders in our jails. Hall’s report critically examines the contemporary threat of violent extremism from within the prison walls – where at the last count reside some 230 offenders convicted of terrorist offences and a greater number who are at risk of radicalisation or already radicalised. The vast majority of these offenders are motivated by Islamist extremism which explains his report’s focus. He begins by making two stark points, obvious to those of us who have paid attention to jail jihad.