Michael McMonagle scandal: Sinn Féin needs to get to grips with its troubled relationship with money
Not every organisation passes its employees around like a pilfered stapler until nobody is quite sure what is going on
Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson columns
How Northern Ireland’s supermarket aisles have become another Brexit battleground
Brexit and the sea border have dragged all aspects of trade with Northern Ireland into the zero-sum game of traditional politics
Why Dublin, London and Stormont are still bankrolling loyalists
Throughout the negotiations of the 1990s, the British government and many others encouraged loyalism to develop a political project mirroring that of Sinn Féin. This briefly appeared realistic
Stop blaming unionists for the Casement Park debacle
What remains of the Euros plan is rancour and paranoia, a sorry legacy for what was meant to be an inspiring cross-community project
In their cosy new embrace, Starmer and Harris may be forgetting the Belfast Agreement
Concerns are being raised by experts that north-south and east-west strands face being “hollowed out” by careless duplication
If you want to know whether Sinn Féin’s housing policy will work, look at what it achieved in the North
There’s one unifying factor to the party’s entirely different strategies in the North and South: both approaches ultimately aim to secure power to advance a united Ireland
UUP needs to become the Progressive Democrats to the DUP’s Fianna Fáil
The UUP could become unionism’s champion of centre-right or centrist good government, challenging the populism and incompetence of the DUP and Sinn Féin
Something weird is happening to the North’s economy, and for once Brexit is not responsible
The public sector is crumbling as essential reforms fall prey to spineless politics. Yet the private sector is booming
No major party has been as cynical on immigration as Fine Gael
The temptation for Sinn Féin will be to portray opposition to immigration as a unionist prejudice, while urging everyone else, North and South, to follow its example and do better
Why the three main unionist parties are making a show of themselves over a GAA flag
A classic failure of unionism is fear of being called a Lundy, an insult derived from the siege of Derry, meaning a traitor or appeaser. The entire unionist political system immediately Lundied itself over the GAA flag
Britain seemed to have turned a corner on immigration after Brexit. Then October 7th happened
The scale and intensity of the protests that followed have caused a backlash against both immigration and the UK’s four million Muslim citizens. Tentative progress on understanding Islam in Britain has been thrown into reverse
How to talk about a united Ireland: Say little and set up a committee
Nothing in the report by the latest all-party Oireachtas committee is contentious because avoiding contention is the point
The difference between Simon Harris and Leo Varadkar on UK-Irish relations goes beyond tone
And it works both ways. Harris’s warmth towards the UK is being rewarded with a softening of Keir Starmer’s stance on a Border poll
Unionism has welcomed Labour’s apparently inevitable win, but nationalists are already milking it
The next UK government’s spending policy could lead to a boon for Stormont parties thanks to the oddities of devolutionary accounting
Northerners look on the Republic’s motorways with envy – but tolls are a bridge too far
Newton Emerson: Toll roads and Northern Ireland: as so often at Stormont, everybody knows what should be done but nobody will step forward to do it.
Larne gas cavern project a victim of green nimbyism and North’s administrative deadlock
Gas storage saga has been dragging on for years for facility that should have been operational in 2022 and which would have helped following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Can Sinn Féin pull off its left-right, North-South balancing act?
The party may move economically left and socially right in the Republic - but it needs to stay the course in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland’s poultry industry must be forced to clean up its act
A BBC investigation found Moy Park breached legal limits on effluent discharge hundreds of times since 2017 within the catchment of Lough Neagh
Some claims about the cost of a united Ireland don’t stack up
These are not harmless notions to drop into public discourse from the top of an ivory tower. Everyone involved should take more care
Why Caoimhe Archibald is the rising star of Northern politics
Sinn Féin’s Minister of Finance is reinforcing a message the party wants to send to voters North and South — it can be trusted in office
Northern Ireland is already a ‘sanctuary city’ in the UK – it could yet become one in Europe
If Brussels were to allow Rwanda-type schemes elsewhere in the EU, London could say this permitted a similar scheme across the UK, yet a court in Belfast could disagree
There’s an obvious solution to the migration row: compatible national identity cards for Ireland and Britain
Rights groups who raised valid objections to the intrusiveness of identity cards need to accept that ship has sailed - the alternative is Kafkaesque bureaucracy and racial profiling
Rwanda immigration law may turn out to be another Brexit
The destabilising impact on Irish politics looks like Brexit all over again, only with tides of humanity instead of shipments of bacon
Battle lines are being drawn in the North over sex education and hate crimes
After two years of dreary wrangling to restore devolution, most observers are glad of the diversion
Simon Harris was right. Many southerners know London or Paris better than Belfast
Figures suggest a substantial share of the southern population may never have been north of the Border
We need to talk about restricting overseas buyers snapping up homes
The Republic’s property market is one of the most open in the world, with effectively no limits on overseas buyers
Unionist parties are not about to merge – it’s hard enough holding them together individually
A choice of parties may be essential for unionism’s long-term health; the implosion of the Scottish National Party is a warning about putting all your eggs in one basket
At some point it will become unmissable that on many issues Sinn Féin is on much same ground as DUP
Northern nationalism regards itself as left-wing, but on most issues its views are centre-right
DUP’s best option is to say the Stormont brake has been tested and then move swiftly on
DUP has never promised this test would block an EU law. The party has only said it will show Stormont has been given “democratic scrutiny” and “the ability to have a say”.
In both the UK and Ireland, even the left is starting to turn right
The true culture-war divide in the UK is public exasperation with the trivia that obsesses the political class
What’s Micheál Martin’s long game: a stronger North or a United Ireland?
There was no chance of a tub-thumping republican speech at the Alliance Party conference
Upgrading the A5 and A8 is not only about safety - this is constitutional politics in concrete form
Shared Island initiative avoids gauche claims of literal nation-building but it was impossible to ignore the subtext: a road in a unionist area to balance a road in a nationalist area
The best thing Varadkar could do for Stormont is to lay off Sinn Féin
When Sinn Féin ducks difficult decisions in the north, southern rivals accuse it of populism. Meanwhile, business at Stormont suffers
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