âLet the bodies pile highâ were his words. Your recollection of the Tory governmentâs approach to it are understandably hazy.
At this stage youâd have to presume Shaney is some ingenious caricature created by somebody in the Irish Times or RTE.
Oh thats what he actually said?..but you said he wanted to let it ripâŚmake your mind up
Hereâs the junior senator from wisconsin again
Youâre still confused.
No. I just wondered why you were telling lies on the internet.
But anyway, boris didnât get his way and the tories went ahead with lockdowns, masks etc. My point was that most of the forum agree wholeheartedly with tory policy on two key issues.
@glenshane understandably thought lockdowns were the undemocratic actions of a dictatorship and was concerned that long term it would lead to an erosion of our rights and freedoms.
He simultaenously holds the view that the actual dictatorship in Russia can and should do what they want and if they want to bring the people of Ukraine under their yoke then they should be entitled to do so without interference.
He is also an Irish Nationalist.
Heâs a difficult circle to square is our Glenshane.
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Boris and his cabinet got their way but did a pretty rapid u-turn when the consequences of such a reckless approach became apparent. Had they continued their idiotic approach the NHS would have collapsed. People have short memories.
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Fire up some evidence there. Is no-one allowed to stray from your childish obedient cartoon version of whats happening in ukraine?
Itâs mad that having Isabel Euphemia Oakeshott leak a load of not very interesting Whatsapp messages has been the best thing to happen to Matt Hancockâs public image in a very long time.
Maybe the bould Matt is smarter than I gave him credit for.
Ah he isnât really.
The perils of being a free thinker.
No evidence then, just yourself and sid consoling one another. All you need noe is glas to arrive with a picnic basket
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If someone could do the needful. SKS plays 5 a side in a Donegal jersey.
An article which tried to praise Ireland but still has undercurrents of an idiot snobbery.
Irish lessons taught Keir Starmer about power
Patrick MaguireFebruary 27 2023, 10.00pm GMT
After the week Westminster has endured, that line strikes a plangent chord. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and the Northern Ireland protocol loom as inescapably over Rishi Sunak as Parnell and home rule did over Gladstone. Now Sue Gray â daughter of Irish immigrants, sometime Armagh publican, former permanent secretary of Stormontâs finance department â has quit the civil service for the Labour Party. There is no longer any doubt. Sir Keir Starmer is the most Irish Englishman yet seen in British politics, a mirror of Churchillâs Parnell. By that I donât mean Starmer is of Irish descent like his predecessors Jim Callaghan or Sir Tony Blair, all four of whose children have the passport. He isnât. Nor that he merely loves Ireland, though like so many Englishmen unencumbered by family ties and unacquainted with the mundane and malign aspects of its national life, he does. These men have always been ripe for parody: consider George Bernard Shawâs Broadbent, the uptight Londoner in John Bullâs Other Island. After one visit he is bewitched and beguiled. âI can hardly trust myself to say how much I like it,â he says. âThe magic of this Irish scene . . . â
Now read these lines from Starmerâs last visit to Belfast, in January. Sentimentality only tends to intrude into his speeches when Ireland does. âAfter we were married, my wife and I took our first holiday here, because I wanted to show her Northern Ireland, the people and communities that Iâd met,â he said. âI was in love with this island and that love has stayed with me.â
This stuff is sincerely meant. He spent new year 2023 on the Cork coast. In October, he told the Commons: âDonegal is a special place to me and my family.â He plays five-a-side in that countyâs Gaelic football jersey. The island is to him what the Scillies were to Harold Wilson.
His has turned out to be a very Irish political project. Not just because a man called Doyle will text me to complain about any mistakes in this column. Or because of Gray, his new chief of staff, whose father Leo grew up on the Irish border in Fermanagh. Nor Morgan McSweeney, the Corkman who joined Labour on the day the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998 and has spent the past three years purging the Corbynites. Having served his political apprenticeship in local government on Lambeth council, once an impregnable citadel of the hard left, his is a mission driven by his hatred for Labourâs version of gombeenism â the boss politics of petty, parish-pump corruption so pervasive in the smalltown Ireland of his youth.
You can trace Starmerâs professions of love for the island and its people to the five years he spent travelling back and forth to Northern Ireland as a human rights adviser to its new police force between 2003 and 2008. There we finally find the elusive essence of Starmer the politician. All he knows about power and how to wield it was learnt there.
Starmer, the bright young thing of the progressive Bar, had arrived restless and frustrated. Forcing changes to the law via the courts, in protracted, attritional cases against the police in particular, was a long and lonely process. âI was still a human rights lawyer railing against the system from the outside,â he told me in the weeks before he won the Labour leadership three years ago. Northern Ireland showed him another way.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary, distrusted by nationalists as the uniformed wing of unionist supremacy, had been abolished and replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), overseen by a cross-community policing board. Starmer observed officers as they dealt with disorder at parades and deployed water cannon at riots. Every year he set dozens of recommendations for change, not unlike the missions for government he unveiled last month. Almost unthinkably, Starmer said in 2005 the PSNI had come to have a better human rights record than any other UK police force. âSome of the things I thought that needed to change in police services we achieved more quickly than we achieved in strategic litigation,â Starmer told me 15 years later. âI came better to understand how you can change by being inside and getting the trust of people.â
There it is: how you can change by being inside. Hence the jump from law to politics. That is how we make sense of Starmer and his breakneck transformations from campaigning defence barrister to director of public prosecutions, Bennite to born-again Blairite, Europhile to Brexiteer. His critics chalk these up as opportunistic compromises in the pursuit of power â a Tory attack line coming to a social media feed near you. But really it is that lesson from his time in Northern Ireland, methodically applied again and again.
To no other Labour leader has the place been as fundamental to their understanding of politics and power. How could it? When Callaghan arrived at the Home Office in 1967, on the eve of the Troubles, the few Whitehall officials who worked on Northern Ireland were also responsible for London taxis, British Summer Time and the nationalised pubs of Carlisle.
Blair may have brokered the Good Friday agreement but Starmer lived it, an unprecedented experiment in building an entirely new kind of state. Devolving power. Reforming institutions that looked unfixable. Long-term, incremental change. Doing, not thinking. Gray, who Starmer has chosen to run his own remodelled state, has â like McSweeney â lived it too.
It is not a vision of Labour politics that would have excited the young Starmer. Nor is it the Good Friday agreement of Mo Mowlamâs secular sainthood. It is a politics of windowless conference rooms and ringbinders full of exacting recommendations on things like bespoke training courses for public sector employees. It is a politics of bureaucratic fixes and committees and annual reports. That is the unromantic Ireland that made the Labour leader a politician. Britain could be next.
Lynchie 
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