Good friday agreement

Tuesday

Ian Acheson

Violent extremists won’t spoil Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland

What can violent extremists do to wreck Joe Biden’s first visit to Northern Ireland? The answer is precious little. The President’s visit has been denied the electoral fairy dust of a functioning Executive as he blows in to hail 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement. While that might disappoint some local politicians keen to bathe in some harmless warm platitudes, it will be less of a security headache for those charged with keeping him safe. So what of the known arrangements and the risks? Biden will land at Belfast International Airport this evening and be taken, one assumes by air, to a venue in the city for some glad-handing.

Friday

James Forsyth

How to fix the protocol

The blame game between London and Brussels over the Northern Ireland protocol obscures the fact that there are solutions waiting to be found. There are, as I say in the Times today, ways to reform the protocol and better protect the Good Friday Agreement while not threatening the integrity of the single market. Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable and would better position it to withstand the undoubted pressures it will come under when the EU and UK start to diverge their regulations.  The first of these is a trusted trader scheme for food. This would allow registered

Friday

Ian Acheson

Are loyalists plotting a return to violence?

What are we to make of Loyalist paramilitary groups withdrawing support for the Good Friday Agreement over the invidious trade border that now exists in the Irish sea? The Loyalist Communities Council, a group that represents the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Red Hand Commando, has written to Boris Johnson and Ireland’s Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, warning of ‘permanent destruction’ of the 1998 peace agreement unless changes are made to the Brexit agreement.  ‘If you or the EU is not prepared to honour the entirety of the agreement then you will be responsible for the permanent destruction of the agreement,’ David Campbell, the chairman of the LCC, said.

Wednesday

Ian Acheson

How Joe Biden can be a true friend to the Irish

On this day in 1974, a body was recovered in quiet fields near the Country Tyrone village of Clogher, hard against Northern Ireland’s frontier. It was that of Cormac McCabe, the headmaster of a nearby secondary school, who was also a part-time officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, locally raised ‘home battalions’ of the British Army. McCabe had been kidnapped the day before, having crossed the border to have lunch in Monaghan town with his wife and disabled daughter. Exposed and defenceless, he was the softest of targets for the Provisional IRA terrorists who abducted him, shot him in the head and then dumped him in a bog field. Joe