Ireland

Never accept meat from strangers. That seems to be the lesson of the horsemeat scandal – at least for the ex-commercial director of Freeza Meats. In September 2012, an Environment Health Officer arrived to inspect their meat stores. Discovering a large block of meat in one of their freezers, the officer decided to quarantine it. When the meat was tested for equine DNA, the meat was discovered to be 80% horse. And thus the mysterious case of the frozen horsemeat began. James Fairbairn, the commercial director at the time, appeared in front of the Efra select committee yesterday in a bid to explain things. In August, so his story goes, a

It is worth pointing out yet again that Mrs Thatcher really was very brave last Friday. It would have been no disgrace to her if, once she had realised how narrow had been her escape, she had felt weak and — as did a few of the Tory wives in the Grand Hotel — had sat down and cried. There would have been nothing cowardly in cancelling what remained of the Conference in honour of the dead and injured. But the fact that she did neither of these things and the way that she conducted herself that day confirms that she has an extraordinary amount of that particular kind of

The boom and bust have left their mark on Dublin. Cruising through the outskirts past the (industrial) estate of Sandyford — flimsy-looking buildings, each as nastily designed as the last but in wildly different styles — I double-take at a gigantic half-built multi-storey car park. There are ‘To Let’ signs everywhere and it’s all a bit reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell song. But the shiny new Luas tram which links this monument to property development greed to the centre of the city is quiet, efficient and fast — and Dublin is, thank heavens, still the ‘fair city’ of the song, the Liffey meandering unruffled and majestic through the middle of

I am delighted to say that my latest book, Bloody Sunday: truths, lies and the Saville Inquiry, has been jointly awarded the Christopher Ewart-Biggs memorial prize at a ceremony in Dublin. My co-winner is Julieann Campbell, author of Setting the Truth Free: the inside story of the Bloody Sunday justice campaign. The literary prize is named after the former British Ambassador to Ireland. Christopher Ewart-Biggs was educated at Wellington and Oxford and served with the Royal Kent Regiment during World War II. He lost his right eye at the Battle of el-Alamein. After Foreign Office postings to numerous countries, including Algeria, he arrived in Dublin in July 1976. Twelve days

Some jokes just write themselves. Hurrah for Ireland: The former head of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland has been appointed chairman of Horse Sport Ireland. Prof Patrick Wall, who was the first chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and has been a prolific commentator on the recent horsemeat in burgers scandal, takes up his position on the board of equine body today. […]  “The thoroughbred guys have a saying, Brazil for the coffee, France for the wine and Ireland for the horses,” he said, and public reaction to the horse meat scandal was evidence that “horses have a special place in Ireland”. Indeed. [Thanks to LH

This week’s discovery that some burgers sold in UK supermarkets contain up to 29 per cent horse meat was met with a combination of concerns about the labelling and sourcing of food, and jokes about the burgers’ ‘Shergar content’. But the fact that people are inadvertently eating horse meat isn’t the only worrying part of the finding; an additional concern is the provenance of the meat. In many equine-consuming countries, horses are bred specifically for their meat, in the same way that livestock are in the UK. If you go to Auchan in Calais and pick up a horse steak from the ‘boucherie’ section, then your meat should be perfectly

Oh, Ireland! You knew it would come to this. Today’s Irish Times carries the appalling story of the death of Savita Halappanavar, a dentist in Galway, who died in hospital largely as a consequence of being denied an abortion. As the paper reports, Mrs Halappanavar: [P]resented with back pain at the hospital on October 21st, was found to be miscarrying, and died of septicaemia a week later. Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar (34), an engineer at Boston Scientific in Galway, says she asked several times over a three-day period that the pregnancy be terminated. He says that, having been told she was miscarrying, and after one day in severe pain, Ms

Martin McGuiness will meet Her Majesty the Queen and shake her hand in Northern Ireland. This is a seminal moment. It does not change McGuiness’s commitment to a united Ireland, but it is a strong statement from the Republican side that bygones are bygones. It is also a sign, perhaps, that the sacrifices Britain made over the Bloody Sunday Inquiry where worthwhile, because McGuiness is making a brave sacrifice by doing this: there will be those who condemn him for it. It is also significant that the Palace has achieved this. The conflict in Northern Ireland and the dark historical relations between Britain and Ireland are causes close to the