Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also Director of Community Safety at the Home Office. His book ‘Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it’ is out now.
Policing any part of the United Kingdom is a difficult enough task these days. Policing the part of it where the national security threat is highest and the personal details of all officers and staff are now likely in the hands of terrorists after an embarrassing data breach is a whole other story. We are
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’.
This weekend, armed assailants tortured a prisoner and held him hostage in HMP Wakefield for six hours, before specialist prison staff stormed the cell. The prisoner was taken to hospital with stab wounds. Much has been made of the fact that he is Ian Watkins, the front man of the group Lostprophets, who was imprisoned
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
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
A report, just published by the NHS, is a stark 171-page indictment of our protective services. The investigation details the shocking failures of every agency either side of the prison walls to safely manage Zephaniah McLeod, a plainly very dangerous and mentally unwell man with a long criminal history, who was released from prison without
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
A member of the UK Parliament is the keynote speaker at an event tomorrow commemorating ‘volunteers’ in South Armagh. The ceremony will take place in the tiny village of Mullaghbawn, set in the now picturesque Ring of Gullion, more familiar to students of the Northern Ireland Troubles as the heart of ‘Bandit Country.’ According to one Northern Irish politician, previously
‘Remember your training Grace, get the rifle.’ We’re only moments into the opening episode of the superb new police procedural Blue Lights when we are reminded this is a very different cop show. In Northern Ireland, where it is set, policing the semi-skimmed peace still carries the additional risk of being ambushed by terrorists. Being tooled up, even
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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 last time inspectors visited HMP The Mount in 2018, the place was awash with drugs. The prevalence of the psychoactive substance ‘bird killer’, and the violence associated with it, meant nearly half of all prisoners there reported feeling unsafe. This insidious drug, collectively known as ‘spice’, was smuggled past officers in the form of
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
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
