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Anthony McIntyre  ☠  When we gather at noon today in West Street, the activists of Drogheda Stands With Palestine can derive some consolation from living in Ireland rather than the UK. 

While the Irish government has unpardonably not yet enacted the Occupied Territories Bill, at the same time it has not sought to introduce the Starmer-type legislation which saw Greta Thunberg arrested last week in London outside the offices of Aspen Insurance. The company is subject to ethical action because the people protesting claim it:

provides financial services to Elbit Systems. Elbit is known as Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer and has several operations within the United Kingdom.

Ms Thunberg has since been released on police bail until March.

Her 'act of terrorism' which prompted the police to grip her was to hold up a placard proclaiming "I support the Palestine Action prisoners" and "I oppose genocide". I doubt there is anyone who has been turning up on West Street every Saturday since the onset of the genocide who does not support the hunger strikers who belong to Palestine Action. Yet, we would end up in the Joy were the Starmer legislation to apply here. 

While that type of draconian repression remains unleashed in Ireland, it is incumbent to use the space currently available to fill it with noise of support for people who are in prison because of their opposition to genocide and who have felt compelled to resort to hunger strike over their incarceration. 

Not only that, it is vital to protect the right to simply mobilise against genocide even in circumstances where no support for groups like Palestine Action is expressed. Der Starmer and Despicable Dave Lammy are intent on not just suffocating expressions of support for Palestine Action, they are also determined to smother any fair and accurate coverage of the genocide. Jonathan Cook warns that reporting facts under the Starmer regime could lead to a fourteen year jail sentence. 

Asking government if it wishes for more repressive legislation is like asking a child if it would like more sweets. If on offer it will be grabbed. Which makes the task of remaining vigilant here in Ireland all the more of imperative in order to prevent any slide which sees the rule of law further becoming the rule of law enforcement, causing the fog of hush to envelop protestors and media outlets alike. 

There has not been a hunger strike this large within the British penal system since the 1981 H Block hunger strike. Yet for the most of the prison protest, that fog of hush has cultivated a media blackout. BBC News At Ten only covered it as the strike entered its seventh week. Although it would be a stretch to claim that the BBC is not complicit in stifling the news, and is the mere victim of an authoritarian government policy. Jonathan Cook has argued that:

There are clear political reasons why the BBC had avoided this topic for so long. It prefers not to deal with matters that directly confront the legitimacy of the government, which funds it. The BBC is effectively the British state broadcaster.

The BBC will not address the fact that Greta Thunberg has been wilfully targeted by the Starmer legislation. A police statement said:

She has been arrested for displaying an item [in this case ‍a placard] in support of a proscribed organization [in this case Palestine Action] contrary ​to Section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Her placard did not express support for the activities of Palestine Action. She merely supported their prisoners on hunger strike. The British state is now trying to label the act of hunger striking - one of the most passive forms of resistance known - as terrorism. In Ireland where it has become a cultural pastime for the political class to behave as mimic men, bowing and scraping to British monarchy, one task of activists is to prevent that class going further and mimicking the Starmer silencing strategy. 

In this country I am free to fully support Greta Thunberg in her protest and the Palestine Action prisoners in their hunger strike without being jailed for terrorism.  Let us strive to ensure it stays that way. 

Hail, Hail Palestine Action.

Jail, Jail the IDF.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Greta Gripped

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Thirty Three

Des Dalton 🏴 remembers an 'Unbreakable Fenian.'

Geraldine Taylor
The death occurred on November 24 of veteran West Belfast republican, Geraldine Taylor. A resident of Twinbrook, Geraldine was a lifelong republican activist. In the early 1970s, Geraldine was interned in Armagh women's prison while her husband Tom was interned in Long Kesh.

From a staunch Republican family, her brother Seán Convery was one of the "Magnificent Seven" who escaped from the Maidstone prison ship in 1972. Geraldine herself was Adjutant and later OC of Cumann na mBan in Belfast during a critical period in the struggle against British rule.

Geraldine Taylor was an unbreakable Fenian. As a person she was imbued with a physical and moral courage that was profound. Never afraid to stand alone whatever the odds if she believed she was right. In 1986 when Gerry Adams sought to lead the Republican Movement to the stoop of Leinster House, she rejected this move as a betrayal of fundamental republican principles. As a proud Belfast woman Geraldine was under no illusions that her stand would expose her to physical threats and social isolation:

Now when the split in ’86 – I was here on my own [Belfast]. I went out and sold papers. I was part of a big mass organisation and I was left. People walked past me and all this craic and it was very hard to take. Very hard to take. And for years it was terrible and we got a few people on board and we were selling our papers and there was manys a night I cried myself to sleep. So one night I was fighting with myself and I said what are you crying for? I said pull yourself together. Look at the men and women, boys and girls that’s buried in Milltown Cemetery - Marisa McGlinchey, Unfinished Business: The Politics of ‘Dissident’ Irish Republicanism

Geraldine was clear in her conviction that she was remaining on the same path on those that had come before her and rejected all attempts by her enemies to label her:

We walked out with the Republican Movement intact. Those who remained in the Mansion House that day were the dissidents. - Marisa McGlinchey, Unfinished Business: The Politics of ‘Dissident’ Irish Republicanism

Geraldine went on to take a leadership role in Republican Sinn Féin serving on the organisation’s Ard Chomhairle and also as Vice President. I had the privilege of knowing Geraldine for almost 40 years during which time she was a loyal friend and comrade but not an uncritical one when she believed the occasion demanded. I was proud to stand with Geraldine in defending the integrity of the Ulster Office of Republican Sinn Féin in Belfast when she fearlessly and successfully faced down a criminal element who were attempting to wrest control of it.

The welfare of republican prisoners was always close to her heart and the focus of much of her activism.

Sadly, we found ourselves on opposites sides in a dispute between her and the Ard Chomhairle which would result in her dismissal from Republican Sinn Féin. Despite this our friendship endured and my respect for her remained undiminished. Geraldine never failed to reach out to me at various times over the following years. When I faced both personal and political challenges in recent years Geraldine was among the first to contact me to express her support. I will forever cherish the memory of those conversations at difficult point in my life.

Geraldine never wavered and remained faithful to her republican principles and right up to her final illness she defiantly flew the flag of uncompromising traditional Irish Republicanism in West Belfast.

Goodbye old friend and may the soil of your beloved Belfast rest lightly on you.

Deepest sympathy to her husband Tom, her children Fiona, Anne and Tomaí, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam dílis

The Soldiers of Cumann na mBan

"They stand for the honour of Ireland,

As their sisters in days that are gone,

And they’ll march with their brothers to freedom,

The soldiers of Cumann na mBan.

"No great-hearted daughter of Ireland,

Who died for her sake long ago,

Who stood in the gap of her danger,

Defying the Sassenach foe,

Was ever more gallant or worthy,

Of glory in high sounding rann,

Than the comrades of Óglaigh na hÉireann,

The soldiers of Cumann na mBan!

- Brian Ó hUigínn


⏩Des Dalton is a long time republican activist.

Geraldine Taylor

Labour Heartlands ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

When did defending your country’s borders become right-wing? When did suggesting that mass migration serves Capital rather than the common people become unspeakable in polite progressive company? And when, precisely, did the British left decide that working-class communities must simply absorb unprecedented demographic change while being called bigots for noticing?

These questions cut to the heart of what socialism means. Because if socialism is not about protecting the material interests of working people, the security of their communities, and their democratic right to determine who enters their country, then it is not socialism at all. It is bourgeois liberalism with a red flag draped over it.

Britain has experienced a demographic transformation without precedent in peacetime. Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year to March 2023, a figure so staggering that the ONS initially underestimated it. It has since fallen sharply to 345,000 by the end of 2024, and further to 204,000 by June 2025. Yet even this “lower” figure remains historically elevated, and the cumulative impact of the Boris-era surge has fundamentally altered the country.

Labour Heartlands defends controlled borders, not because we hate foreigners but because we understand class. Mass migration is a tool of Capital, used to depress wages, weaken unions, and fragment working-class solidarity. 

Borders, Big Business And A Broken Social Contract

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.

2-December-2025
“Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state”, the Russian anti-war protester Andrei Trofimov told the Second Western District Military Court in May.

In 2023, Trofimov was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, for opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine in social media posts, and trying to join the Free Russia Legion that fights on Ukraine’s side. At that hearing, Trofimov said he hoped for Ukraine’s victory, and called president Putin “a dickhead”.


On the basis of that statement alone, he was further accused of “justifying terrorism” and defaming the Russian army. For those “crimes”, the judge at the hearing in May this year, Vadim Krasnov, added three years to Trofimov’s sentence.

Before sentencing, Trofimov told the court that he had not justified terrorism, but supported the Ukrainian armed forces’ legitimate military actions against aggression, and had not defamed the Russian army whose actions were unconstitutional and illegal. He told the court that he considered himself guilty of a much more serious crime: treason – taking the enemy’s side in war.

Excerpts from the speeches by Trofimov and three other anti-war protesters were read out in London last month, at a launch event for the book Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts. I said a few words about the book, which I edited.

Here’s a film of the event.


And there will be another chance to hear these powerful readings in London – on Thursday 5 February, 6.30pm, at Birkbeck college. Here are the details.


You can order copies of Voices Against Putin’s War, or download a free pdf, here.

We published the book against the background of repeated claims that a peace agreement is about to be signed between Russia and Ukraine. These are louder than ever after this week’s talks in Berlin. At the time of writing this, it is not clear to me that the Kremlin is really interested in stopping the war, or what the “security guarantees” being offered to Ukraine actually mean.

I would recommend following the excellent arguments made about the peace process by Oleksandr Kyselov (most recently here, also here and here), Hanna Perekhoda (who writes on facebook here), and other Ukrainian socialist writers.

If you want to know why the 20% of Donbas that Ukraine still controls matters so much, this comment by the Institute for the Study of War is worth reading. This speech by Valery Zaluzhny helps us understand what the Ukrainian political elite thinks.

Whatever the outcome of the talks now in progress, if any, the defence of victims of Russia’s military occupation of Ukrainian territory, and domestic political repression, will remain a central issue for our movement, right across Europe.

☭ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow! Or email peoplenature@protonmail.com, and we’ll add you to our circulation list (2-4 messages per month)

Try Me For Treason

Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.


Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Thirty Two

 

A Morning Thought @ 3013

Liam O Ruairc  🏴When the award winning journalist Ed Moloney (1948-2025) died in October this year, his death received widespread media coverage, with many obituaries and appreciations of his work published. (1) 

Ed Moloney

This piece will be far more modest. It is based on personal recollections of my dealings with Ed Moloney. I was not a close friend of his, much more of a casual acquaintance. This very much a view from the periphery of his life rather than its centre. Between 2000 and 2003 I met in him in person on a total of 21 occasions, and until he passed away we had a couple of dozen interactions via email and Facebook. While these were limited in numbers, they were sufficient to give me some real impressions of who Ed was, and should have given Ed a fair idea of who I also was. But this is definitely not “A Secret History of Ed Moloney”!

For many years I had been familiar with the journalism of Ed Moloney, but the very first time he was ever raised in a personal conversation I had was on 08 July 1999. That day I was having a drink with professor Paul Bew in Dukes Hotel in Belfast, and I was telling him that I thought the Sunday Business Post newspaper had the best coverage of affairs in Northern Ireland, the articles of Tom McGuirk in particular. After all that paper under editor Damien Kiberd had been the only mainstream newspaper to campaign against the Belfast Agreement with its ‘Not A Deal For Nationalist Ireland’ editorial on 12 April 1998. Bew disagreed and told me that the best journalist was in fact Ed Moloney and The Sunday Tribune was much more interesting. He was to have lunch with him the following day (or shortly after, I can’t recall), some time before he was to spend a year teaching at Boston College. Possibly they were to discuss what later became known as The Boston Tapes project.

The very first time I met Ed Moloney in person was on 03 March 2000 at the public launch of Fourthwrite, the journal of the Irish Republican Writers Group at the Conway Mill in Belfast. I am not sure I was actually able to talk to him on that occasion. Brendan Hughes had just made an important speech, and the attention of the journalists was concentrated on that rather than chatting with obscure people like myself who just turned up. But it was on 15 April 2000 that for the first time I had quite lengthy discussions with him. On that date, a former republican prisoner who knew Ed very well for many years as well as a former member of the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party, who at the time were both completing post-graduate theses under the late James Daly at the Department of Scholastic Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast as well as myself went up to Ed Moloney’s house near the Cranmore bus stop on the Lisburn Road in Belfast. Ed drove us all up to Monaghan to the Ex Prisoners Assistance Committee (EXPAC) - at that time chaired by Anthony McIntyre and Tommy McKearney- Annual General Meeting in Monaghan. This was an interesting meeting at which I met Carrie Twomey for the very first time. Ed drove us back to Belfast, up to the Felons’ Club and The Gravediggers (of capitalism?) where we had another pint for the revolution. We had hours of discussions about various topics.

If this occasion kind of stands out for me, later ones did not leave much of an impression. For instance after the split in the Irish Republican Writers Group on 10 March 2001, I recall that during a dinner with Anthony McIntyre in the Morning Star in Belfast on 12 May 2001, Ed had explicitly deplored the degeneration of the Writers Group. However, far more colourful was the wedding of Anthony McIntyre and Carrie Twomey in Belfast on 07 May 2002. I can’t recall if Ed was there when the legal ceremony was performed in Belfast City Hall. After that we all had to go to The Green Hut in Turf Lodge. Dolours Price drove Davy Carlin, the Spanish academic Rogelio Alonso and myself to the venue. In the car, Davy Carlin and I had an argument as to wether the “law of value” applied to the so-called “Asiatic Mode of Production”. How Dolours put up with this nonesense, I do not know! At the Green Hut, I happened to be seated beside Joan McKiernan, who was Ed’s wife. Ed was probably nearby. Upon learning she had been a leading Cliffite I accused her of not being an orthodox Bolshevik Leninist standing in programmatic continuity with the theses and resolutions of the first four congresses of the communist international and the 1938 transitional programme for arguing the centrality of permanent arms economy, state capitalism and deflected permanent revolution rather than the correct general crisis of capitalism, degenerated workers state and permanent revolution perspective. She was only saved from this Marxist inquisition by the appearance of John McAnulty with whom I raised the topic of security and the Fourth International and how Hansen and Novack had colluded in the assassination of Trotsky. Such were the joys of some of the conversations at Mackers and Carrie’s wedding! It is only when Brendan Hughes and his partner arrived that some peace was brought to the table.

On 11 December 2001, in a review of Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston’s biography of Martin McGuinness in The Sunday Times, Paul Bew wrote: "Ed Moloney's authoritative and devastating Penguin History of the IRA is just around the corner". This was the very first time I had become aware of Ed Moloney’s book which was published in 2002 as A Secret History of the IRA. I bought the book on 30 September 2002 as soon as I saw it for the very first time. Upon first reading, the book was quite different to what I had expected. I had thought the book would have named who Stakeknife was. I was not alone in this. A conversation with QUB academic Richard English in the winter of 2002-2003 indicated he had similar expectations. My review of Ed’s book was published in The Blanket on 18 March 2003 under the title ‘Disturbing Secrets’. But this was a book I only had half digested at the time. I have re-read A Secret History of the IRA four times in its entirety, and just sections of it many more times. I have to say that I got far more from Ed’s book when I re-read it than when I had initially bought the book. This is especially true when I bought the second edition on 03 July 2007. If today I had to write an article about Ed’s masterpiece it would be different from the 2003 piece.

The last time I ever saw Ed Moloney in person was on 08 March 2003 at Anthony McIntyre’s house in Springhill Rise in Belfast. It was a very weird occasion as both signed to be so-called “guarantors” to a new property I was moving into. Also, that very morning Anthony McIntyre had received an advanced copy of Richard English's Armed Struggle A Political History of the IRA which had been a highly expected book.

After Ed Moloney permanently moved to the United States of America, our contacts became purely online, whether through email or Facebook messages. The Sunday Tribune was no longer published as a newspaper and Ed has to a large extent retired from his career as a journalist. But he still produced excellent pieces. This was particularly the case of his essay ‘The Peace Process and Journalism’ which I read during the winter 2006-2007. (2) This essay was so good I have quoted it in most of my published pieces since then. This essay about journalism and the peace process did what Liz Curtis’ 1983 Ireland The Propaganda War or David Miller’s 1994 Don’t Mention The War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and The Media were able to to during the war years. Greg McLaughlin & Stephen Baker (2010) The Propaganda of Peace: The Role of Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process were able to produce a good study but not from an actual media participant like Moloney did. I believe this is one of Ed’s best articles.

While I had been aware of the Boston Project, I did not have any significant involvement in it. I bought the book Voices From The Grave on 30 March 2010, but this was not a book that had a major impact on me. As opposed to the Secret History, it is not a book that I have re-read a couple of times. However the film I, Dolours had much more of an impact. I went to watch it with my friend Michelle on 07 September 2018 at the cinema complex in Belfast’s Dublin Road which today no longer exists. The film seemed to me sufficiently important for DVD copies to be available. There is a long series of Facebook messages between me and Ed Moloney about the possibility of creating DVDs of the I, Dolours film. I am old fashioned enough to still be using CDs and DVDs!

On 29 June 2018 I contacted Ed Moloney via Facebook to ask for his endorsement for my book Peace or Pacification? I sent him the draft document of the book. On 25 July 2018 he replied:

“i think it is very good. Will not make you any friends though but that is a mark of achievement.....”

On the same day he sent me the following endorsement:

Liam Ó Ruairc has written an important, revelatory analysis of the peace process in Northern Ireland which I am confident will take its place among the best books written about this consequential period in Anglo-Irish history. His underlying thesis is that what has happened in the near thirty years or so since the IRA recognized the southern state and embarked on a journey to constitutionalism is less a peace process and more a pacification process in which the republicans and the British co-operated to drain and enfeeble the vital ideological juices which had sustained resistance to partition for so long. The war in Ireland began with republicans and their allies abroad viewing the NI situation as a relic of British colonialism and ended with the militants accepting that it was really just a struggle over cultural identity; in the process republicans have been drained of their radicalism and now subscribe entirely to the neo-liberalism panacea. It is impossible to read this book and not wonder at the scale of the British triumph. The companion to this book, explaining how British intelligence so completely overwhelmed the IRA, has yet to be written. Until then Ó Ruairc’s fine work will do very nicely.

Of the six endorsements I received , I believe this one is the best.

On 13 August 2019 Ed Moloney sent me his postal address in the Bronx to send him a hard copy of my book once it was commercially available.

While Ed Moloney was now living in the United States and was no longer at the centre of the Irish journalistic scene, he still produced relevant material on his The Broken Elbow Blog. Our first exchange regarding that blog took on 18 March 2011, as I actually was suffering from a broken left elbow. Every week from now on I would have a look at his blog. During the same period Ed was also following my Irish Republican Education Forum Facebook group. On 09 April 2015, The Broken Elbow had an article entitled: “Adams & McConville: First The Magazine Piece. Now The Book. Next The Movie?” I did not pay any attention to this piece at the moment. As readers will understand this piece related to Patrick Radden Keefe, whose work would lead to a best selling book and a television series, but at that time the importance of Radden Keefe’s work was not clear. It is only when on 04 November 2018, I bought Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe that I became aware of him and his work. For various reasons I was not able to read and study this book properly before many months, but in the meantime I had become aware that Ed Moloney was challenging many of its conclusions. On 2 May 2019, Ed Moloney’s article “An American Reporter in Belfast: How a New Yorker Writer Got So Much Wrong in His Bestselling Book On The Troubles” published in Counterpunch raised hard hitting questions about Radden Keefe’s book. (3) From that time Ed’s blog had many articles about fairly technical questions such as British Army radios at the time of Jane McConville’s “Disappearance”. To put my cards on the table, I have to say that I am more convinced by Ed Moloney’s version of events than Patrick Radden Keefe.

Over the last few months of his life, I was trying to find what Ed Moloney’s opinion was of the Disney TV series of Radden Keefe’s book was or Martin Dillon’s new claims about the assassination of Jean McConville. Although he was ill I did not realize he was dying. When he passed away in late October, my impression was that the Irish equivalent of John Pilger and Robert Fisk died. If Ed Moloney’s wife and son lost a brilliant human being, journalism has lost one of its best voices.

Notes

(1) For examples of obituaries, see: Outstanding Chronicler of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Irish Times, 25 October 2025. In the view of the author of this article, the best article about his journalism is: Suzanne Breen, 'No saint, but this was a colossus of NI journalism - his rows with Dublin editors are legendary', Belfast Telegraph, 22 October 2025.

(2) Ed Moloney (2006), The Peace Process and Journalism, in: Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined II, London: The British Council, 65-82

(3) Ed Moloney, An American Reporter in Belfast: How a New Yorker Writer Got So Much Wrong in His Bestselling Book On The Troubles, Counterpunch, 02 May 2019, 

⏩ Liam Ó Ruairc is the former co-editor of The Blanket.

Ed Moloney

Gary Revel ★ Recommended by Christy Walsh.

Details of the $170 billion enforcement package shows most of it will come from public health, food, and safety programs, government departments, medicine and health supports.

It is a multi‑year immigration and border enforcement package passed in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” covering ICE, Border Patrol, detention expansion, deportation operations, and infrastructure.

The four‑year enforcement package, not a single agency budget includes:

ICE itself receives about $45 billion of that total for detention and deportation operations.

Trump’s White House is attempting to scale up to 1 million deportations annually, a level never before achieved in U.S. history.

  • Managing the money means:Expanding detention capacity
  • Increasing rapid‑removal operations
  • Contracting private detention companies
  • Building new processing centers
  • Funding mass transportation (buses, flights)

ICE is receiving more funding than any other federal law enforcement agency to support this expansion.

  • New detention facilities
  • Surveillance technology
  • Rapid‑response enforcement teams
  • Large‑scale transportation logistics

This is the largest immigration enforcement investment in U.S. history.

In the real sense of things the funding is being used to create a Trump-personal-quasi-secret police force.

Emerging evidence and reporting suggest that the Trump administration’s use of the $170 billion immigration‑enforcement package raises profound constitutional and statutory concerns. 

Continue @ Gary Revel.

Trump’s $170 Billion Personal Domestic Military

Dr John Coulter ✍ With only a couple of days remaining of this year, I’ve been delving into my crystal balls to see what 2026 holds for us on both sides of the Irish border.

It might be another 18 months until the next Stormont and local council elections in Northern Ireland in May 2027, but all the political parties have been in election mode since the new school year began in September 2025.

So expect bundles of opinion polls throughout 2026 with all eyes on the race between Sinn Fein and the DUP as to who will be the top dog in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Expect to see support for Jim Allister MP’s TUV creep up especially as distrust among pro-Union voters about DUP promises over the Protocol, the Windsor Framework, and the Irish Sea Border continues to fester.

The real danger for Unionism is Lagan Valley Syndrome developing in many constituencies, especially if opinion polls reflect a fairly even three-way split in the pro-Union vote between the DUP, UUP and TUV.

During last year’s Westminster election, the supposedly rock-solid pro-Union Lagan Valley constituency fell to the pan nationalist front in the form of an Alliance MP.

Speaking of Alliance, the bubble will finally burst and there will be an all-out civil war between those who want Alliance to become more openly middle of the road mirror image of the Liberal Democrats as its founding fathers intended, and those who want it to be a more clearly defined soft nationalist party which will allow Alliance to make gains west of the River Bann.

And speaking of leadership elections, even if the UUP’s Mike Nesbitt remains as party boss, the grassroots will hold its own unofficial leadership contest between MLAs Robbie Butler and Jon Burrows with both camps inviting their respective ‘candidates’ to address constituency and branch meetings.

Across the Irish Sea, expect a leadership coup against Labour PM Keir Starmer, with a Hard Left candidate winning thereby shifting the party policy-wise to the Looney Left.

Such will be the fanaticism of the new look Hard Left leadership, that they will decide to call a snap Westminster election. Unfortunately, this will backfire on Labour, and Hard Right Reform UK will gain control of the keys to 10 Downing Street.

With party boss Nigel Farage as PM, expect to see the rapid start of large scale deportations of asylum seekers and illegal migrants from the UK. Expect to see Reform propose a plan to have a series of deporting centres and camps established on remote Scottish islands rather than the current luxury of hotels.

The small boat crisis will come to a shuddering halt as Reform pumps millions of pounds into the Royal Navy to form an iron wall in the English Channel forcing the people trafficker gangs to start pushing people into other European Union countries.

Reform will undo any Labour bid in the meantime to get the UK to rejoin the EU, creating a financial crisis whereby the EU will say it actually doesn’t want the UK back!

Presidents Trump and Putin will do a Munich-style agreement which prevents World War III, with Ukraine being craved up politically. Given Trump’s interest in history, the US President will give the Crimea to the UK, making the region a British Empire dominion based on the fact that Britain won the Crimean War in the mid 19th century.

As for Gaza, American sources are hinting at evacuating thousands of Palestinians to South Africa while the Jerusalem-Washington political alliance begins the process of rebuilding the region as an Israeli-controlled dominion.

However, the big global power broker in terms of financial clout will be China as the Far Eastern communist super nation takes firm control of world economics, causing militant Christian fundamentalists to rethink Biblical predictions as to who is the Anti Christ. Beijing will replace the Vatican for this Biblical honour.

And speaking of religion, Islamic communities across mainland Britain will demand Sharia law to run regions where Muslims are in the clear majority culturally and numerically. As Sharia law is blatantly homophobic and transphobic as well as being overtly tough on women, expect Sharia law courts to start closing LGBT clubs and meeting places and cutting funding to LGBT and women’s rights organisations and groups.

Across Ireland, the safe-guarding crisis which has gripped one of the island’s largest Protestant denominations, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI) will explode as more alleged victims come forward to tell their stories, potentially sparking as the saying goes - more heads will roll.

In the Republic, the broad Left alliance which saw Catherine Connolly sweep to power as Irish President will disintegrate as the various factions begin ideological feuds with Sinn Fein lighting the fuse over a border poll.

Southern Ireland will have to ditch its military neutrality and join the NATO alliance as part of the Russia/America pact on Ukraine. Mind you, this could be a real benefit to Southern Ireland as Trump stations thousands of American forces personnel across the island bringing millions of much-needed dollar investment to both the Republic and Northern Ireland.

While the UK farming industry enjoyed a festive present of a Labour climbdown on the so-called farm inheritance tax, the agricultural industry will be stepping up a gear in its campaign to get the tax scrapped completely.

Just as this year witnessed strikes by key medical staff, 2026 will see similar strike action by the farming community causing food shortages, rationing and long queues and panic buying in many shops and supermarkets.

Once politicians come back from their New Year holidays, expect to see more silly arguments over language on road and housing signs. Just as erecting flags has always been seen as a clear method of marking out sectarian turf, there’ll be more Irish language signs erected in republican areas, with Unionist areas retaliating with signs in both English and a Ballymena accent (sorry, that should read Ulster Scots!)

On the sporting front, there will be some notable achievements. My beloved Gunners will finally bring silverware to the Emirates with either the English Premier League title, or the Champions League title.

In Scotland, Edinburgh side Hearts will follow St Mirren in breaking the Old Firm domination of domestic titles by winning the Premiership, while in Northern Ireland, Linfield will launch a last gasp onslaught to retain the Gibson Cup.

Similarly, in the soccer World Cup, the Germans will reign supreme again, beating the English in the final. In rugby, Ireland will secure pole position for the next World Cup, while yet another Irish trainer will clinch the much coveted English Grand National in horse racing.

On the GAA front, the Sam will be won by an Ulster team, with a Munster squad becoming all-Ireland hurling champions. In cricket, England will continue to make fools of themselves at the wicket as they did in the recent Ashes tests in Australia, meaning that Ireland will move above England in world rankings.

In the meantime, a Happy New Year to all Pensive Quill readers, and roll on Easter!
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 


Coulter’s Crystal Balls 🔮 Predictions For 2026

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Thirty One

 

A Morning Thought @ 3012

Anthony McIntyre  ⚑ When sentenced to twelve years his conviction created something of a stir due to his university degree. 

Mark Lenaghan
At that stage, in 1984, there was probably no one else in the republican wings with that level of education, although by the time of the Good Friday Agreement and the surge of releases many republican prisoners were emerging from the jail with third level qualifications.

Mark Lenaghan, known to his fellow prisoners as Fiddler, was a rare bird in more ways in one. Well educated, he was also deeply religious. It gave rise to a certain touchiness on his part. Once when I referred to a rare monastic-type silence on the wing he took umbrage, thinking I was having a go at his beliefs, leaving myself and Somhairle Dines bemused and amused in equal measure. On that wing with people like myself and Big Syd McManus housed there, religious conviction was never spared the whip of wit. This just didn't happen to be one of those occasions.

On the wing, despite his deeply held beliefs I don't recall him as religiously in the face of others. That was more a feature of life on the loyalist wings where the common religious currency was Old Testament fire and brimstone.   

His religious belief, or fervour as it seemed to me, was an enduring feature of his life, and when he had completed his sentence he taught religion at St Malachy's College before later in life becoming an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church. I had sometimes wondered what became of him and have a grudging admiration for the fact that his religious conviction was not the result of some jail fad, to be abandoned like old socks that have outlived their usefulness.

That he never returned to the IRA on his release was entirely in line with the evolution of his religious thinking which placed an emphasis on the rejection of armed force as a way to tackle political problems. He felt the slippage into a military mindset was simultaneously the withdrawal from a moral mindset, the result being that anything can be justified for the big picture; that ultimately the practitioner of political violence ends up deceiving themselves. 

Like many of his generation he did not drop from the sky into jail. State violence produced street violence, with many young people seeing armed responses as a productive way of addressing state repression.  As part of an apolitical family he grew up in a loyalist area, Woodvale at the top of the Shankill Road.  Describing his upbringing as being in the Catholic faith, the family home was first bombed and then in a second attack loyalists, behaving like Israeli settlers, stole their home and evicted the family. This stirred great resentment within the young Mark Lenaghan. Once allocated a home in Twinbrook he exchanged religious views for political ones.  

Twinbrook, a burgeoning estate on the outskirts of West Belfast and also home to Bobby Sands, was an exclusively nationalist community 'seething with resentment' at the unionists, the police and the British army. The area was 'pickled in violence.' While still at school, midway through his teens he decided to join the IRA. 

He moved into the IRA's civil administration and detailed how the IRA system of policing left a lot to desire. He identified the dynamic driving IRA policing as less one of seeking control over the community, and being more of a response to community pressure, something often overlooked by observers. Gradually he moved to the Active Service Units which brought him to the coalface of armed conflict with British forces. After one such confrontation in February 1982 he was captured and imprisoned. 

Prior to finding himself in jail he also found himself outside the Catholic Church, coming to see it through a Marxian lens as one more Ideological State Apparatus. He put this down to having acquired a perspective of if you are not with us you are against us. Imprisonment, and the time for reflection it allows, brought him back to his faith. 

His death was the first I had heard of him in decades. I had no idea that he was married with three children or had become a church deacon. Other former prisoners had died in 2025, most notably Brendan 'Bik' McFarlane, but they had tended to remain politically involved whereas Mark Lenaghan's life took off in a completely different direction. 

By all accounts,  he was deeply committed to the parish he worked in as a deacon, becoming immensely popular with the congregation. For those who knew about his IRA past it didn't much matter. They took him as they found him. 

While religious belief to me is ridiculous, it would be churlish to heap ridicule on Mark Lenaghan. Given that he took a road less travelled by people of his background he came to strike me as a formidable man man on a remarkable journey. 

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Mark Lenaghan

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