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TPQ
Anthony McIntyre ☠ Writing in the Irish News on 12-January-2026.

Just into the New Year Denis Bradley, writing in this paper, raised a matter which has defied resolution throughout many old years. 

Truth, despite acquiring a word association with reconciliation, is a concept which in the North has long been used for something entirely different - recrimination: our truth about you, but not your truth about us. 

Denis Bradley, alert to this, in suggesting that compassion should place limitations on clarity, invites his readers to reconsider the value of truth recovery in its most expansive form. His main concern is, briefly, that to come clean to the extent that informers be identified, will have a destructive affect on the families of those who are 'outed.'

One authentic, but not sufficient, reason for wishing to have informers publicly identified is curiosity. The titillation to be derived from the layers of deceit being pulled away from the spook world, causing spinners and spoofers to seek out new shadows, should not be understated either. Many aficionados of horror find rich pickings by flicking the mind's channel to one of the following stations: Internal Security Unit, Force Research Unit, MI5, Special Branch. John Ware's upcoming book on the moral quagmire inhabited by Freddie Scappaticci, Brian Nelson, and a range of state agencies is likely to be replete with the genre of nightmare that prevented Edgar Allan Poe getting a good night's sleep. Yet there is no compelling reason to insist that curiosity should trump compassion. Pursuing informers at this point is often driven by the same type of mindset that presses for prosecution of former combatants, As the former IRA prisoner Tommy McKearney once put it: why continue to take prisoners when the war is over?

While not intrinsically objectionable there is no uncomplicated way to erect the humane 'Bradley barrier.' Would the family of John Bingham be allowed to know the identities of those who killed him but not that of the informer who was also part of the same IRA operation? Perhaps the most that can be done is to erect the safety rail of compassion rather than a barrier in the hope that a society chooses wisely and opts not to go down a path that leads to even more destruction. 

One thing the Kenova Report demonstrated starkly is that there are families who have already been destroyed by the informer label. They lost loved ones, and forever walk the earth bearing the mark of Cain for a sin not their own, or a sin perhaps not even committed. Compassion should not be confronted with the harsh command of verboten at the family homes of those whose loved ones were executed on the orders of the IRA Army Council after it was fed information procured and processed by Freddie Scappaticci, and green lighted by his agent handlers in the British security matrix.  

The involvement of a British agent in the construction of cases against people accused of informing, leading to their execution, is as corrupting as police malfeasance in the Birmingham Six 'appalling vista.'  

Even within its own narrow ethical bandwidth, the deaths of all those executed by the IRA on the watch of Freddie Scappaticci amount to a gross miscarriage of justice, the cases contaminated beyond all reasonable doubt.  Each of the dead should be posthumously pardoned by the only body capable of doing so, Sinn Fein. The party still has within its ranks a former element of the Army Council, the institution which signed off on the Scappaticci executions. It alone carries the authority within the communities where the deceased once lived to remove the stain. Seeking to evade the obligation to exonerate by recourse to the mantra of the IRA has gone away, is as shallow as the secret graves the IRA interred some of its victims in. 

If Sinn Fein can lay wreaths at monuments for British war dead, it can just as surely lay wreaths at the graves of Vincent Robinson, Anthony McKiernan, Charlie McIlmurray and the many others the IRA and British state, in a macabre joint enterprise, forced to sail into nothingness under the 'tout' flag. The same military whose fallen Sinn Fein now honour on Remembrance Sunday stands accused by the party of being responsible for the killings procured and counselled by Freddie Scappaticci. To whatever extent the British state was responsible - and it is hugely culpable - showing compassion to the families of its victims is hardly a breach of any principle. Hubris should not stand in the way of an action that would be one of humility, not humiliation.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Truth, Recrimination And The Value Of A Little Compassion

Duleek 1916-1981 Monument Committee   is organising a tenth anniversary commemoration for Volunteer Tommy Gallagher.

Assembly Point: Hunger Strike Monument, Duleek.

Date: 22 February 2026.

Time: 1500.

Speaker: Francie Mackey



Tommy Gallagher Commemoration

Seamus Kearney 🎤 After his release from internment which officially ended on 5th December 1975, Freddie Scappaticci returned to the family home at Farnham Street in the Ormeau Road area of South Belfast. 

By the end of 1976 he had returned to the Provisional IRA, operating as a Belfast Brigade Intelligence Officer, but had also resumed work in the building trade, working alongside members of the Official IRA from the Markets area in a tax scam involving the misuse of 715 tax exemption certificates.

In 1977 he was arrested by the RUC fraud squad and threatened with prosecution and the real possibility of going back to prison over the tax scam, which seemingly terrified him. Significantly, others were compromised in a similar vein by the British security services after they had been released from the cages of Long Kesh, so Scappaticci was certainly not on his own.
 
After agreeing to work as a spy for the RUC, providing them with low level intelligence on the IRA, Scappaticci became uncomfortable as he believed the RUC to be a sectarian force, so simply walked into the heavily fortified British army barracks in Royal Avenue, Belfast, the former Grand Central Hotel, and offered his services to them instead. 

His first army contact was Sergeant Peter Jones from the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, on a four month tour of duty in Ireland from January to May 1977. After their assessment of Scappaticci the army decided to 'poach' him from the RUC and groom him into becoming a member of their Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU), part of 39th Brigade of the British Army. For his part Scappaticci loved the attention and gradually seen himself as a British military officer in an elite group, convincing himself and being convinced by his handlers, that the IRA was a blight on the Nationalist population of the North and had to be defeated. The fact that his blood monies would reach around 80,000 pounds per year, directed into a bank account in Gibraltar, also played a role in his conversion to work for the other side. 

Fundamentally, Scappaticci did not possess a moral compass but had a dissociative identity disorder (DID), which allowed him to switch sides in the war for his own self interest and material gain. Again, it must be stated that he was not unique in this regard, as other IRA Volunteers did the same, including people close to him, self preservation taking precedence over ideological loyalty.

When the Provisional IRA commenced the total overhaul and restructuring of its units in 1977, cell structure, the ' Green Book' and a new 'Internal Security Unit' ( ISU) were included in the overhaul. Once the British army became aware of this, they set their sights on infiltration of the Internal Security Unit, as it was like' honey to a bee'.

The British army pushed for their man, Scappaticci, to enter the ISU, while at the same time the RUC 's Special Branch were using their best endeavours to get their agents into the same unit. As it turned out both security agencies succeeded when the IRA' s Internal Security Unit was eventually activated in the Autumn of 1978. Ironically, the head of the ISU, a former member of the British army's Special Boat Service ( SBS), had already been a Special Branch agent for years previous. Scappaticci became his second-in-command. As for the others, most from D company, Lower Falls, Belfast, they were compromised IRA Volunteers with a few exceptions.
 
The Internal Security Unit, whose remit was to root out informers, brief new recruits, investigate botched IRA military operations etc was heavily infiltrated from its inception. Furthermore and disgracefully, there was no rotation of personnel which meant prolonged and sustained damage could be inflicted on the IRA, blunting its overall capacity to win the war against the British. The Provisional IRA would not be defeated in the field, but a policy of containment ensured that a military victory was unachievable.


Seamus Kearney is a former Blanketman and author of  
No Greater Love - The Memoirs of Seamus Kearney.

Stakeknife 🕵 The Rise And Fall 🕵 Act Ⅰ

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3027

Gary Robertson ⚽The Who in their classic “Won’t get fooled again” from 1971 sang “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” a feeling of Déjà vu, the promise of something new yet somehow predictably the same.

And so it is currently at Celtic Park. Sure the 33 days of disaster that was Wilfred Nancy are over and again riding in to save Celtics’ season is club legend and all round good guy Martin O’Neill. Yet despite the new found confidence in the team - a crushing defeat of Dundee Utd, a team we had succumbed to only days before showed the players are good enough, O’Neill's tactical work and on the pitch, perhaps green shoots of recovery. 


But as always (to borrow another musical metaphor) every rose has its thorn and the thorn is Celtics’ board and their inability to see beyond their bank balances. The team needs investment however, a new striker for one is a must but at time of writing the board continue to drag their feet. Hibs' Kieran Bowie is certainly catching the eye of other clubs and we could do much worse, in my opinion, than look to bring him in. But as always there’s a price to pay and whether Dermott is willing to prize open the biscuit tin remains to be seen. 

Speaking of Bowie, Hibernians themselves fought out a draw with the vastly improved Motherwell. Under Jens Berthel Askou, the Steelmen are playing very attractive football and are a threat to anyone. No longer does any team expect to turn up at Fir Park and leave with three points. How long they can keep their man is a question only he and they can answer. Will be be swayed with a job in England? For the good of Scottish football I hope not but sadly the lure of big money “down south” is a difficult one to resist. For now purely from a neutral standpoint, let’s enjoy his brand of football and how he has this team playing. Motherwell are a joy to watch.

Sticking in the central belt, Livingston (a team I have a soft spot for) look doomed already to be playing in the championship next season. Four points adrift of second bottom Kilmarnock, who themselves are four points away from tenth placed St Mirren, it’s already looking like it’s going to be a long difficult season for David Martindale's men. 

At the other end of the table however Hearts continue to fly high, leading the chase from the usual suspects. Sure their match with Dundee was marred by some questionable refereeing, They showed such true character when down to ten men, after the dismissal of their keeper just before half time, that they hung on to claim three points, helped greatly by a wonder save by current Scotland number one Craig Gordon who at 43 is playing as well as he’s ever done. 


Rangers kept up the chase with a 2-0 victory over luckless Aberdeen who are winless since December 14th. A big club, the fans deserve better and should be challenging for honours season after season rather than languishing in mid table. 

Back to the bottom six, and Falkirk inflicted a damaging defeat on Kilmarnock, beating them 2-0 at Rugby Park. Like Livingston I fear for their future in the SPL. New faces in the manager and assistant managers seats, Neil McCann and Billy Dodds appear to have their work cut out but who knows with the transfer window wide open perhaps they can strengthen the team and drag themselves away from relegation fears. Rangers themselves seem to have adopted the Danny Rohl style well and are now looking more like the team we expect to see at Ibrox. Without doubt certainly in the mix for the title and playing some very watchable football. Could the young German lead “the bears” to title glory? The fans seem to think so. A demolition of Celtic in the latest Glasgow Derby and a comfortable win over the dismal Dons. Things are looking rosy down Govan way.

 
Meanwhile those of us of a “green persuasion” wait with bated breath scouring news sites, fan pages and Celtic minded podcasts in the hope signings will be made. Will we find that 20+ goal a season striker? Will we be able to find a player who spends more time on the pitch than the injury table? All will be revealed in time. Just don’t get your hopes up Celtic fans. They say it’s the hope that kills you, if that’s true we’ve all died a thousand deaths.

Til next time . . . 

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

After 33 Days, They Rose Again

Barry Gilheany ✍ It was the most audaciously illegal act ever in US foreign policy. 

In the dead of the night on 3rd January 2026, US forces captured or kidnapped (depending on one’s point of view) President Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and his wife from their residence in Caracas and flew them to New York - where, in the theatre of performative power and humiliation that we have witnessed in human traffic in the opposite direction namely the deportation of supposedly illegal Latino immigrants and falsely branded criminals to El Salvador’s notorious supermax - to face charges of narcotics supply to the US. 

The overthrow of uncompliant governments in Latin America at the instigation of US agencies is, of course, hardly a rare event in a region where America has always presumed the right to do as it likes to uphold its strategic interests. But this was no half-baked attempt to overthrow a regime using native proxies like the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961; no coup with a ready mean moustachioed military dictator like Pinochet; no long drawn out insurgency such as the Contra guerrilla campaign against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s; no transformative blueprint for the reordering of an entire region by democratisation and free markets such as the Project for a New American Century which provided the intellectual ballast for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No, it was the decapitation of the figure head while the regime continues its repression of the Venezuela population. In an inversion of the language of anti-war movements of the West, “it was all about oil” as Trump made abundantly clear while it was most certainly not about “democracy” which was the message delivered by Trump’s disavowal of any role in any future dispensation for Maria Corina Machado, the leading light of the democratic opposition and winner of the Noble Laureate which Trump so craves while he indicates his desire to cut a deal with the technocratic Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez to ensure US control of Venezuelan oil reserves. No colour revolutions on Trump’s watch.

And there will be no colour revolutions, televised or otherwise, because despite the apparent ideological chasm between Trump and the Chavismo regime that Maduro represented, both belong to the loose but interconnected conglomerate of authoritarian leaders that Anne Applebaum describes as Autocracy Inc. Unlike military regimes and ideological alliances from the past and contemporary hybrid or “illiberal” democracies like Hungary, Turkey or India, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, cemented not by ideology but instead by a ruthless, single-minded determination to keep their personal privilege and wealth.[1]

Applebaum lists the strongmen leaders of the following countries (at the time of writing): Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan and maybe three dozen others who share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to repel any attempts at transparency or accountability, and to strike out at anyone, at home or abroad, who has the courage to challenge them. The leaders of Autocracy Inc also share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth. They often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are moulded not through ideals but through deals – deals designed to ameliorate the effects of sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.[2] Although the name of the country that he leads is not listed in the above rogues gallery of autocracies, the modus operandi of their mutual collaboration also belong to the toolkit of President Donald Trump. His transactional view of the world, of personal and international relations and his brazen and signal approach towards self-enrichment puts the United States into that club.

Not a few of those autocracies on that list were initially birthed through popular revolutionary or national liberation struggles such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola and, most pertinently for this article, Venezuela. For as much as the events of January 3, 2026, are so emblematic of raw American power, they can also be seen as the long-term culmination of a revolution betrayed.

President Hugo Chavez arrived in office in 1998 after a strident campaign for change in the Republic of Venezuela which had been established forty years earlier. Formerly a wealthy, stable democracy, Venezuela had, as is the typical developmental pattern in many oil states, become nepotistic and corrupt with bribery of politicians and kickbacks being given to their friends. With the fall in oil prices in the 1990s, the resultant anger created the conditions for the revolutionary ferment that brought Chavez, a lieutenant-colonel in the Venezuelan army who had led an abortive coup d’etat in 1992, to power in a democratic election in 1998 on a promise to create a more honest Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. A year later, the new Venezuelan president held a meeting with an old comrade in struggle Jesus Urdenta, his chief of internal police. Urdenta brought to Chavez evidence of corrupt practices in the new, supposedly revolutionary government. He informed him that several top officials in the new government were padding invoices for government contracts, including the printing contract for Chavez’s new constitution. Urdenta urged Chavez to bring an end to such behaviour. After an initial silence, Chavez asked for Urdenta’s resignation and Venuezela’s Supreme Court quashed any investigation into corruption.[3]

So, Chavez made a choice, one which would prove in the long term to be fatal for the legitimacy of the revolution and the Bolivarian Republic. Had he sided with his old comrade and established an expectation of probity in the public sector, then it would have provided a solid ethical and democratic foundations for the undoubtedly popular social programmes that he did institute. But, in an attempt to keep himself in power in perpetuity, he made the calculation that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones and he was proved right to the long-term detriment of his revolution and his country.[4]

For in the years that followed, cronies of Chavez would support the president’s drive to eliminate any mode of accountability and transparency, both because doing so maintained their stay in power and protected them from scrutiny. Like other budding autocrats like Putin, Orban and Erdogan, Chavez gradually but steadily denuded democratic institutions in Venezuela of autonomy – the press, the courts, the civil service, various regulators, and ombudspersons – even while proclaiming his belief in democracy. His supporters went along with that too and, over time, the state began to act like a criminal enterprise.[5]

And what a gravy train grew for the officials who partook in the skimming off of the Bolivarian Republic’s resources. During the fourteen years Chavez held power, Venezuela took in nearly $800 billion in oil-export revenues, much of which did indeed finance the state welfare programmes which made Chavez such a poster boy for Western leftists like Jeremy Corbyn, erstwhile leader of the British Labour Party. But hundreds of billions of dollars from PDVSA, the state oil company, as well as other Venezuelan state companies, ended up in bank accounts around the world. In 2017. Investigators found that PDVSA officials had been hiding millions of stolen dollars at the Portuguese bank, Banco Espirito Santo. A 2021 investigation revealed that Swiss banks were hiding $10 billion on behalf of officials at Venezuelan state banks, electrical utilities, and other entities. In that same year, journalists uncovered a $2 billion Venezuelan oil company that had been processed through banks in the principality of Andorra.[6]

But graft pervaded the totality of Chavismo society with one of its most important agents being the industry of currency exchange manipulation, created by the state’s byzantine system of multiple currency prices. The beneficiaries of this “democratisation of kleptocracy” included students who gamed the allowance for cheap dollars meant for overseas studies either to profit from the artificial exchange rates abroad or by paying unscrupulous schools to produce paperwork suggesting that they had studied abroad which meant that cheap dollars could be swapped on the black market for many more Venezuelan bolivars than it had cost to buy them, creating for the student “a nice little earner” of a few thousands of dollars in profit. But there were far greater and more egregious players in on this scamocracy who exploited their connections to work out how to claim tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to import spare parts, medical supplies, telecoms equipment, chemicals, computers. If Venezuela needed to import anything, then someone would be generating the false paper trails and making discreet payoffs, just to unlock access to cheap currency. [7]

Behind the allure and bluster of Chavismo propaganda lay an economy and society so weakened by corruption and gross incompetence that it was peculiarly exposed to the effects of turbulence, internally and externally. The cash behemoth that was the oil industry was the first to suffer the shocks that undid the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002-3, Chavez detonated chaos in the industry by sacking 19,000 oil workers for going on strike and replaced experts with regime loyalists. Later, the decline of commodity prices and the imposition of sanctions on the PDVSA by the first Trump administration accelerated the collapse. Almost simultaneously, Venezuela began to experience critical scarcities of everything due to the currency exchange scams. Billions (or maybe tens of billions) of state funds had disappeared into the proverbial black hole, the country’s foreign currency had been siphoned into private offshore accounts, hyperinflation accelerated, and imported goods disappeared.[8]

People without dollars faced hunger and malnutrition if not outright starvation. The Catholic Charity Caritas estimated in 2019 that 78 percent of Venezuelans ate less than they used to, and 41 percent went whole days without eating. Doctors in Venezuelan hospitals faced pressure not to list malnutrition as either a cause of illness or death.[9] Even the most basic commodities disappeared from shelves including, most excruciatingly embarrassing (if such emotions could be held by such uber-kleptocrats) toilet paper.

The death knell for the Bolivarian revolution turned kleptocracy with a faux left tinge should have been sounded by the death of Chavez in 2013 and his replacement by the uncharismatic party functionary Nicholas Maduro. Venezuelans knew the truth of the hollowed-out revolution and the regime it brought to power; corruption seeped from its pores. The accession of Maduro to power ushered in a series of popular, Arab Spring demonstrations across the country and it seemed that the days of the regime were well and truly numbered. However, as Anne Applebaum describes, this was the moment that the regime called in favours from Autocracy Inc.

As well as the common ur garden means of revenue raising by rogue regimes such as drug trafficking, illegal mining, kidnapping, extortion and gasoline smuggling, the Maduro regime was able to find friends and trading partners among other sanctioned states and companies happy to engage in corruption. Russian companies such as Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil and TNK-BP (a joint Russian-British venture, at their own behest or at the request of the state, filled the gaps left by departing European, North American and South American firms frightened by the instability and risk, to put money into Venezuelan oil, agriculture and even manufacturing. In addition to subsidised grain exports replacing those previously from Canada and the US and gasoline (the only gasoline available in Venezuela), Moscow supplied Caracas with some $4 billion of arms and armaments, including 100,000 Kalashnikovs, 24 fighter jets, and 50 helicopters to be used in the recurring bouts of repression that characterised the Maduro regime. Complementing such lethal cargo, China has sold surveillance technology, crowd-control equipment, and riot gear to the Maduro government, along with water cannons, tear-gas guns and enormous moveable walls that could block people from joining crowds – all tools that helped prevent the opposition from winning power. China had also been a generous benefactor in the way in which it replaced international institutions wary of lending to Venezuela by providing $30 billion in loans before it cottoned onto the reality that these loans would never be paid back and that an incredibly expensive, Chinese-backed high-speed railway meant to cross Venezuela’s lightly populated southern plains would never be completed due to Venezuelan contractors absconding with the money.[10]

A shared anti-American worldview links Cuba and Venezuela and in return for subsidised Venezuelan oil, Cuba provided soldiers, police officers, security and intelligence experts as sell as sports coaches, doctors, and nurses. A shared feeling of ‘disrespect’ from the democratic world lies behind the personal links between Maduro and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Venezuela exports gold to Turkey and receives food in exchange. But the biggest Autocracy Inc relationship that Venezuela has cultivated and developed is with Iran. They relate to each other on the basis of shared anti-American grievance and interest in clandestine petroleum sales. Iranians bought Venezuelan gold and sent food and gasoline in return. Iranians are believed to be advising Venezuela on repressive tactic against dissidents. They helped Venezuela build a drone factory with mixed success and have helped with the repair of Venezuelan oil refineries. In return, the Venezuelans may have helped launder money for the Iranian proxy militia and are believed to have provided passports for Hezbollah and Iranian officials as well.[11]

By tapping into this axis of convenience/corruption/illiberalism (add any suitable adjective) conceptualised by Applebaum as Autocracy Inc, the Maduro regime was able to shamelessly steal elections, bloodily suppress street protests and imprison thousands of political opponents and presumably continue to feather the nests of its entourage of placemen and apparatchiks. 

The ending of Maduro’s term in office by a much more powerful kleptocrat and authoritarian populist who, like Maduro’s predecessor, can speak to his constituency in familiar language, will most likely change nothing on the ground. In many ways, it was an easy win for Trump as his European allies, especially the UK, feels hamstrung in its response due to their perceived need to keep him on board in the defence of Ukraine. Despite all his bluster, it is almost impossible to see him repeating his “success” with, for example, the despotism of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

References

[1] Anne Applebaum (2024), Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run The World. London: Allen Lane p.2

[2] Ibid, p.3

[3] Ibid, pp.43-44

[4] Ibid, pp.44-45

[5] Ibid, p.45

[6] Ibid, pp.45-46

[7] Ibid, pp.46-47

[8] Ibid, pp.48-49
 
[9] Ibid, p.49

[10] Ibid, pp.50-51

[11] Ibid, pp.51-53

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

The Day That Changed Everything Yet Nothing 🪶 Trump Captures Maduro But Business As Usual In Venezuela With Regime Unchanged

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3026

Anthony McIntyre  ☠ Each week we gather here in an act of solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza who for over the past two years have been subjected to a genocidal onslaught. 

Given the very focused Israeli strategy of infanticide, which has resulted in a disproportionately high number of children making up the civilian death toll, we have frequently expressed our horror at the wilful extinguishing of young life. No vigil passes where the fate of children in Gaza fails to get mentioned. Children leaving the only world they will ever have known - some too young to be even cognizant of their surroundings - have taken up a large portion of our psychological world. 

On the particular Saturday, the second West Street vigil of 2026, I would like to shift our gaze away from destruction, desolation, death. Rather than focus on children that have involuntarily left the world, I would like to draw attention to a child that has just come into the world. The new arrival is the son of our esteemed colleague Stephani Kirwan and her partner Ryan Brennan. 

For Drogheda Stands With Palestine, Stephanie, over the past two years, has been a driving force behind what we do. Inspirational, selfless, she has often delivered motivational speeches at these vigils. Often she would be accompanied by her daughter. On at least one occasion, her partner Ryan - fresh from having scored a wonder free kick the previous evening at Athlone during Drogheda United's magnificent and successful cup run - stood on the periphery of the vigil caring for the child while Stephanie spoke with passion and anger.

As a visitor to the Occupied Territories, Stephanie can speak with first hand knowledge of what conditions are like for those forced to live under the jackboot of Israeli occupation. Outside of these weekly vigils she has immersed herself in campaign work which on occasion has taken the form of fundraisers in McHugh's at which she has communicated to her audience the dire need for more people to become involved in opposing the genocide.  

A matter of weeks ago, heavily pregnant, she arrived at my house after which I accompanied her as she went about aid work, on this occasion for a project not associated with Gaza. A truly wonderful human being who, despite now being a mother of two, will continue to reach out to others including the mothers and children in Gaza. For we Drogheda United fans - a few of us here are season ticket holders - Ryan Brenna, as Drogs captain . . . well, he is a great guy too!

Hearty congratulations to both Stephanie and Ryan and a warm welcome to their son, a companion for their daughter to fuss over. 

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

A New Arrival

Irish Independent Written by Grace Boland.

As a politician, I hear constant reports of the hurt that nameless hatred can inflict.

Freedom without responsibility is not freedom at all. Yet that is what the online world has become, a space where harm hides behind anonymity and accountability is optional. We would never accept this in our streets, our schools or our workplaces. So why do we tolerate it online?

The online world is not a paral­lel universe. It shapes our relationships, our children’s lives, our politics and our democracy. Yet it remains the only place where we still seriously argue that rules are an attack on freedom, rather than a basic condition of safety.

Much commentary on proposed online safety legislation misses this fundamental point. The objective is not to silence people or to strip citizens of their right to express unpopular views. The objective is to make the digital “public square” safer, fairer and more accountable.

Critics frame the debate as a choice between anonymity and freedom. That is a false choice. We accept limits on behaviour in every other sphere of life without calling it censorship. We have defamation law, public order law and child protection law, not because we want to control speech, but because unregulated behaviour causes real harm.

Continue @ Indo.

Tackling Anonymous Online Abuse Isn’t Censorship 🪶 It’s Common Sense

Dr John Coulter ✍ Whether or not the Ulster Unionist Party holds a leadership contest or coronation at the end of the month, the central issue remains - in what direction is Unionism going?

Whoever becomes leader and deputy leader at the Emergency General Meeting in late January in a Belfast hotel, their primary vision must be to establish Co-operative Unionism in time for the May 2027 Stormont and council elections.

No matter if the new UUP leadership decides on a liberal or traditional ideology for the party, a strategy on the number of candidates and transfers between parties must be the primary concern in its ‘in box’.

Vote splitting, non-transferring and voter apathy in traditionally pro-Union constituencies have seen seats lost to the pan nationalist front of Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Alliance.

If brutal examples were needed, Unionism only needs to examine the results of the last Westminster poll in Lagan Valley, a supposedly rock solid pro-Union seat since its creation in 1983. Because of a three-way split between the DUP, UUP and TUV in the General Election, the seat fell to Alliance.

During the last Stormont showdown, because of poor transferring among pro-Union parties, veteran DUP MLA Mervyn Storey lost out to Alliance in North Antrim.

Indeed, in many normally pro-Union District Electoral Areas (DEAs) across Northern Ireland, voter turnout is starting to dip well below 60 per cent as an increasing number of ‘stay at home’ Unionists lose faith in the ballot box.

Gone are the days when Unionist MPs could boast of a 30,000 plus vote majority in General Elections. Put bluntly, Unionism has allowed the pan nationalist front a free gift at the ballot box. In recent years, too, many in the pro-Union community have been voting Alliance as a protest against the mixed-messaging among the Unionist parties.

However, a clear message must be sent out to moderate Unionism from the UUP’s EGM on 31st January - Alliance is no longer the soft-u Unionist party it was under Oliver Napier, David Cook or John Alderdice.

Alliance 2026 is an integral part of the pan nationalist front and has now become a soft-r republican party, occupying the electoral ground once held by the now defunct Irish Independence Party of the Seventies, which was once fronted by Protestant ex-British Army officer John Turnley before his murder by the UDA in 1980.

If Unionism as an ideology is to regain the upper hand electorally at Assembly, local government and Westminster levels, all the pro-Union parties will have to work together publicly so that Unionist voters can see that co-operation is a practical reality, and not empty rhetoric.

The blame game as to who split Unionism will have to be laid to rest. The bitterness of not voting for other pro-Union parties will have to be set aside and Unionists will have to vote all the way down the ballot paper for every pro-Union candidate on the ticket.

Likewise, the various pro-Union parties will have to realistically analyse how many candidates can be elected according to the pro-Union quotas available, and equally importantly, which pro-Union parties are best placed to either take or hold seats in the Assembly and council in May 2027.

It has been done in the past. For example, in February 1974, operating under the banner of the United Ulster Unionist Council, known as the Treble UC or Unionist Coalition, pro-Union parties scooped up 11 of the 12 Westminster General Election seats.

At that time, the Treble UC represented three main Unionist parties - DUP, UUP and Vanguard. Voter turnout in many constituencies was well over 60 per cent, and over 70 per cent in some seats.

The new UUP leadership will have to create an ethos of Co-operative Unionism, whereby agreed party candidates will have to be stood to ensure increased voter confidence among the pro-Union electorate, and especially the winning of seats at all levels.

Unionism will have to again find the Treble UC Spirit of ’74 strategically if it is to avoid continuing to play second fiddle electorally to the pan nationalist front.

And especially at Northern Ireland Assembly level, Unionism will have to undo the disaster of 20 years ago and the St Andrews Agreement when the top post of First Minister was changed from the largest designation (as under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement) to the largest party.

The mentality of putting party before Province must be confined to the dustbin of history. Unionism must use this year to lobby the British Government to restore ‘largest designation’ to the Stormont First Minister’s role.

The mouthpiece of the Provisional IRA, its political wing Sinn Fein, holds the First Minister’s post as under the St Andrews Agreement, the republican movement is the largest party at Stormont. Indeed, Sinn Fein has eaten so much electorally into the moderate Catholic vote that it has also eclipsed the SDLP as the largest party at council level.

Unionism cannot afford a knee jerk reaction to Sinn Fein being the top dog at the Assembly by calling for Stormont to be scrapped. If devolution falls once more, it will not be replaced by Direct Rule from Westminster, but by Joint Authority between the Dail and the House of Commons.

By 1st February, the UUP will have a new leadership in place. Whatever fancy label they wish to place on their ideology is irrelevant. It will have to be a policy of Co-operative Unionism among all the pro-Union parties that will decide the future direction of Unionism, and ultimately the future role of the UUP.

 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Pathways And Policies, Not Personalities, Will Revive UUP

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