Our friends in the North

Reading Ed Moloney’s Secret History Of The IRA, this year’s most – pardon the pun – explosive contribution to the literature of The Troubles, it’s striking just how utterly the landscape in the north has been transformed by the peace process.

And yet if ever the FF election slogan ‘A lot done, more to do’ had real application, it’s to Northern Ireland where this latest year of fragile peace saw the busting of an alleged IRA spyring inside Stormont leading to yet another suspension of the assembly, the arrival of yet another secretary of state (Paul Murphy replacing John Reid) and, most worryingly, more outbreaks of sectarian violence and more punishment beatings.

The latter hit a new low with the “crucifixion” of an alleged joyrider Harry McCartan in Dunmurray. But arguably even more shocking than the fact that a young man was nailed to a wooden fence, was that there still appeared to be quite a lot of local support for such “community policing”.

It was also a year of sometimes harsh words, with David Trimble taking the prize by contrasting his beloved United Kingdom – “a vibrant multi-ethnic, multi-national liberal democracy” with “the pathetic, sectarian, mono-ethnic cultural state to the south”.

He later apologised for using the word “sect-”…no, sorry, “pathetic”.