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Showing posts with label Sam McBride. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sam McBride. Show all posts
Belfast Telegraph ★ Written by Sam McBride.

31-January-2026

Stormont is a broken, hapless administration whose rambling incoherence is excruciating

This year MLAs have spent just nine minutes debating legislation in the assembly chamber — yet could find time to discuss everything from the traitors tv show to Donald Trump and 'blue Monday'

Few U-turns in Stormont's history have been both as sudden and significant.

Last Thursday, John O'Dowd's Department of Finance announced the outcome of 'Reval 2026' - a revaluation of business properties across Northern Ireland to decide how much each should pay in rates, the local property tax jointly controlled by Stormont and councils.

On Monday, O'Dowd stoutly defended the policy from criticism. He lambasted MLAs who queued up to question him and insisted he was standing over the policy.

Just 72 hours later, he abandoned this approach. It was a humiliating reversal of a major government policy, and has additional significance because it came from Sinn Féin's most capable Stormont minister.

What happened this week is significant in itself. But its far greater significance lies in what it reveals about the Executive.

Things in the Executive are bad, and they're getting worse.

Continue @ Bel Tel.

It Can't Go On Like This

Belfast Telegraph ★ Written by Sam McBride. Recommended by Christy Walsh.


Much of what was said by Sinn Féin president at critical juncture in stuttering peace process was crafted in Downing Street by Jonathan Powell.

A man who is now a key figure in Britain’s intelligence apparatus wrote key sections of a seminal speech Gerry Adams gave about the IRA’s disbandment, declassified files prove.

The Sinn Féin president’s words in October 2002 came at a critical point in the peace process where the IRA was on the back foot after a series of incidents.

It had got discovered smuggling guns in from Florida, got caught training FARC rebels in Colombia, faced a backlash over the post-September 11 war on terror, and was known to still be widely involved in criminality and so-called ‘punishment shootings’.

That had contributed to unionism deserting David Trimble for the DUP, with the First Minister clinging to office but lacking real authority even within his own party.

Against that backdrop, an IRA spy ring at Stormont was exposed at the start of October 2002, prompting the government to suspend the institutions before Trimble walked out.

Just three weeks later Adams turned to a highly unlikely source to help write a speech about the IRA: the Prime Minister’s chief-of-staff, Jonathan Powell.

Continue @ Bel Tel.

Files Prove Key Parts Of Seminal Adams’ Speech Written By Man Now Key Figure In British Intelligence

Sindo ⛔ Written by Sam McBride. Recommended by Kate Yo.

Senior party members are selecting the social media replies they want to shield from the public.

As an election looms, unwelcome comments on immigration, housing and tax are disappearing, 

For more than three months, Sinn Féin has been quietly censoring criticism of the party — and even some praise. Analysis by the Sunday Independent shows how the practice was started by Mary Lou McDonald in June, then followed by her party.

It has gone to considerable effort to hide claims that it is soft on immigration, is cynically changing position in an attempt to win back votes and is part of the establishment.

Criticism of its transgender policy and of McDonald's leadership, and claims that it has lost touch with its voters, plus reminders of IRA atrocities and criticism involving IRA victims such as murdered Jean McConville and Máiría Cahill have also been censored.

In June, McDonald quietly started to "hide” unwelcome replies to her posts on X.

Among the hidden tweets were vile abuse, conspiracy theories, open racism and the automated spam that pollutes social media.

Many would argue that removing such material improves the quality of debate for others. However, Sinn Féin has been going far beyond removing insults and abhorrent views. Much of the censored material was respectful and did not involve personal abuse, but raised points of legitimate political debate.

​Continue reading @ Sindo.

Censored ⛔ The Online Criticism Sinn Féin Is Trying To Hide

Anthony McIntyre  ☠  Sam McBride’s contribution to investigative journalism and public understanding has been huge. 

His tenacity and stamina brought transparency to an institution that responds to probing much like a vampire to sunlight - the Power Splitting Executive in the North. His book Burned is arguably the best investigative journalism to have emerged on this island in the past decade. It ruffled the feathers of the DUP as the party sought to swan around on the moral high ground before it faced its swansong as head honcho on the political block.

While not having produced anything as detailed or forensic in respect of the party that upended the DUP, four weeks ago McBride charted the journey that Sinn Fein has made in order to position itself for high office in Dublin. He would not claim to have come up with anything spectacular, even new. All he did was craft a common-sense observation, much the way a sports reporter would trace the history of a soccer club and the changes it had undergone on its way to the cup final. His crime was to write it in an economy of words with a pen that worked like a scalpel.

If the Sinn Féin which might soon lead Ireland’s government had been around in the 1970s, it would have been denounced by Gerry Adams as a traitorous, partitionist, capitalist capitulation to the popular mood; the antithesis of the willingness of the 1916 rebels or the Provisional IRA to disregard public opinion.

Later McBride would itemise the type of changes he had been referring to three weeks earlier,

And it’s not just Sinn Féin’s approach to violence which is different. The party’s revolution is seen in its embrace of capitalism, its support for abortion, its abandonment of hostility towards the EU, its backing for the PSNI and An Garda Síochána, its endorsement of the Special Criminal Court, and in a plethora of other areas.

Nobody yet has pointed out what in any of that is untrue. It reads much like a claim that Liverpool lost the Champions League final last season to Real Madrid. A case of stating the obvious. 

Some of the things the party has changed its position on are welcome – such as supporting the right of women to choose to opt out of their own pregnancy. It seems logical that many people who previously recoiled from the party now vote for it because it has changed so much.

For pointing this out McBride has been pilloried by people not happy with him laying the facts out.

The response was wearily familiar to anyone who writes about Mary Lou McDonald’s party in anything less than reverential terms.
There were various strategies adopted. Anonymous accounts pretended to be terribly disappointed in me — they apparently thought I was a great chap when I was criticising the DUP, until this article opened their eyes to my inalterable bigotry.
This is transparent: Do what we like, and we’ll praise you; step out of line and we’ll decry you . . . 
Others were sneering. It was “fake news” from a “unionist scribe” who as a “west Brit” was too stupid to understand the sophisticated reasons behind their beloved party’s u-turns.​
But the abuse quickly started, as it invariably does. Some of it was sectarian. There were references to “planters” and my “overindulgence and self-intoxication in bigoted Orangeism.

In his 1995 article on Ur-Fascism Umberto Eco warned of mechanisms employed to 'limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.' It would be ludicrous to accuse Sinn Fein of being fascist or Mary Lou McDonald of being an Irish Giorgia Meloni but not so to point out that in its harassment of Sam McBride the party or its online goondas are drawing on tactics which frequently appear in the far right play book. This in a bid to stymie critical reasoning.

In a world where the far right is increasingly pushing irrational obscurantism coupled with the smear that disagreement is treason (echoes of Eco), democratic culture and vulnerable communities will depend on robust journalism strategically positioning itself at each echelon of society's defence in depth. Yet there are ongoing efforts by Sinn Fein to curb such journalism either through SLAPP - which won McDonald the SLAPP politician of the year "awarded to the politician who has proven most reliant on SLAPPs and legal intimidation to respond to opposition, dissent, or efforts at accountability" - or the type of online bullying and intimidation that is being directed at Sam McBride.

Investigative journalism is a vital asset and will prove even more so in a climate where, in the chilling words of Brecht, the bitch that bore the bastard is in heat again. Perhaps now we can better understand why they oppose abortion.  

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

In Defence Of Sam McBride

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