I think Sister Michael should have got her own spin-off show.
I definitely third or fourth Derry Girls. Netflix recommended it to us a year or two ago and my wife and I just binged the first two seasons over two days. (Good to know the subtitles are there – my wife and I didn’t know that was an option – but we found it understandable without.)
Back to the original topic of the thread, “Northern Ireland Sees Spams of Violence as Old Tensions Resurface.” (NY Times - paywalled).
A bus hijacked, pelted with stones, then set on fire. Masked youths rioting, hurling missiles and homemade bombs. A press photographer attacked on the streets.
For almost a week, scenes of violence familiar from Northern Ireland’s brutal past have returned in a stark warning of the fragility of a peace process, crafted more than two decades ago, that is under growing political and sectarian strain.
But analysts agree that six consecutive nights of violence, during which 55 police officers have been injured and 10 arrests made, mark a worrisome trend.
“I think it’s very serious, it’s easy to see how things can escalate and hard to see how things can calm down,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of political sociology at Queen’s University, Belfast.
OTOH, there’s this report by TLDR News, Did Brexit Spark the Belfast Riots? Whether it did or not let us hope the kids prevail and the Good Friday accords hold.
This article explores some of the reasons for the recent riots. The Loyalist, Unionist Protestant working class are pushing back against what they see as their enemy the Republicans who want unification with the South.
This is coming from the grass roots, the kids on the rough council estates, the housing projects divided between by ‘Peace Walls’ between supporters of the Republicanism and Uniification with the South and the Unionists who support Northern Ireland remaining in the UK.
The Good Friday agreement was an agreement between senior politicians on both sides. But the on the ground they see things very differently. The Unionist on the ground side feel marginalised by the drift towards unification and are pushing back. Push back in Northern Ireland means rioting.
The danger is that this cause will be taken up by the paramilitaries and the sectarian nightmare will begin again.
Despite the Good Friday agreement, the communities in Northern Ireland remained segregated along political and religious lines. That lack of integration and a lack of a shared political identity is a fault line and any perception that one sides interests are advancing at the expense of the other is likely to meet with protests, whatever cosy power sharing agreement the politicians come to.
Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, the unevenly applied Covid rules and police pressure on gang related criminality on Loyalist strongholds, seem to have been the triggers.
@ShadowFacts
Northern Ireland Sees Spams of Violence as Old Tensions Resurface.
All this going on and you still have time to make Python jokes? Was it thrown in the can or slice by slice?
you know mid thread there was a discussion of parliament should of pretty much putting Brexit on hold until it was figured out how to do it
Heres how here in the us you’d try for an end-run around a dumb decision (very simplified version )
1 someone or some entity would sue in a state or federal court saying it an illegal decision and win or lose you’d go up the judicial ladder which would take 5-10 years (or less if the court really wanted to make a decision on it)
2 then you’d go to the supreme court and pretty much explain why you’d need to overturn the decision of the peons and there be a 70/30 percent chance it gets overturned …
Now such a strategy has backfired also … so you’d pay your moneys and takes yer chances as they used to say …
Hahaha, oops. 
I’ll have spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, molotov cocktails, spam, spam, spam and spam.
[pedant]That’s 77.7/22.2 percent.[/p]
May was set up to fail. Nobody wanted the job, they knew whoever took it would get all the sh!t and be left trying to make the almost unworkable actually work. Boris Johnson came in at the moment when it was clear that something had to be done once Article 50 had been triggered, and he essentially got the Brexit done by settling for the bare minimum, which May had tried to improve on. Johnson may have a degree in Classics, but outside that rarefied world he is much less impressive. The whole Brexit thing has been done with no real planning, or only at the last minute, and little things like the implications for Northern Ireland never entered his tousled head.
She did indeed get handed a poison chalice, but it was solely her choice to chug it. There’s no reason other than sheer incompetence why she couldn’t have come up with a reasonably realistic negotiating strategy, nor why she had to trigger Article 50 when she did. I mean, David “The dog ate my Brexit impact assessments” Davis and Chris “Ferries? What ferries?” Grayling alone should have been big red flags indicating that the May government wasn’t capable of assuming even a basic level of responsibility for accomplishing Brexit - or indeed anything - but they all just ploughed ahead as if everything was going fine.
And then we got Boris.
Agreed. It was a very demanding situation, and May did not rise to the occasion.
I don’t understand what this would have achieved, in practice. A realistic negotiating strategy would have involved compromises that the hard Brexiters would have blocked. You can’t admit the chalice was poisoned, while also saying that she could drink from it and survive. It’s inherently contradictory. I get the impression you just love to hate her so much you can’t admit that from the moment she decided to do Brexit she was unavoidably fucked.
The woman sets my teeth on edge but I can still see the reality of her position.
I work in the shipping industry and know people who were peripherally involved in that ferry situation. The whole thing was a beat up. In the industry, it is absolutely normal for a customer facing business to run a shipping line or ferry service but charter in all its ships from third parties that specialise in owning and operating ships. Many household name shipping lines own no or few ships themselves.
Chris Grayling may be a complete waste of oxygen for all I know. But insofar as the public view of him is based on the ferry thing, it’s based on a lack of understanding of the shipping business.
Her key miscalculation was invoking A50 and then proceeding to negotiation. The strategy was to establish a deadline to force people to talk and agree. This was the source of all the grief, ultimately. It was either a stealth path to a very hard Brexit or an oblivious surrender to them. A wiser politician would have launched the dialogue first, thereby revealing the major sticking points (e.g. N. Ireland), without the ticking clock. Her choice was either dishonest or wholly inept.
Of course she was fucked and of course there was no chance of a Brexit deal that wasn’t bad for the country. But her failure was one of basic management nonetheless. The usual Negotiation 101 approach is:
- Agree in advance what you want to achieve and what your hardline items and negotiable points are.
- Decide your negotiating strategy and how you will achieve those goals.
- Set the timetable on the basis of 1) and 2).
May did those steps in reverse - started the clock ticking, and then tried to figure out a negotiating strategy without having the slightest clue about 1). This is like jumping out of a plane and then trying to order a parachute online. If the UK was patently unable to agree a Brexit position, starting the countdown was the worst possible thing to do. But she did it anyway.
And she did it in the deluded view that she would gain leverage by playing chicken with the EU, who did know exactly where all their negotiating positions lay and what they needed to keep and were willing to give up, and who had done all the “impact assessments” for the various types of withdrawal agreements, and who had a lot less to lose and a lot more power than the UK. And then she whined about how unfair it all was that the EU were better prepared, more skilled and had a stronger negotiating position than the UK, something that everyone could have seen coming.
This assertion that I criticise May because “we love to hate her” is ludicrous. I don’t deny that she was put in an impossible situation and I did in fact want her to make the best of a bad situation, but it was a situation she chose to get herself into and then she continued to make all the wrong choices and blame everyone else for them. To say so isn’t partisan malice; it’s a recognition of reality.
And are government contracts normally awarded on an accelerated, limited competition basis with minimal due diligence?* My snark aside, the lack of directly-owned ferries wasn’t the main issue with those contracts.
*Given the current news stories, the answer appears to be “yes, and especially when the Tories are in power”. But they’re not supposed to be.
On top of @Gyrate’s points, one of May’s major failings was a total unwillingness to work across party lines. All her positioning on Brexit was aimed at getting a Parliamentary majority solely via the votes of Tory/DUP MPs - including the ultras who wouldn’t give her the time of day and responded to every concession to their demands by asking for yet more.
Under May, Parliament as a whole was more independenty minded than it had been for years, as the Remain/Soft Leave/Hard Leave divide cut across traditional party lines. This independent-mindedness peaked with the indicative votes when Parliament organised itself to vote (non-bindingly) on what it thought was the right way forward for Brexit. Of the various propositions, teh most successful was Kenneth Clarke’s motion to back a Customs Union, which was just 3 votes short of a majority. And that’s without government backing and all the vote-wrangling available to a serving PM. Had May even considered reaching across the aisle to find a solution she might well have been able to not only get a deal through but also get one that was not simply a series of capitulations to one party’s radical fringe.
I mean, we don’t know! It might have failed. But she had the opportunity to try, and she rejected it. In fact, even saying she rejected it implies that she gave it some consideration and it’s very hard to believe she actually did. Party before country every time.
Is it normal for a ferry company to have no trading history at all, and a roughly cobbled together website, with T&Cs copied and pasted from a pizza delivery site?
And for this ‘startup’ to be awarded a £13.8m contract with no due diligence?
On the other hand, The Troubles were supported and partially funded by the American Irish diaspora, and ended post 9-11 when American opinion and regulation on funding foreign terrorist organisations changed.
If The Troubles come back, it won’t be in the same form as the 1960s - 1990s.
You’re far closer to the story than I am. So I may well be out of turn here, and welcome your thoughts on my mistakes. IMO …
That is a nice summary of Negotiating 101. Which rubric presumes your own side is capable of making the tradeoff decisions in 1 and 2 before battle is joined with your counterparty. Which Parliament as a whole and the various Tory factions were patently unable to do then and as far as I can tell from my remove, still haven’t really done now.
Deadlines concentrate minds. IMO it was literally the only stick May had that might have beaten some sense into her side.
As you (several you) have said, that gambit signally failed. Under time pressure they decided to fight one another more fiercely than they fought the EU. A shambles was duly non-delivered then Boris took the field to shoot the wounded, declare victory, and wobble off to the bar.
Don’t bank on anything. It only takes a few people to make a big nuisance of themselves.