Northern Ireland

Drumcree March Ban Comes at a Cost to Nationalists

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Thanks to Unherd for asking me for my view on the consequences of the Secretary of State for NI banning the Drumcree march. An excerpt is below – the full article is on Unherd.

Screengrab of the UnHerd Newsroom article “Drumcree march ban comes at a cost to nationalists” by Gerry Lynch, dated 12 October 2026. The photo shows Orangemen in the Drumcree parade: older men in dark suits, white gloves and orange sashes, several in bowler hats, walking along a road past a stone wall and a corrugated metal hall. Union flags fly overhead and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hangs on the hall. A few women stand at the roadside watching. The article is tagged “Drumcree march” and “Garvaghy Road”.

The ban, “was the only sensible decision after the region’s police chief, Jon Boutcher, had written to Bryant formally requesting a review of the Commission’s ruling. The alternative was to let the dispute fester through a long winter and set the context for regional elections looming in May.

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“The decision lets both sides of Northern Ireland’s divided community claim victory. Nationalists — from anti-Good Friday Agreement dissident Republicans, through to Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — were united against reviving the parade. Thousands, including Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald and Vice President Michelle O’Neill, descended on Portadown over recent weekends to support locals, who repeatedly showed they could block the road in numbers too great for the police to remove them without a degree of force nobody was prepared to countenance.

“Many Unionists, however, see a decidedly pyrrhic victory for Irish nationalism, undercutting its claims to accommodate Orange and British culture in any future “new Ireland”. They hope it will bolster wavering liberal Protestants — the sort deeply perturbed by Brexit, who have shown intermittent flashes of being tempted by a united Ireland in a future border poll — although this group is hardly known for supporting Orange parades. Unionism can walk away from this crisis seeing itself as the side that boxed clever and took the moral high ground. Rather than shouting “No surrender” and digging in for a long siege as it once would have, it leaves with important legal victories in its back pocket, having avoided unduly annoying the likely swing voters in any border poll: the region’s detribalised moderates and ethnic minorities.

“Nationalism’s victory comes at the cost of a real medium-term risk to the 1998 Public Processions Act which regulated parades.”

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Trump doesn’t understand the messy politics of Irish reunification

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Unherd asked me for my views on Donald Trump’s United Ireland comments, and I was glad to supply them. Here’s an excerpt.

Unherd headling beside photo of Taoiseach Micheál Martin and US President Donald Trump seated together, with Irish and American flags and white floral arrangements behind them

“The United States was founded through a successful rebellion against the British Crown, and Americans have consequently long felt a degree of sympathy for those seeking a united and independent Ireland. For some, that sympathy went much further: during the Troubles, Irish Americans even helped fund the IRA’s campaign, with some going so far as to buy weapons. But across the world, people who know little about Northern Ireland or the precise nature of its communal divisions generally assume that it is natural and inevitable that the region will ultimately leave the UK and reunify with the Republic.

“It is likely that Trump’s remarks reflected that widely held instinct and have no actual diplomatic plan behind them — just another flippant comment made for laughs. But those with more intimate knowledge of what is still a place apart from both Great Britain and the rest of Ireland are only too aware that four centuries of complex and messy ethno-sectarian conflict in Ulster will not vanish quickly.

“Northern Ireland is a notoriously self-obsessed place, where political shifts are measured in decades and generations rather than months or years. It is unlikely to pay much attention to outsiders as its people work out whether its changing demographics will also alter its constitutional status — a genuinely open question.”

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Photo Recharge for Your Soul – NI September 2023

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A man reading a newspaper at a café table in a richly decorated room.

A baker’s dozen of the best shots I took while back home this month. All photos © Gerry Lynch.

Looking west from the fancy new viewing point-cum-picnic area at Magheracross just west of Dunluce Castle. The peninsula that ends just below the setting sun is Portrush.
The tasks of early autumn—making silage near Meigh, County Armagh.
Reading the Financial Times in the beautiful Northern Room in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library: a 1990 decorative effort on Victorian themes.
I shot Scrabo silhouetted against the setting sun from the shore of Strangford.
RISE is the official name given to the public art sculpture located at Broadway Roundabout in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It has been given unofficial, colloquial titles that you may be more familiar with.

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Once Again, America Chooses Ireland Over the UK

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Unherd published a piece of mine on US government interventions on Northern Ireland, and why Ireland’s special relationship with the USA usually trumps the UK’s (read more here). Irish influence in America is not just about raw political calculation, nor entirely about the large number of Americans who proudly bear Irish ancestry. The technocrats miss … Read more

Strange outbreaks of positivity over Northern Ireland

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I was published in Unherd over the strange emergence of good vibes about breaking the EU-UK bad blood over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Headline in Unherd from Gerry Lynch's article on the Northern Ireland Protocol

“After nearly two years of ugly in-fighting over the Northern Ireland Protocol, there has been a sudden outbreak of positivity from key players in London, Dublin, and Brussels about the possibility of a deal to amend or replace it. Even self-styled “Brexit hard man” Steve Baker, now a UK government minister in the Northern Ireland Office, told Tory conference-goers he was “sorry” his behaviour had weakened Anglo-Irish relations. He later asserted to BBC Radio Ulster his willingness “to eat a bit of humble pie” to achieve a deal.

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“Although real gaps remain to be bridged, most parties have an interest in a deal being done. Above all, it would remove the risk of a UK-EU trade war erupting during a winter where it would be of primary benefit to Vladimir Putin. More subtly, it would be of assistance to both London and Brussels in the war of values, hard evidence that free democracies are better than autocrats at finding solutions in messy territorial and ethnic disputes. An agreed and flourishing post-Brexit Ulster would be a fine counter-blast to the hell Moscow has made of the Donbas.”

To read the rest, please click through to Unherd – it’s free.

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On Current Trends, Northern Ireland Will Leave the Union

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I was published in Unherd on the 2021 Northern Ireland Census figures. Demography isn’t destiny but it contributes powerfully to it. This week’s Northern Ireland 2021 Census release, showing Catholics outnumbering Protestants for the first time, does not in itself doom the Union. It should, however, represent a major warning to Unionists on both sides of the … Read more

IN MEMORIAM GERARD BENEDICT NEWE 1907-1982

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Where Layde’s old tombstones tell the taleOf time before we felt the flailOf England’s “for your own good” yokeYou must have stood on many a mornAnd blessed the day when you were bornIn May’s bright sunshine and turf-smoke.  As the dog clambered on your kneeYou looked at Scotland past the seaWhere flew the exiled childer Lir. Framed by hedges … Read more

The Bright Field

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Late on a summer evening, as I took photos from the summit of Divis (478m above sea level) the highest of the Belfast Hills towards Lough Neagh, suddenly a shaft of sunlight broke through and illuminated the fields on top of Budore Hill, about 4 km away. Clearly visible on Lough Neagh is Ram’s Island, … Read more

Who Benefits from the Collapse of Power Sharing?

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole…

We’re unlikely to know for a long time exactly why talks on restoring devolved government collapsed in such spectacular fashion last week. It’s always worth asking, in those circumstances, ‘cui bono?’

A long-term collapse in devolved arrangements, and a return to Direct Rule, whether or not it is acknowledged as such, would seem at first blush to benefit the DUP, at least in the short term. It also represents a significant shift in power within the DUP, away from Foster and the Assembly group with its stratum of moderates like Simon Hamilton, and towards the consistently hardline Westminster group, which is currently keeping Theresa May in power.

That in turn gives the DUP Westminster group a free hand to push for a hard Brexit with a relatively hard border, not tied into any Executive or wider Assembly approach which would see the DUP constrained by the need for consensus with Sinn Féin and a broader majority of pro-European opinion in the Assembly.

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