The Centre for Cross Border Studies

Four years ago I wrote a ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’ called ‘Can we become the best border region in Europe?’ in which I listed some of  the distinguished people from the Irish border region over the past [...]

If I am surprised at Irish university researchers’ lack of interest in North-South cooperation (see last month’s Note), I am utterly baffled by the lack of interest shown in this essential building block of the Belfast Agreement by the [...]

After more than 12 years of toiling in the field of North-South cooperation in Ireland, one of the real puzzles for me remains the lack of interest shown by our university academics and researchers in this important and innovative aspect of peacemaking and politics, economics and society on this island. [...]

How many people know what ‘fracking’ is?  I knew little about this controversial new mining practice until a green-minded friend from Leitrim contacted me about it last month. Fracking is short for drilling for natural gas by fracturing rocks [...]

There is a wonderful statement in the 1919 Democratic Programme of the First Dail  – which was eventually sidelined by Sinn Fein leaders as being too left-wing – that ‘it shall be the first duty of the Government of [...]

Over the past year three Northern Irish golfers – Graeme McDowell, Rory McIlroy and Darren Clarke – have put our little region firmly on the global sporting map by winning the world’s two greatest golf tournaments: the US Open [...]

July is holiday time so this will be a short, sharp column and – for a welcome change – it won’t be about cross-border cooperation. I want to reply to the bloggers who respond to my ‘Note from the [...]

Regular readers of this column know that I greatly admire those people I call the ‘unsung heroes’ of North-South cooperation as part of the peace process in Ireland. These are the people, most of them unknown outside their immediate [...]

‘The week that Anglophobia died’ was the headline on the Irish Times article by that splendid columnist Fintan O’Toole(1) at the end of the Queen’s hugely successful visit to Ireland. Citing Frank O’Connor’s poignant story of Irish volunteers in [...]

This isn’t a good time to be Irish. After the euphoria of the years of the Northern Ireland peace process and the Celtic Tiger economy, we have the disillusion, and even despair, brought on by the cataclysm of the [...]