The Centre for Cross Border Studies

As a former journalist, I do relish getting hold of a government report that makes eminently sensible recommendations but which politicians for some obscure reason do not want the public to see. So I was delighted when earlier this month a copy of the North-South Feasibility Study compiled by the Irish Department of Health [...]

Armagh is now on the Irish diplomatic circuit.  Next month the highly regarded Southern Joint Secretary of the North South Ministerial Council (NSMC), Tom Hanney, leaves to become Irish ambassador to Belgium. His successor, Anne Barrington, is finishing her days as ambassador to Tanzania. The man who will fill in over the summer, the [...]

Growing up as a Northern Irish and British boy in the 1950s and 1960s, it was an article of faith that the wealthy United Kingdom had the best welfare state in the world and the Republic of Ireland was a backward and impoverished place that couldn’t afford such a socially advanced system. Even after [...]

Here is some good news. The postal service between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland works well. A report in February by Consumer Focus Post, the consumer ‘quango’ which looks after the interests of users of the UK postal system, found that nearly four in five Northern Ireland individual users and nearly two [...]

I have just returned from Malawi in southern Africa where I was with a group of Irish and Northern  Irish university academics in health, education and ICT who are working with  colleagues in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda on a training programme to help build their capacity to raise the research performance of universities [...]

On 20 February I addressed a Sinn Fein conference in London on Irish unity. It was very much an event for preaching to the converted.  Apart from the historian Lord Bew, I think I was probably the only speaker out of nearly 30 who cast doubt on the wisdom and feasibility of the [...]

If I ever became Mayor of Armagh, the first thing I would do is to give the freedom of the city to the Vallely family. John B. Vallely is the best known of them, an artist who despite his international reputation has continued to live and work in his home place, and to draw [...]

Cross-border cooperation in Ireland is not exactly trendy. Much of it involves the painstaking building of trust and relationships, often as a pre-requisite to working on practical joint projects. Almost by definition, such mundane, ‘under the radar’ work rarely gets a mention in the media. It’s probably just as well, since such politically sensitive relationship-building could easily be destroyed by crude tabloid journalism. Maybe we should be relieved that most journalists think of cross-border cooperation as ‘do-goodery’ that is not newsworthy, lacking the elements of clash and controversy which is their usual stock in trade, and believe – almost certainly correctly – that anything to do with Northern Ireland is now deeply boring to the great newspaper-reading and TV-watching public in other parts of these islands. I should know – I was a journalist for 26 years.

Continue reading My Unsung Cooperation Heroes of 2009

On 13th December 1999 a long line of black Mercedes snaked across the border into Armagh for the first meeting of the new North/South Ministerial Council set up by the Good Friday Agreement the previous year to oversee the new cross-border ‘Strand Two’ institutions established by that Agreement.

There to meet them was the first group of civil servants from Belfast and Dublin who were going to staff this extraordinary experiment in inter-jurisdictional cooperation on the island of Ireland. 10 years on it is generally accepted – even occasionally by DUP politicians – that this new era of good relations between North and South has been, along with the reform of policing, one of the real success stories of the Northern Ireland peace process.

Continue reading Civil Servants and EU Officials are Peacebuilders too