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Martina Devlin Opinion King Puck reprieved in heat of the moment, but they really shouldn’t be using a live goat

Excuse me while I check the calendar. Yes, just as I thought – it’s 2022. For a while there I imagined we’d looped back a few centuries to a time when animals were fair game to be treated any which way the human race judged fit.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Policy-makers pull plug on common sense by approving energy-hungry data centres

Last weekend, I met a family living in Ireland whose members dress like the Amish. They wear homespun, all-concealing clothes in plain, dark colours and engage only sparingly with modern technology.

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Martina Devlin Opinion David Trimble deserves praise as a peacemaker, but he made a serious mistake with Brexit

David Trimble was wearing the sash and talking about rights when I first encountered him. It was at Drumcree during the marching season, and Orangemen insisted on walking the Queen’s highway, as they put it, which included passing along the nationalist Garvaghy Road.

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Martina Devlin Opinion We must stop downplaying the reality of climate crisis and act before it gets worse

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” TS Eliot wrote, yet even all- owing for that, the reality of climate change can no longer be downplayed. Still need evidence? This week, all you had to do was open a window or go outside. Freak weather conditions are happening on our doorstep, with temperatures hitting record highs.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Faint tut-tuts over sexist, sectarian effigies of three women politicians on Twelfth bonfire just don’t cut it in 2022

“I don’t want to be a doll hung up on the Wall,” says Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, the Wall being where the bodies of executed (“salvaged”) people are displayed as a warning. It’s a novel that has little in common with Northern Ireland. Or has it?

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Martina Devlin Opinion Irish have skin in the game as we await the identity of next 10 Downing Street resident

Civil War is always bloody, as we know to our cost in Ireland. In Westminster, civil war is raging among the Tories, and across the Irish Sea there’s the reek of a power struggle and the stench of belated virtue-signalling.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Dr Kathleen Lynn and her partner left a loving legacy – their names belong on the new national children’s hospital

The English poet Philip Larkin wrote: “What will survive of us is love.” It is a haunting line which seems particularly appropriate to the life of Dr Kathleen Lynn, whose name is a worthy one to attach to the new national children’s hospital in Dublin, due to open 2024.

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Martina Devlin Opinion We need to teach people that violence is always wrong and can never be excused

Often, it’s a hidden crime, under-reported because it happens in the home, and not enough stigma is attached to fists flying behind closed doors. Society has tended to look the other way when women walk around with black eyes – or worse – and the default position has been that domestic abuse is no one else’s business.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Britain will have to choose: either it has the North, or the kind of Brexit it wants

Here’s the reality reinforced by Boris Johnson’s rogueries this week. Brexit plus Northern Ireland’s place within the UK are conflicting facts – they cannot easily co-exist. Sooner or later, Britain must choose: either it has Northern Ireland, or the kind of Brexit it wants.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Johnson’s on borrowed time but with DUP backing he can still inflict serious damage

First, the good news. It’s only a matter of time before Boris Johnson is replaced. Inevitably, he will follow in the footsteps of David Cameron and Theresa May, to become the third consecutive prime minister to topple amid Britain’s flailing Brexit strategy.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Holiday plans up in the air as travellers left to pay the price of DAA’s penny-pinching

“Penny wise and pound foolish” is how my granny would have described Dalton Philips, chief executive of the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA).

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Martina Devlin Opinion Tory bill isn’t about reconciliation, it will simply help people get away with murder

“Withdraw the Bill of Shame”, urged the placards of people who lost loved ones in violent circumstances – a plea that went unheard. It is a measure of the perversity of current Tory policy that unionists and nationalists alike are against a new law on Troubles-related crimes, with every party in the North opposing its plan to offer amnesty in return for information.

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Dervla Murphy: freewheeling pioneer with a fierce wanderlust

‘If visas had been needed in 1492, America would never have been discovered,” Dervla Murphy once said, describing how she disregarded the need for official documentation whenever she couldn’t come by it on her travels to “far-flungery”.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Good Friday Agreement is being used as a poker chip in Britain’s battle with the EU

“At least governments led by Margaret Thatcher” are words I never dreamed I’d find myself writing, but here goes. At least governments led by Margaret Thatcher had ministers of a certain stature and ability – politicians such as her successor, John Major, and others including Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Cynical brinkmanship over protocol serves only to weaken the bedrock of democracy

Barking can lead to biting – or getting bitten. The British government is growling and snarling about the Northern Ireland Protocol in a display of aggression more focused on domestic politics than any tensions in the North around post-Brexit trade rules.

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Somerville and Ross: the writing collaboration from ‘beyond the grave’

A century ago, one of Ireland’s most successful writers was engaged in something extraordinary. Edith Somerville convinced herself, and managed to persuade others, that she was collaborating beyond the grave with her dead writing partner to continue producing their popular Somerville and Ross novels.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Better safe than sorry – we must put new maternity hospital into public ownership

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” is the attitude – as though people who raise difficulties are fault-finding or being ungrateful. But the ownership and governance of the new national maternity hospital are too important, for current and future generations of women, to allow plans to pass without scrutiny.

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Martina Devlin Opinion On the brink of change: Voters in North are poised to turn status quo on its head

There’s a joke that does the rounds in Northern Ireland at election time that goes: “To heck with the future, let’s get on with the past.” While that has the ring of truth, the forthcoming election is in a league of its own because voters are poised to upend the status quo.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Taxpayers run risk of being pushed beyond their limits as public-sector pensions soar

Without knowing it, I once slept in a house where someone had been murdered. A sense of disquiet troubled me during the course of that night. I can’t pretend to have detected its cause – there was no flash of insight into what happened years earlier – but a general unease bothered me.

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Martina Devlin Opinion We shouldn’t get bogged down in a turf war when the planet’s future is at stake

The longest distance between two places in Ireland is the gap between urban and rural dwellers. This latest turf-cutting row has the hallmarks of that divide, but also highlights a trend in political life: concede ground to special interest groups, and never mind the long-term costs.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Our leaders must use their voice to press for a total economic blockade of Russia

How many more Mariupols before we decide saving lives is more important than saving energy supplies? How many more Buchas before our reliance on creature comforts begins to matter less than the Ukrainian people’s right to peace?

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Martina Devlin Opinion The Russian mother helping traumatised Ukrainians feel safe and settled in Ireland

One week you’re going to work, doing the shopping, meeting friends for coffee – the next you’re living in a distant country that may barely have registered in your consciousness. Home is now a stranger’s spare room or a hotel. You find yourself negotiating a new culture, foreign language, unfamiliar surroundings, even as anxiety about family members left behind bubbles just beneath the surface.

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Martina Devlin Opinion UK borders bill only highlights illogicality of having two jurisdictions on single island

Just when you thought the Brexit commotion had taken a back seat to war in Ukraine and spiralling cost-of-living concerns, a Westminster vote limiting free movement for people on the island of Ireland inserts a new plot twist.

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Martina Devlin Opinion I had a moving seat at the heart of Dublin’s parade. Now I know how heads of state feel

A rip in the fabric of time was how yesterday felt – as though all clocks whirred back to the pre-Covid era when buoyant crowds of strangers, cheering and laughing, were the norm and the phrase “super-spreader” had never been thought of.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Let’s tighten our belts and help put an end to Putin’s barbaric bombing of Ukrainians

What if the EU is financing Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine by buying his gas? What if the bloc is speaking out of both sides of its mouth, imposing sanctions to condemn the unfolding crisis while continuing to do business with Russia because of member states’ dependence on energy imports?

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Martina Devlin Opinion Uprooted, surviving in a terrifying limbo yet determined to preserve family integrity

How does it feel to shut the door on your home knowing it might be reduced to rubble by airstrikes in your absence? What do you pack when time is short, you don’t know if you’ll ever be back, and you can take only a few bags?

The Slowworm’s Song: Squaddie’s actions in the north come back to haunt him

“It cannot be made less and it cannot be made safe and it cannot be hidden and it cannot be forgotten.” Those words of remorse and pain reveal the burden of knowledge carried by a former soldier in Northern Ireland — a man haunted by a devastating secret from his tour of duty during the Troubles.

Myths, sagas and a voyage around an unconventional life

This might be the most unusual and original book you will read all year — part memoir, part personal essays, part masterclass on life and literature in medieval Ireland. Fierce Appetites by Maynooth academic Elizabeth Boyle is a voyage around her unconventional life.

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Martina Devlin Opinion If we’re to tame the Facebook behemoth, we must think holistically as well as legally

It’s the Goliath of social media networks, the go-to communication tool of the modern age, but privacy concerns mean Facebook also causes considerable unease – it collects huge quantities of data on its users and unashamedly monetises their identities.

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Martina Devlin Opinion Dublin-Belfast Economic Corridor: Blossoming all-island trade links quietly do the work of North’s political dinosaurs

‘Keep calm and carry on” may be sound advice in principle, but something more proactive is needed to improve island-wide relations. Positive outcomes are still possible post-Brexit and the pandemic, but they won’t happen overnight or by chance – imagination, energy and commitment are the essential ingredients.