Northern Ireland Editor of the Belfast Telegraph & Sunday Independent. Author of Burned: The Inside Story of the Cash-for-Ash Scandal. Any views mine alone.
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A senior trade unionist who represents Stormont’s top civil servant has urged ministers to defend her pay and pension contributions soaring by £30,000 in a year – but no one has come forward to do so. Neither the DUP nor SF will say if they approved it.
Despite failing to reform the floundering NI Civil Service, its boss, Jayne Brady, has seen her salary and pension contributions rocket £30,000 in just one year for a "satisfactory" performance - and no one will say who approved it.
The curious case of Gerry Adams and the Irish presidency: Adams is head and shoulders above any other SF candidate & the timing for him is more perfect than ever - yet he isn't even being mentioned, and SF is flip-flopping on whether to stand at all.
For almost a century, an old paper file was judged too sensitve to release. But now it reveals how London wanted Stormont to pardon men accused of murdering the son of the Apprentice Boys’ governor in 1920 as anarchy gripped Londonderry around partition.
NI Water has still failed to produce a copy of its fraud prevention policy, despite insisting that the document exists and trumpeting its importance on its website. I asked for a copy of the document almost three weeks ago, but NI Water still hasn’t been able to send it to me.
Months after NI Water claimed it had investigated a whistleblower’s claims about systemic fraud against the taxpayer & shut the case, the PSNI is now examining the allegations. But the whistleblower has already been ditched by NIW after 20 years as a contractor.
Working from home once signified poverty; now it signifies privilege. But that privilege involves disadvantage elsewhere - and especially for young people. This is an unjust revolution which is favouring people like me.
A major gangster was on the IRA Army Council in 2002, according to a previously secret Downing Street file — while David Trimble told the Government that people in both unionism & nationalism were too tolerant of criminality but the effect was ‘corrosive’.
It's a decade since a critical meeting as RHI ran out of control. Now, hapless Stormont’s continued inability to shut RHI exposes how irreformable devolution has been - and some of the behaviour which led to RHI is being repeated under a Sinn Féin minister.
🎧Talking to Olivia Peden about the 'invasion' of Clontibret: It's such a bizarre, absurd, disturbing and significant event with enduring mystery as to whether Peter Robinson was trying to outflank Ian Paisley, or if Paisley dropped him in it.
As Ambassador to Ireland, JFK’s sister was seen as close to Gerry Adams - but after September 11, she privately said Tony Blair should be "much tougher with the IRA" and should tell Congress “that Americans should stop sending any money to the IRA”, declassified Downing Street file shows.
Gerry Adams furiously complained to Tony Blair about voters being taken off the electoral register after an anti-fraud law came into effect — but when Sinn Fein handed over names to the Government, some of them proved to be dead, declassified files show.
Ouch! As it happens, I'm not. Thanks, Sean.
Just hours before a Belfast Telegraph article on the issue, NI Water deleted a statement which dismissed a whistleblower’s allegations of systemic fraud. It now admits that multiple investigations are under way into allegations it said had been resolved.
When busted in 2002, the IRA’s Stormont spy ring had gathered a host of material which could be useful to terrorists – including a map of Castle Buildings with instructions about its zones, passwords and security information, declassified files reveal.
While denouncing David Trimble, Jeffrey Donaldson secretly presented himself as far more moderate than the hardline image he cultivated, suggesting he might enter government with Sinn Féin without full IRA decommissioning, according to declassified files.
A Stormont department has defended highly complex accounting procedures which make it appear to have spent £1.9m on a series of active travel projects last year, when in fact that never happened. ✍️ @sjamcbride.bsky.social
Why the other Stormont could help unlock the Casement conundrum...and influence international sport. Unlikely as it may at first seem, cricket is the perfect game to convey the rich diversity of what Ireland - north and south - has become.
A businessman who blew the whistle on what he believed was systemic fraud against taxpayers says his advice to anyone in a similar position is to “shut your mouth & carry on” as if nothing happened. Now he's lost most of his business after NIW ditched him.
The instructions to MI5 and Army Intelligence agent Willie Carlin to do everything - up to and including vote-stealing - to ensure Martin McGuinness got elected is an even starker example. (From Carlin's 2019 book 'Thatcher's Spy').
This is part of a long line of British Government actions which don't fit easily with the republican view of 'the Brits' as their implacable enemy; at key junctures, the Government or security forces took intriguing decisions which aided key IRA or SF figures.
Declassified files reveal that the British and Irish governments were dismayed when they learnt that an ‘independent’ body they’d set up to monitor paramilitarism was considering naming every member of the IRA Army Council - and they lobbied to stop that.
Tony Blair removed his NI security minister just days after she sent a blunt private message that he was being too soft on Sinn Féin, declassified files reveal. Months before the IRA's Northern Bank heist, she denounced the PM's “nonsense” stance, saying she wouldn’t defend it.
I'm an AI sceptic, but I think these things are potentially helpful if properly labelled and understood - here we only had one almost unusable pic from the police of someone who could still be alive; the AI version involves huge caveats, but at least has the potential to be recognisable.
After six weeks, Liz Kimmins has now decided to appeal the A5 verdict. That means yet more delay and uncertainty. Perhaps more significantly, roads expert Wesley Johnston (@niroads.bsky.social) now believes the A5 will never be built as envisaged. There will be major implications for other projects.
The mystery of the computer whiz who vanished from a Portrush gaming arcade in 1991: Malaysian student Chang Swee Chuan's normally messy car was spotless, there were Triad rumours & the PSNI were until recently searching for the wrong guy. Fascinating story by Gabrielle Swan.
A key Downing Street figure in the peace process advised Tony Blair that the IRA could never prove it fully decommissioned so he should maybe accept a few “big symbolic acts of decommissioning” & then declare the process complete, declassified files show.
There was a time when Sinn Féin campaigned under the slogans ‘No Return to Stormont’ and ‘Smash Stormont’. Increasingly, modern Sinn Féin is inching towards a once-unthinkable slogan: Keep Northern Ireland.
When asked if it would apologise for misleading its voters, the DUP last night declined to do so. It didn’t dispute any of the secret talks with Sinn Féin which it spent years denying & admitted that “some individual members...did accept invites to confidential meetings” with SF.
Flattery, deceit, a financial bung, MI5 briefing and a secret back-channel to Sinn Féin: Buried in thousands of pages of newly-declassified Downing Street files are secrets which lay bare how the DUP misled its voters after it overtook David Trimble's UUP.
Declassified files show: 🕵️Almost immediately after a major meeting of the UDA’s inner council in 2003, MI5 was aware of what had been said in the room 🗣️South East Antrim UDA man was talking to the NIO 💷Government strategy for loyalist community cash
A man who is now a key figure in Britain’s intelligence apparatus wrote key sections of a seminal speech Gerry Adams gave about the IRA’s disbandment, declassified files prove.
Some senior Fianna Fáil sources dismiss reports of a Deirdre Heenan Presidential candidature. She is competent & a political blank canvass but would carry risks: A slew of highly opinionated comments, & the implications of being unable to vote for herself.
Files uncovered by the Belfast Telegraph show it wasn’t British ministers who came up with the idea of water charges & privatisation – it was put to them by politcal figures in Stormont Castle. And it wasn't a flippant idea, but the subject of months of high level negotiation.
For more than two decades, Northern Ireland’s biggest parties have insisted they’ve always opposed water charges — but newly-declassified files show that the idea of selling off NI Water and charging the public came from the Stormont Executive.
At the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, ex-SDLP leader Colum Eastwood says that a number of people from several parties have asked him to stand for the Irish presidency, adding: "I am considering it".
When asked at the MacGill Summer School if Irish passport holders in NI should get a vote in Irish presidential elections, ex-Fianna Fail minister Mary Hanafin says: "Not yet, and not in isolation". She cites NI's lack of reconciliation and the recent bonfire disputes.
Behind the scenes, there are efforts to engineer unionist unity. Gavin Robinson believes unionism should see the Orange Order as its inspiration for such unity. Yet two recent incidents illustrate how unity would leave unionism weaker rather than stronger.
Norman Tebbit had rage, but many missed that he also recognised the need for rapprochement. In a long interview at his Suffolk home 14 years ago, he told me that Sinn Fein had changed & saw Martin McGuinness's Royal handshake as a seminal "battlefield moment".
Stormont has voted to accidentally tie its own hands by passing a sweeping law whose implications most MLAs didn't understand. Now it's going to force them to do what they hate: take unpopular decisions.
Niche.
The first reviewer of the concept of For and Against a United Ireland is torn about my appearance: On the one hand, "Presbyterian by the look of him", he thinks, "a Northern Protestant of sorts"... but "could be mistaken for the younger Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners".
🎧Podcast with Olivia Peden, Moore Holmes & Gareth Crozier: The good, the bad & the ugly of 11th night bonfires. There are loyalists who relish bonfire controversy and loyalists who loathe it. Can they be reconciled, and is strict regulation necessary?
What a truly grotesque image: burning the effigies of migrants - who the organisers ensured all had brown skin. Even from the perspective of the loyalists involved, this is stunningly stupid: it might be a migrant's vote that swings a border poll. (Photo by the great @kscott94.bsky.social)
Strange as it may seem, people don't seem to think that Fintan talking with me is as worthy an occasion for which to part with cash.
Joe Trewellard shut Bara Bakehouse over the weekend to join a bakery in Belfast. He tells James McNaney about the industry’s challenges and why he thinks good bread should be affordable.
MLAs are members of a legislative asssembly - they can legislate to change the law. They could have passed a very simple bill imposing tougher sentences for waste crime. Instead, they've repeatedly faffed about with meaningless motions, rows, grandstanding & tribal chest-beating.
Prosecutors have refused to appeal the sentences of the two businessmen who enriched themselves by creating the biggest illegal dump in the UK — meaning they’ll both be out of jail by next year. By contrast, someone who stole pyjamas got longer in jail...
The Mobuoy illegal superdump could damage human health for more than a century – & cost taxpayers £107m to even partially make safe....yet the businessmen responsible gave the judge sob stories that getting caught hurt their own health & finances.
The Lyric Theatre event has sold out in a week, but tickets are still available for Dublin's National Concert Hall where Fintan O'Toole and yours truly will debate a united Ireland...in a way you've never heard the topic discussed before. 🎟️ www.nch.ie/all-events-l...
The ever-taller Eleventh night bonfires are architecturally impressive, but potentially deadly. They're akin to someone who can modify a Ford Fiesta to travel at 180mph — it demonstrates amazing skill, but is insanely dangerous. This can't go on.
Now the road has been blocked, Stormont's back to not even pretending to care; the work it promised isn't happening. And its reasoning unintentionally reveals that building the biggest road in NI history would be less polluting than the industrialised farming Stormont encourages.
After decades of neglect, the only reason Stormont showed any real interest in protecting one of Northern Ireland's most sensitive habitats was because it wanted to build a huge road - and knew a judge would block that unless it at least pretended to care.
The DUP “did the dirtiest ever you seen”, says one of two ex-DUP MLAs who've quit the party...followed by a constituency branch which has folded. He says: “They’ve finished themselves — they’re not being straight and honest with the public.”
Civil servants working under the direction and control of a Sinn Fein minister put an extraordinary argument before the High Court which exposes how for years Stormont hasn't been - and still isn't - remotely interested in protecting the environment.
🎧Podcast (free) Who is the mystery owner of Ian Paisley Jr's valuable constituency office? Talking to @OliviaPeden_ about how a DUP MP was able to claim vast sums of public money to rent from an entity whose owner is hidden behind a dead man's name. 👉 www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/podcasts/the...
Thanks for your kind words, Liam. It's the subscribers who make it possible.
Tickets now available for the Dublin launch event accompanying the release of For and Against a United Ireland with @fotoole.bsky.social. Despite it being in the National Concert Hall, I promise not to sing. 🎟️Book tickets: www.nch.ie/all-events-l... 📙 Pre-order the book: shop.ria.ie/products/for...
🎧Podcast (free) Trying to explain the latest extraordinary story involving Ian Paisley Jr and money - there was so much that we had to split it into two episodes...
www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...
Yes - details to come!
I will!
Thanks, Antain.
Tickets now available for the Lyric Theatre event accompanying the release of For and Against a United Ireland: Fintan O'Toole for & against; yours truly for and against... and more. 🎟️Book tickets here: lyrictheatre.co.uk/whats-on/for... 📙 Pre-order the book here: shop.ria.ie/products/for...
We're hiring an intern to write about Britain—do apply! (We treat interns as regular writers, pretty much from day one.) www.economist.com/britain/202...
Paywall launch was fourth-time lucky for Belfast Telegraph publisher CEO says paywalls are "a lifeboat for the future of journalism" but not all content needs to be blocked off (about 40% of articles at Mediahuis Ireland are still free) pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/pay...
We have politicians who beat their chests while passing a tough climate change law - but then express dismay when a judge actually enforces the law they made. It's akin to someone who has voluntarily chosen to be a vegetarian loudly demanding that they be allowed to eat meat.
The A5 debacle is classic Stormont: It wants to slash carbon emissions but emit more; it wants it to be compulsory to protect the environment but be allowed to damage the environment; it wants to cut road journeys while building bigger roads. This is insane - but it's not the judge who's mad.
Thank you.
Ian Paisley Jr is refusing to discuss or explain this. If you have information about this story, you can contact me in confidence at sam.mcbride@belfasttelegraph.co.uk or write to Sam McBride, Belfast Telegraph House, 33 Clarendon Road, Belfast.
A Belfast Telegraph investigation has established that Ian Paisley Jr's office is owned by a hidden representative of a man long dead...whose family learnt that from us. At one point there were three mortgages on the valuable property, one highly unusual.
📣 Speaker Announcement: Sam McBride, author & Northern Ireland Editor at the Belfast Telegraph, joins #MacGill2025 this July in Glenties. Catch him on stage debating the case for and against a united Ireland. 🎟️ Register: macgillsummerschool.com @notredame.bsky.social @sjamcbride.bsky.social
Happy to say I did the cartoons for this, arguably the most important part of any book.
Paid internship at The Economist. Put a lot of effort into the piece. Be original and write it well. www.economist.com/britain/2025...
Some old certainties relied upon by our ancestors are now outdated. If we are to take a decision which could reshape the island of Ireland for centuries to come, we need to base that decision on robust analysis of facts, not flabby tribal thinking.
Irish Unity: For? Against? Both. Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride explore both sides of the Irish unity debate with intellectual depth and balance. 📆 Out 20th October 📚Preorder now bit.ly/4ei6x3I 🎤 National Concert Hall & Lyric Theatre Belfast to come @fotoole.bsky.social @sjamcbride.bsky.social
Pre-order now and book to attend our accompanying events with Fintan and Sam - 17 Nov in Belfast and 30 Nov in Dublin at arinsproject.com @ria.ie @ndirishstudies.bsky.social
Written by two of the island’s most renowned political journalists, @sjamcbride.bsky.social and @fotoole.bsky.social, ‘For and Against a United Ireland’ gives an up to date, comprehensive, evidence-based examination of the arguments for—and against—Irish unity. Pre-order your copy today.
Thanks, Helen.
Some more details here: The book cotains four parts in which each writer sets out with equal force what to them seem the best arguments for Irish unity, and then the best arguments for the status quo. As a whole, the book is neutral on the question.
Coming in October: For and Against a United Ireland with the wonderful Sam McBride www.ria.ie/research-pro...
You can pre-order For And Against A United Ireland directly from the Royal Irish Academy at this link - the first 500 copies will be signed by us both.
📢 Some news from me: I've written a book with the erudite and eloquent Fintan O'Toole in which we each argue for - and then against - Irish unity, setting out objectively what seem to us each side's best arguments, and the issues people across the island of Ireland should consider.
Kate O’Halloran received the cold letter from Stormont demanding repayment of a trifling sum owed by her dead son Gerard on Saturday - the day the Belfast Telegraph revealed how Ian Paisley's office rates repeatedly hadn't been paid, year after year after year.
How Stormont works: The Executive's debt collectors are chasing a grieving mother for £47.64 owed by her dead son, who died with little money - while failing to recover thousands in unpaid rates for Ian Paisley's constituency office, stretching back years.
It's massive. Goodness knows how it could ever be scientifically explored, but this is a subtantial economic reality. Ex-DUP MLA Sammy Douglas is one of the few to say openly what everyone knows.
A few years ago, the PSNI top brass could find £25,000 to take - at the invitation of police - a UVF commander, the UDA leader, and others to a summit. The police claimed they were "community representatives". Preposterous, yet routine.
In Northern Ireland, the authorities pretend paramlitary commanders are 'community workers' to give them public money. Here a real community worker (who loyalist thugs attacked for standing up to them) says people like him can hardly get any public funds.
Millions of books - including mine - have, without permission or recompense, been stolen to build a sort of artificial brain which Mark Zuckerberg hopes will make him even richer. An AI presented as progress is founded on a profoundly unethical model.
Red letters, bounced cheques and court action: How Ian Paisley Jr’s office failed to pay into public purse which lavishly funded him. The man who once got taxpayers to pay £950 (£1,800 today) for a single chair left politics with unpaid bills - which the DUP now won't pay.
A former spy within the IRA says that Northern Ireland’s new Troubles investigation body is demanding sensitive details of his new identity abroad...just weeks after a data breach where it mistakenly sent him material about an unlinked atrocity.
The embedding of paramilitaries within certain communities is now so deep - and so accepted by officialdom - that it has become like the situation in Animal Farm, with the supposedly respectable and the supposedly illegal are formlessly entwined
The DUP is calling for a conversation on migration - but that could rebound on it. The party doesn’t want its voters to know that it lobbied for increased migration...and specifically low skilled workers for big chicken, focused on areas such as Ballymena.
It's impossible to simultaneously lobby for increased immigration while decrying the effect of more foreigners — but that’s what the DUP's been doing, pushing on behalf of big business for more cheap labour from abroad while criticising what that means.
🎧Podcast (no paywall) Talking to @ciarandunbarrach.bsky.social about Sir Ken Bloomfield, a man who was no ordinary civil servant, who survived an IRA assassination attempt, and whose colossal legacy contrasts starkly with that of the NI civil service's leadership today.
Brilliant work by my colleauges @kscott94.bsky.social, Gabrielle Swan, Kirsten Elder, and journalists from other newspapers and broadcasters, telling the stories of people suffering horrifically due to raw thuggery - which some people are trying to explain away because they're not its target.
Alina Bohdan fled war in Ukraine. She has young children and is suffering from cancer. Last night she was huddled in fear reading the Bible to them as a baying racist mob swept down the street, seeking whom they might devour. What sickening insanity.
The two criminals responsible for the vast Mobuoy toxic dump polluting Londonderry’s drinking water repeatedly lied about their role — and then claimed when caught that the court process was hurting their own health.
North-south bodies were once one of the most contentious aspects of the Good Friday Agreement; now, they're one of the least controversial elements. Few people could even name them. Yet a far older north-south institution is booming: The Enterprise train.
Great read by @sjamcbride.bsky.social on Sir Ken Bloomfield, arguably the most influential & significant administrator in N Ireland’s history & whose career spanned the last days of… erm Rome (the fall of #Stormont), the fraught, false dawn of Sunningdale & the long years of direct rule #devolution