POINTS TO PONDER IN 2016

Political Commentator DR JOHN COULTER has been looking forward to 2016 and outlines some pointers which should be considered in what is certain to be a contentious year.

The 2016 Dail General Election outcome could see current Taoiseach Enda Kenny forced to bury the hatchet with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and form a Fine Gael/SF coalition in Leinster House with Adams as Tanaiste.

And don’t say it’ll never happen. Just look at the Northern Ireland Assembly where the late Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists entered a power-sharing Executive at Stormont with Martin McGuinness’s Sinn Fein.

As for the North’s Stormont General Election, Sinn Fein could crown the Easter Rising centenary by becoming the Assembly’s largest party, thereby deposing new DUP First Minister Arlene Foster as McGuinness finally becomes the head buckaroo on Stormont Hill.

But in the Republic, the proposed rainbow coalition to stop Adams becoming Tanaiste may fall apart as Sinn Fein needs to break through the 40 TD mark in Leinster House.

If this happens, Fianna Fail, Irish Labour and the Greens will start a ‘political bitch fight’ as to who gets what posts and adopts what policies.

Kenny may finally throw up the head and do a deal with Adams just as Paisley did the deal with Adams at St Andrews a decade ago – a move which will spark a rebellion in Fianna Fail ranks, toppling current boss Micheal Martin who will probably be replaced by a more hardline republican within the party to combat the Sinn Fein bandwagon.

In exchange for Sinn Fein behaving itself as a party in both Leinster House and Stormont by implementing Looney Left policies, massive concessions will be given by Fine Gael and Westminster – the payback being that Sinn Fein MPs take their seats in the British House of Commons, thereby ending Sinn Fein’s historic policy of abstentionism.

In Great Britain, as the clamour grows for the UK to vote to leave the European Union, the British/Irish bodies could prepare for this by allowing the Dail to be an observer partner in the influential Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

This could force the Dail to vote to leave the eurozone and re-introduce the popular Irish punt. In May’s Northern Ireland elections, Sinn Fein finally puts the last electoral nail in the SDLP’s coffin as under new boy leader Colum Eastwood the SDLP is reduced to fringe status.

On the tourism front, the centenaries of the Easter Rising in April and the Battle of the Somme in July will bring huge financial benefits on both sides of the border.

Having lost the referendum vote on gay marriage in the Republic, the Catholic Church will try to bolster up its flagging influence by arranging for Pope Francis to visit Ireland.

But his trip North will do nothing to stop gay marriage being legalised there in spite of constant votes against it in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Arlene Foster will remain as DUP leader even if she loses the First Minister’s post to Sinn Fein in May’s Stormont poll. Her reaction must be to push for a merger between the DUP and its rival Ulster Unionists as the unionist family internal feuds continue to cause splits.

Unfortunately, it seems likely Ireland as an island will suffer a major terrorist attack from Islamic radicals – aided by dissident republicans – as a result of allegations that Shannon airport was used by the Americans as a pit stop for their planes on rendition flights.

Any terror attack on Ireland will spark a joint response from the British and Irish security forces which could mark the end of the dissident republican terror threat for at least a generation.

However, still on the religious front, there is still the danger that the courts north and south become bunged up with Christian fundamentalist clerics trying to get themselves jailed, fined or chastised for making hell fire sermons against Islam.

Such is the fallout from any terror attack on Ireland, that the Dail and Stormont could agree to the introduction of Israeli-style National Service where all able-bodied citizens are required to do at least two years in the army – either the British Army or the Irish Defence Forces.

Ironically, the election of a hardline Republican Party President in the United States could prompt Ireland to develop closer ties with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia to avoid Irish troops being sent to fight in the Middle East.

On the sporting front, the soccer teams from the North and South could pull off surprises at Euro 2016, and in GAA, an Ulster team stands a superb chance of lifting the ‘Sam’.

In horse racing, for those who fancy a flutter, 2016 seems destined to be a year where you put your money on Irish riders and trainers as Irish-owned horses could romp to victory in many of Britain’s leading racing festivals.

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter  @JohnAHCoulter

COULTER’S COVETED COCK-UP CUPS FOR 2015

Contentious Unionist journalist and Tribune magazine’s Ireland Columnist DR JOHN COULTER takes a highly irreverent and satirical look back at the political year with his now annual Coulter’s Coveted Cock-Up Cups for 2015.

Many of the Irish political parties plus the American Secret Service have swept the boards in this year’s Coulter’s Coveted Cock-Up Cups awarded by political journalism’s very own Mouth On The South, Dr John Coulter.

The Top Tit Trophy goes hands-down – or should that be hands-up? – to Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny for not pledging Irish Defence Forces troops as part of a future ground war against the Islamic State nutters in Syria.

Irish troops have served with distinction as part of United Nations operations, and I have every confidence that if they were sent to Syria, the Islamic State thugs would be diving for cover after they got a good shamrock covered boot up the arse.

The Political Prats Prize is won by Fianna Fail for not seizing the poll initiative and unveiling an electoral pact with the Shinners, thereby ensuring the Blueshirts don’t inflict another four years of cuts and job losses on the Irish nation.

And speaking of Sinn Fein, party president and Louth TD Gerry Adams collects the Best of British Bowl, kindly sponsored this year by the IRA’s Army Council, for continuing to help administer British rule across the Emerald Isle.

Gerry’s buddy, Marty McGuinness, is deputy First Minister and helps run Stormont’s Partitionist Parliament along with the Democratic Unionists in the North.

And there’s no doubt if the Brits vote to quit the European Union in 2017, a Sinn Fein partnership government will have to negotiate the South having to rejoin the Brit-run Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, otherwise the Republic will become an irrelevant pimple on the asshole of the EU.

As for the Greens, North and South, they collect the Looney Looper Award for continuing to hook-wink the Irish electorate with all the crap about global warming, species becoming extinct, and really having no policies which are of any relevance to the everyday life of folk on our blessed island.

As for the Irish Labour Party, it gets the Yellow-Belly Cup for lacking the balls to merge with the British Labour Party in the North and forming the first genuine all-island socialist force in Ireland for over a century.

Then again, the political cowardice of the Irish Labour movement isn’t surprising and the Left in Ireland is always splitting and fighting over something. Just when is Irish Labour going to show the same balls as the Shinners and fight elections on both sides of the border?

As for the Northern parties, the DUP collects the Lost In Space trophy for not electing Unionism’s Mr Big Gub, wee Jimmy Allister, the head buckaroo of the fringe and hardline Right-wing Traditional Unionist Voice party as the new DUP chief to succeed Robbo.

With the DUP facing a potential battering from the Northern Prod electorate for its continual pussy-footing with Shinners at Stormont, wee Jimmy could have given the DUP the muscle it lost when Big Ian left this scene of time to organise the angels in heaven.

Mind you, the Ulster Unionist faction with the DUP collects a new award this year, the Takeover Trophy (kindly donated by the British Intelligence community now that it has completed infiltrated the republican movement) for getting the most number of ex-UUP members into senior positions with the Rev Ian Paisley-formed Democratic Unionists and converting the DUP into the UUP Mark 2.

And speaking of being lost, Mikey Nesbitt’s Ulster Unionists also romp home with the What The Feck Do We Do Next Cup, for making the UUP politically unrecognisable to its own voters.

Instead of the UUP being the voice of traditional centre right Unionism, Mikey has summoned the spirit of the former Northern Premier Brian Faulkner and turned the UUP into a politically limp-wristed version of Faulkner’s now defunct Unionist Party of Northern Ireland … maybe Mikey is planning a shotgun marriage with Alliance?

Talking of Alliance, it needs to grow balls, tits and virtually every other vital political organ imaginable as its plans to combat the threat from Islamic State in Ireland are about as useful as a contraceptive in a maternity ward.

Alliance wins the Latte Lib Cup for being more focused on drinking trendy coffee than getting its finger out and saying something brave about the need to take on the Islamic terrorists threatening Ireland.

The Sticky Silverware goes to the Stoops, who under new boss Comrade Colum Eastwood look like they will drift so far to the Hard Left, they’ll fall off the political spectrum into the dustbin of history like the Irish Nationalist Party and Irish Independence Party before them.

And what of the prestigious Gobshite Cup – which goes to the social media folk who say the most amusing and daft things about me?

The clear winner is the American Secret Service for its inability to spot clear satire when I suggested Islamic State be tackled by dropping mustard gas on its bases. But then again I’m told, some Yanks don’t do irony, sarcasm or satire.

This year is nearly over, but already there’s an impressive group of assholes and twits queuing up for the 2016 awards. Happy Easter!

In his latest Ireland Eye column in Tribune magazine, political commentator DR JOHN COULTER explores the long-term implications for Unionism and Republicanism in the so-called Fresh Start document as ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ vie for political control of the various parties.

Smooth coronation, not bitter confrontation seems to be the ‘in motto’ now that yet another political sticky plaster known as Fresh Start is being applied to the cancer called social unrest in Ireland.

Labour’s former comrades in arms in Northern Ireland, the election-battered, moderate Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party unveiled a surprise at its recent annual party conference when delegates voted to depose their current traditional nationalist boss, the aging South Belfast MP Dr Alasdair McDonnell with the much young Assembly member Colm Eastwood, who represents the party’s emerging socialist republican wing.

The latest initiative to save devolution was the Fresh Start agreement, hammered together after several months of nail-biting talks and large doses of brinkmanship. In reality, the sticky plaster label was simply to keep the existing Democratic Unionist/Sinn Fein Executive government in power until next May’s Stormont General Election.

So far as the SDLP is concerned, it doesn’t matter who leads the movement. It has been constantly battered since the original 1998 Good Friday Agreement by an increasingly slick Sinn Fein electoral bandwagon.

Within days of the SDLP leadership coup, the DUP unveiled that its leader and Stormont First Minister was shortly to retire and would not lead the party into the May 2016 poll.

Unlike the rival Ulster Unionists who constantly aired their dirty linen in public, the DUP wants peace between the modernisers and fundamentalists in the party. So the party has split the leadership in two – one to lead the Westminster party, the other to be First Minister at Stormont.

Former UUP politician Arlene Foster is to become First Minister, while devout Christian and North Belfast MP stays as the party’s Commons boss. And so peace reigns once again in the DUP!

This leaves all eyes firmly focussed on Sinn Fein’s ability to smoothly replace the party’s aging double act of Gerry Adams in the Dail and Martin McGuinness at Stormont. Both men have one last throw of the electoral dice to throw.

Next year marks the centenary of one of the most iconic events in the republican calendar – the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising, which laid the foundations for the modern IRA.

Sinn Fein’s electoral aim is to be in power in both jurisdictions of Ireland by the end of 2016. Campaigning on an anti-austerity ticket in the Republic could see Sinn Fein and Adams become a minority partner in a coalition government in the Dail, with the former West Belfast MP becoming Tanaiste (deputy prime minister).

Given the splits within unionism, Protestant voter apathy and Sinn Fein’s demolition of the SDLP at the ballot box, McGuinness is odds-on to become First Minister, and so it would be ‘job done, Sinn Fein rule in both parts of Ireland’.

The problem for Sinn Fein is what faction of the broad republican movement will replace the Adams/McGuinness cross-border partnership.

A recent police/MI5 report concluded what even the dogs in the streets across Ireland have known for decades – the Provisional IRA’s ruling Army Council is not only still intact, but also running Sinn Fein.

This has fuelled considerable speculation that the hawks are set to return to the leadership of the movement’s political wing. When Sinn Fein seriously entered the electoral arena after the 1981 republican hunger strikes which claimed the lives of 10 IRA and INLA prisoners in the now closed Maze jail, being a terrorist activist was a key condition to becoming a Sinn Fein politician.

A leading republican propagandist coined the iconic phrase of the ‘ballot paper in one hand, and the Armalite rifle in the other’ – a clear reference as to how the political campaign worked hand in glove with the IRA’s terror war.

However, since the Good Friday Agreement, a new maxim has emerged in the movement’s vocabulary – ‘a ballot paper in one hand and an honours degree in the other’.

Increasingly, a new brand of so-called young ‘draft dodgers’ has emerged within Sinn Fein and has been getting elected. This new generation of young Sinn Fein politician is university educated and did not serve an apprenticeship in the Provos – hence the jibe ‘draft dodgers’.

This does not mean that all the young Turks emerging in the republican movement are doves. Given that the Army Council still calls the shots in Sinn Fein, many feel the doves have had their day and it’s time for republican hardliners to flex their muscles in the party once again.

If more hawks start to hold key posts within Sinn Fein, it could stem any future defections to the dissident republican terror factions who feel Sinn Fein has compromised too much, not just in the Fresh Start deal, but in the running of Stormont itself.

An edited version of this column appeared in his Ireland Eye print edition of Tribune magazine on 18^th December, 2015.

Sinn Fein: An Alternative Strategy