Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Conservatives took another step in their nascent alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party today, with a visit to Northern Ireland by David Cameron in support of UUP European election candidate Jim Nicholson.

The previous evening, Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson explained the thinking behind the alliance in a talk at West London's Hammersmith Irish Centre.

This is the first time in decades there is someone representing a national party as well as a local party in an election in Northern Ireland. And we intend to go on. We intend to choose joint candidates over the next few months for the general election. The way things are going we might have to accelerate that, and we will see how we we get on.

This is a long term project. There may be bumps on the way. We've seen a few this week  with Lady Sylvia's comments. It will not go smoothly, but I think it is a really worthwhile thing to try and do. If we could move Northern Ireland politics away from the age-old stale debate about the great dividing trench, just park that and concentrate on things that really matter to people on a daily basis, I think we would bring in people who've not been involved in politics before.

Tom Griffin (London, OK):The agenda behind the dissident republican attacks of the past few days was acutely summed up yesterday by Irish News commentator Brian Feeney:

The killings were designed to accomplish a number of objectives – to embarrass Sinn Fein; to provoke a disproportionate response from the British; to cause division between Sinn Fein and the DUP and make it less likely that policing and justice will be devolved to northern politicians.

All of these aims add up to a larger purpose of undermining support for the peace process in the North's republican communities.

It has been rejected by the dominant unionist DUP; Sinn Féin are unhappy with the truth recovery proposals; one of four members of the Commission for Victims and Survivors, former newsreader Mike Nesbitt, suggested it “was likely to divide families;” the Ulster Unionist leader has called for the proposals to be withdrawn; even the cross-community Alliance party were outraged, though leader David Ford acknowledged “many positive recommendations.” Not a great reception then.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): A leading member of Sinn Féin dismissed the Conservative Party's latest foray into Northern Ireland politics during a visit to London at the weekend. Seanna Walsh, the head of the Sinn Féin Culture Department, said his party were not worried about the emerging alliance between the Conservatives and the Ulster Unionists.

"We do not believe that David Cameron is any way emotionally or realistically attached to the union between the North of Ireland and Britain," Walsh said. "The UUP vote collapsed in the last election, and they are not the entity which they once were. They used to have 10 or 12 MPs in Britain. They now have one. So it's not a concern that we would have, who David Cameron hitches his wagon to. We would see it as being totally opportunistic."

Walsh, the former leader of IRA prisoners in the H-blocks, was speaking at a special screening of Hunger, the British film which portrays the death of his predecessor Bobby Sands in the 1981 hunger strikes.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Writing in the Irish Examiner, David Trimble's former advisor Stephen King compares the Irish Troubles with the current events in Gaza.

The difference between the situation today in Gaza/Israel and in the 1990s in relation to the IRA should be blindingly obvious. The republican movement was looking for a way out of its self-destructive and counterproductive violence; Hamas believes it’s on a roll towards its ultimate aim of a Jew-free Palestine on the whole territory of Israel.

One of Jerusalem’s key objectives in Gaza — supported quietly by Arab governments — is to inject some realism into Hamas, just as the British and Irish security forces did to the IRA. We should recall it was not a short process: it took years, decades in fact. And even then, the IRA had to observe a unilateral ceasefire before they could join talks: the RUC, gardaí, British army and the Irish defence forces were scarcely confined to barracks.

Arthur Aughey (University of Ulster) reviews Irish Protestant Identities Edited by Mervyn Busteed, Frank Neal and Jonathan Tonge, Manchester University Press 2008 pp389 + xvii. In his careful response to the scholarly papers he concludes with a lesson for Gordon Brown that devolution, especially to Northern Ireland as it is now, has proundly altered what it means to be British - and that this can no longer be defined by the 'centre'. 

This book of twenty-five chapters is a selection of papers presented at a conference organised by the British Association for Irish Studies held at the University of Salford in September 2005. An additional commissioned chapter deals with the fortunes of the two major Unionist parties since the Belfast Agreement of 1998, in particular tracking the transition of the Democratic Unionists from opposition to the ‘Trimble-Adams Pact’ to miraculous support for a Robinson-McGuinness Executive. Appropriately, the book retains the diversity of the papers’ subject matter and, in keeping with recent academic convention, there is no attempt to identify either the ‘mind’ of Protestant Ireland or its ‘character’. It is not the singularity of tradition but the plurality of experience which the editors try to convey and they do so successfully. One of the merits of the book is that it deals with Protestantism in southern as well as Northern Ireland and also considers the impact of Protestant migration to North America and Great Britain, along with the influence of the Orange Order in Scotland and England. It cannot provide a complete picture, of course, but it does provide a more subtle and honest one. This is to be welcomed since Protestantism in Ireland and specifically in Northern Ireland has often been the subject of crude stereotyping. Irish Protestant Identities, along with John Bew’s new study, The Glory of Being Britons (Irish Academic Press 2008), will be an indispensable source of reference for anyone interested in the history, politics and cultures of Irish Protestantism.  

Tom Griffin (London, OK):Over at the main openDemocracy site, John Palmer looks at the stakes as Ireland contemplates a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

With ratification now virtually complete in the rest of the EU (the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany apart), the Irish veto has put the whole process of reforming the way the union functions into cold storage. 

Meanwhile, a number of large-scale issues and events have emerged or become more acute since discussions about a new constitutional treaty for Europe began - global economic crisis, severe threats of climate change, dangerous regional conflicts, challenging geopolitical shifts, prospects for significant change in United States policy under a new president. All are stretching or will stretch to the limit the capacity of the union to react.