Sam McBride

Just three years ago, an article typical of the time began thus: “Some time in the spring of 2025, the smiling president of Sinn Fein, Mary Lou McDonald, is likely to settle into the taoiseach’s chair in Government Buildings”.

The cause of a united Ireland hasn’t been set back by Sinn Fein’s failure to get into government, Mary Lou McDonald said this week. She’s right — although not for the reasons she claims.

Ten years after the sale of Nama’s Northern Ireland loans for more than a billion pounds and more than four years after two top business figures were charged with fraud over the transaction, the corruption trial has been delayed yet again.

Despite MLAs’ protestations to the contrary, it hadn’t the feel of a momentous occasion.

Twenty years ago, the IRA penetrated what was meant to be the fortress-like security of the Northern Bank’s central vault and plundered the contents.

As southern Sinn Féin goes through the motions of trying to organise a left-wing government, northern Sinn Féin has just shown how incomprehensively incoherent the party’s economic policies are — and how fiscally right-wing the party has become.

As southern Sinn Fein goes through the motions of trying to organise a left-wing government, northern Sinn Fein has just shown how incomprehensively incoherent the party’s economic policies are and how fiscally right-wing the party has become.

The statesman-philosopher Edmund Burke once observed : “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.”

Lying bleeding on the Crossmaglen ground after being shot by a Royal Marine Commando, the IRA man thought he was dying.