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Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill will lead a party delegation to meet Chief Constable Simon Byrne on Monday to discuss what she describes as a “crisis of confidence in policing”. Ms O'Neill said she is not calling for Mr Byrne to stand down after he issued an apology to the families present at a memorial service for those killed in the Sean Graham bookmakers massacre on Friday. Speaking during a press conference on Saturday night, Mr Byrne also said one of the officers present has been suspended over the incident, which saw the arrest of a man wounded in the atrocity as he attended...

When a friend dies, it is often the small things one misses; the details rather than the big picture. In the days since Norman Houston died, many people, often those in public life whose work brought them into close contact with him in Washington, DC, have rightly paid tribute and expressed sympathy online. The artist Colin Davidson, whose large-scale portraits hang in the Lyric Theatre, summed it up in his Twitter tribute, writing of Norman's "empathy, selflessness, decency, warmth, professionalism, loyalty, inclusivity, positivity, balance" as the qualities than made him "unique in this wor...

Seamus Heaney celebrated hope and not old divisions Choice of poet as face of centenary of North has proved controversial Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 01:24 Susan McKay Seamus Heaney: He hated what the division within the North did to people: “open minds, as open as a trap”. Photograph: Pat Langan   No good was ever going to come of this. One of Seamus Heaney’s most intense preoccupations as a poet and essayist was the anguishing complexity of identity in this divided island....

'Be advised my passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised Mr Heaney, who was from a Catholic nationalist background, famously wrote the poem 'An Open Letter' in 1983 as a response to being included in 'The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry'. However he was pictured with the Queen at a state dinner in Dublin in 2011. Speaking in an interview with BBC journalist Mark Carruthers shortly before his 2013 death the Bellaghy poet described his own identity as "Ulster-Irish or Irish-Ulster, take it one way or another". Mr Eastwood described the use of Mr Heaney's portrait in the ca...