Peter Geoghegan

When John McCallister resigned from the Ulster Unionist Party on 14 February he accused the party leader, Mike Nesbitt, of ‘forcing Northern Ireland politics back into the sectarian trenches’. Hours earlier, the UUP, the Democratic Unionists and the anti-St Andrews Agreement Traditional Unionist Voice had announced that a Unionist unity candidate, Nigel Lutton, would stand in tomorrow’s Mid-Ulster by-election. Martin McGuinness resigned the seat at the end of last year; the Sinn Féin candidate to replace him is the deputy speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Francie Molloy. In 2007, the DUP MP David Simpson, speaking under Parliamentary privilege, claimed that Molloy was involved in the IRA murder of Lutton’s father in 1979. Molloy denies the allegations. The Unionist candidate’s uncle, Joey Lutton, was jailed for his part in a 1976 Ulster Volunteer Force murder.

Last March there was an explosion at a semi-detached house on the Gleann Riada estate in Longford, seventy miles north-west of Dublin. The blast – which blew out the sitting-room window and left a hole in a ground floor wall – was caused by methane that had accumulated underneath the property. The two men who rented it were in the kitchen. In October, Ireland’s Health Service Executive said that Gleann Riada was ‘unsafe’ and called for ‘necessary and immediate remedial work’. Residents were told not to light fires and to keep their windows open.

Apparently there were 43 illegal roadblocks in Belfast on Monday night. In a bar with Christmas lights on the ceiling, a hundred yards from a City Hall not flying the Union Jack, most drinkers were glued to their smart phones. The man beside me was scrolling through the #flegs hashtag on Twitter. (So was I.) His friend was trying to work out if his bus was running. In the end they decided to share a taxi home.

That night, in East Belfast, a firebomb was thrown at a police car outside the constituency office of the local MP. Naomi Long is the deputy leader of the Alliance Party, which came up with the compromise solution to the problem of the Union Jack on Belfast City Hall: the flag will now fly on 15 designated days a year, not continuously as it did until last week.

‘This is the day the Scottish left came out of its ghetto,’ Robin McAlpine, the director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, said towards the end of last month’s Radical Independence Conference (RIC) in Glasgow. Around 800 people had paid £10 a head (£4 unwaged) to listen to speeches from socialist and green politicians, trade unionists and disability activists in the rather incongruous setting of the Radisson Blu hotel near Central Station.

Earlier this month, Providence Resources announced that an oil field at Barryroe, off the coast of Cork, is expected to yield 280 million barrels. The company’s CEO, Tony O’Reilly Jr, the son of the media mogul, told the Today programme that this was ‘very good news for Providence shareholders and the Irish economy’. The first part of his statement is undoubtedly true: Providence’s share price rose sharply on the back of the Barryroe news. That Ireland’s economy will benefit is much less likely.