Unity

IN February, the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council delivered it’s assessment of the three-year budget proposals prepared by the Department of Finance. The Council was established in 2021 to ‘bring greater transparency and independent scrutiny to the region’s public finances, focusing on the NI Executive’ (The Finance Minister’s proposed 2026-2027 to 28-29/29-30 Budget: an assessment). In short, it is a regional version of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and the Council’s chair, Robert Chote, previously ran the OBR and, before that, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – it’s pretty heavyweight.

At the threshold of the imperial age, as Enlightenment optimism dissolved into war, famine, and repression, Jenny Farrell revisits Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War to uncover the emergence of a modern aesthetics shaped by terror itself. Her essay reads Goya’s haunting etchings not as historical illustrations but as a radical confrontation with violence stripped of heroism, exposing the psychological and social collapse wrought by war and reaction. Moving from atrocity and starvation to nihilism and the fragile persistence of truth, Farrell shows how Goya forged an art that refuses moral comfort while demanding that suffering be seen. The result is a powerful reflection on how art bears witness when history descends into darkness and why Goya’s vision remains urgently contemporary.

As global tensions sharpen and military spending surges across Europe, the threat of war is no longer a distant abstraction but a looming reality that could shape the lives and deaths of a new generation. In this stark warning, Eoin Ó Murchú writes for Unity that rising militarisation, escalating great-power rivalry, and Ireland’s deepening security ties with Britain signal a dangerous abandonment of neutrality at precisely the moment when the risk of nuclear catastrophe is growing rather than receding.

Two and a half centuries after Adam Smith warned that powerful interests conspire against the public, a new aristocracy has emerged not of land but of data, platforms and unimaginable wealth. In this article, Mike Morrissey argues that today’s techno billionaires command fortunes larger than nations, shape political narratives under the banner of “free speech,” and increasingly blur the line between private power and public authority. As wealth concentrates at historic speed and digital empires intertwine with populist politics, the question is no longer whether capitalism produces inequality, but whether democracy itself can withstand an age of techno oligarchy.

JOHN Taylor’s interview in the Irish News, in which he declared that a United Ireland is now inevitable has caused shockwaves throughout Unionism. Taylor was one of the hard-line Unionists during the civil rights period, only reluctantly yielding ground as the political debate shifted under the weight of the sectarian crisis affecting Northern Ireland.

John Molloy argues that the latest US war in Iran exposes the brutal double standard at the heart of Western politics: governments that claim there is “no money” for social needs can instantly bankroll war, enriching arms profiteers while dragging the world toward deeper conflict, austerity and the erosion of national sovereignty.

 The agony of the Palestinian people under the Israeli boot weighted with American munitions deepened despite the live-streamed genocide. Notwithstanding the cease-fire, Israeli military operations persisted. IDF supported settler-violence increased. Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, openly pursued West Bank annexation and ‘encouraged’ Palestinian migration.

Amidst the build up to another International Women’s Day it can grate hard on women activists to witness the occasion  too often being commercialised and reduced to marketing gimmicks and superficial empowerment messaging.  International Working Women’s Day was built by and is still championed by women who want to make substantive and systemic change to our society and world.

THERE is no West Bank. There is no two-state solution. There is only Israel’s destiny. So says Miko Peled, whose insights into the Zionist mind-set inform his advocacy for Palestine. Asked about Israel’s ‘endgame,’ Peled was forthright. It is a Jewish state. Israel will make sure it remains so. Arabs can support it or die fighting against it. According to Zionism, antisemites are everywhere. Antisemitism can be better dealt with in the Jewish state.

While some were surprised that a Labour government should boast implementing a draconian immigration regime, the issue has become more pressing and more divisive than almost any other, including the NHS and the economy. Reform’s rise in the polls, despite the absence of a coherent policy framework, has been largely based on its claim that it will stop immigration – some members talk about ‘remigration’ i.e. sending back people (i.e. ethnic minorities) with already settled status.