My biggest media hit of the year was a quick soundbite the morning after the US election, given to Bloomberg in Brussels, who explained that all of their US-based experts were still in bed. (As I probably should have been too.) It came out just in time for the Asian evening news cycle, so I found my name popping up in mentions in Chinese (both Hong ( Read more... )

In April and October last year, the Spanish online newspaper OK Diario published two stories including completely false statements about me, in particular about my alleged contacts with Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez - I have never met Pedro Sanchez, or communicated with him at all ( Read more... )

My biggest media appearances were the BBC election broadcasts for the three elections in Northern Ireland, with my long-term sparring partner Mark Devenport. Not much of it is online, but I am in 2:49-3:35 here:

Click to view

Some viewers' responses were a little, er, unusual...

Kraftwerk, the Magherafelt years. pic.twitter.com/mBlGFilsbp
- MLAs And The Like (@ ( Read more... )

(First of six posts: see also Instagram, LinkedIn, Livejournal, Twitter and Facebook.)

For the last few years I've done a round-up of my my year on social media. This year I'm starting with the more traditional media pieces to which I contributed or in which I was mentioned, grouped by theme rather than in date order.

Northern Ireland

As usual, I ( Read more... )

A few months ago I discovered RTÉ's archived news reports of Ireland's switch to decimal currency - when the UK switched from pounds of twenty shillings and 240 pence to pounds of 100 new pence in 1972, Ireland was compelled to follow suit, as the Irish pound had always been pegged to sterling. (Scots and others please note - this was unilaterally ( Read more... )

Over on Slugger, David McCann reminds us that the most recent Northern Ireland Assembly election was exactly a year ago today. I hadn't realised that the election broadcasts are almost all online, both for the 2 March Assembly election and the 8 June Westminster election. Here I am ( Read more... )

An old friend from my Alliance Party days, Mervyn Jones, died suddenly last week. He was 66.

When I saw the news (via a mutual friend on Twitter), I stared at the computer screen for a few minutes, as you do, and then wrote down a couple of memories of him for my Facebook readers, particularly those who knew him. This is really sad news ( Read more... )

I am participating in today's BBC coverage of yesterday's Northern Ireland Assembly election (votes here are counted over the two days after the vote). It looks like the results will be much more interesting than I had anticipated - turnout is up in Nationalist and mixed areas, down in some of the more hardline Unionist areas. Initial indications ( Read more... )

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The perils of live broadcasting. Mark Devenport and I had agreed that once more than half of the Assembly results were in, we would take off our jackets in the hot studio. But just as Mark Carruthers began to ask what we would take off when three-quarters of the results came in, we were interrupted...

'Results blackout' as power fault interrupts @ ( Read more... )