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Belfast Telegraph
08-08-2025
- Politics
- Belfast Telegraph
Sam McBride on the DUP's route to power sharing: Deceit, flattery and secret Sinn Féin talks
Publicly the DUP refused to speak with Sinn Féin - but declassified files show a different side to the storyTwo factions of the party disagreed on power-sharingTalks of the early 2000s ultimately floundered Flattery, deceit, a bung, MI5, and the secret back-channel to Sinn Féin - uncovered files have revealed the DUP's route to power-sharing. Publicly the DUP refused to talk to Sinn Féin, Ian Paisley wanted 'Sackcloth and Ashes'. But the truth was that the party was in direct talks with Republicans. In public, Ian Paisley's party insisted it was united – but the reality was very different. Peter Robinson was briefing the government on how to deal with an increasingly frail Paisley – and the two big factions of the party disagreed on power-sharing. Whilst the DUP did end up going into government with Sinn Féin, the talks of the early 2000s ultimately floundered just before the IRA's audacious Northern Bank robbery. To tell this tale of political intrigue, money, and what some might call betrayal, Ciarán Dunbar is joined by Belfast Telegraph's Northern Ireland editor Sam McBride, who has been looking through the formerly classified Kew Files in London.
RTÉ News
07-08-2025
- Business
- RTÉ News
The story of the Irish farmers restaurant in the heart of Paris
Analysis: La ferme irlandaise set out to showcase the best of Irish food and ingredients when it opened in the French capital in 1979 Limerick ham and Irish stew were on the menu of a restaurant in France 40 years ago. La Ferme Irlandaise served traditional Irish food and fare in the heart of the French capital. Located at 30 Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré in the first arrondissement, it opened its doors in 1979. It was close to the Avenue de l'Opéra and Place Vendôme which contains upmarket hotels and jewellery stores, along with luxury boutiques. The idea for the restaurant was to showcase the best of Irish food and agriculture in the centre of Paris. It was financed by Farmer Business Developments, an investment company that was started by farmers and led on to FBD Insurance. The restaurant was run by Peter Robinson, a classically-trained chef who had trained in London, Paris and Lausanne. His restaurant, Armstrong's Barn in Annamoe in Co Wicklow, won various culinary awards, culminating in a Michelin star in 1978. The early vision for La Ferme Irlandaise was for a prestige eatery that would show off quality Irish ingredients. It was officially opened in November 1979 by the Minister for Foreign Affairs Michael O'Kennedy. Ireland's ambassador to France, Hugh McCann, and the deputy mayor of Paris, Christian de La Malène, were also in attendance. Oysters from Cork harbour were flown over for the event, together with beef from the Irish Meat Packers factory in Midleton and lamb from Dublin Meat Packers. Several semi-state agencies also helped in the early days. An Bord Bainne flew in fresh cream daily and An Bord Iascaigh Mhara flew in fresh seafood. Head chef Hester Cowhig observed that bacon and cabbage was one option the French "didn't take to at all" Brown bread was baked in the restaurant daily with flour from Howards of Cork. There was seating for 46 people. They were obviously going for a distinctive look with French designer Hubert de Givenchy advising on the decor. Diners ate from tables made of black Kilkenny marble. There were mirrors on the ceilings, deep pile carpets underfoot and the walls were painted cool black and off-white. Half of the staff were Irish and the other half were French, including the wine waiter. An early menu included smoked salmon, lamb kidneys in Hennessy brandy and Dublin Bay prawns cassoulet. Robinson had hoped that it would become a "permanent fixture on the Parisian restaurant scene" and that they would eventually win a Michelin star, but he left the restaurant in May 1981. The management was then taken over by Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House restaurant in Cork. When it reopened in August 1981, it looked different and the menu had undergone a shift in taste. Jim Whelan, who had worked in Ballymaloe, took over as manager and the architects Patrick Scott and Maurice Hogan advised on a new colour scheme. Allen said that she wanted to give the revamped restaurant the "style and atmosphere of a little farmhouse". On the new oak tables was the pottery of Stephen Pearce, a neighbour of Ballymaloe in Shanagarry. From RTÉ Archives, David Hanly interviews Myrtle Allen for a 1988 episode of Hanly's People Virtually all of the staff, from the chefs in the kitchen to the waiting staff, was Irish. Jim Cullinane from Ballycotton in Cork was the head chef and Rory O'Connell, now known for his TV cookery programmes and cookbooks, was the second chef. In terms of the new food offering, Allen wanted to "show how very good Irish products are" and to demonstrate "how good the traditions of Irish cooking are". In the beginning, she paid regular visits to ensure that it was running smoothly. She brought wholemeal stoneground flour to make the bread, as well as rashers and eggs and apples to make apple tarts. O'Connell later recalled that he would bring back a suitcase with wheels of Cashel Blue cheese, frozen recently-picked blackcurrants and blackberries and herbs from the garden at Ballymaloe. For Parisians, who were used to coffee and a croissant for breakfast at the weekend, La Ferme Irlandaise offered them a novel alternative with the Sunday brunch, featuring a full Irish fry of sausages, rashers and black pudding. Speaking about the brunch in 1983 to the New York Times, Allen said "the French love it" and "it's what they expect from Ireland". Allen wanted to "show how very good Irish products are" and to demonstrate "how good the traditions of Irish cooking are". Irish ice cream and carrageen moss were popular with the customers. The meat would come from the market at Rungis which had replaced Les Halles as the main wholesale market of Paris. It had arrived there from Ireland by refrigerated lorry. La Ferme became popular with locals, expats and tourists and was rated among the top 10 foreign restaurants in the city. By November 1984, a typical menu included watercress soup, smoked salmon pâté, Ballymaloe Cheese fondue, Shanagarry beef and Guinness pie, chicken baked in thyme, sole with herb butter, Irish lamb with mint and butter sauce and Irish coffee. Not all Irish dishes were a success: head chef Hester Cowhig observed that bacon and cabbage was one option that the French "didn't take to at all". La Ferme Irlandaise was taken over in 1985 by Brian Loughney, who ran the Kitty O'Shea Irish pub in the city, and closed in June 1987. Today, there are an estimated 50 Irish pubs in Paris. While they are all flying the Irish tricolour and wearing the green jersey to some extent, they have a tough act to follow compared to La Ferme Irlandaise. It will go down in the annals of Irish food history as one of the first restaurants on the European continent to showcase the very best of Irish produce and culinary traditions.
Belfast Telegraph
04-08-2025
- Belfast Telegraph
Peter Robinson and the loyalist ‘invasion' of Clontibret
But in the early hours of 7 August 1986, hundreds of Ulster Loyalists, some in paramilitary uniforms, spilled over the border and into Clontribret. A trail of destruction and violence descended on the village. Gardaí were attacked with two officers ending up in hospital. Anti Anglo-Irish agreement graffiti was sprayed throughout the village, and cars and property were damaged. The so-called 'invasion' was led by then DUP Deputy leader Peter Robinson – the only person to be arrested. He was later convicted of unlawful assembly and given a mammoth fine as his supporters brawled outside the courthouse. Ian Paisley said Robinson alone was responsible for the incident, Robinson blamed Paisley. To revisit the infamous Clontibret Invasion – Ciarán Dunbar is joined by Sam McBride.
BBC News
22-07-2025
- General
- BBC News
Photographer celebrates North Shields fishermen
A photographer who spent more than 10 years taking pictures of a town's fishermen has shared some of his favourite Robinson took more than 10,000 images during his time with the fishing fleet of North said his aim was to highlight the hardship of life at sea as well as celebrate the workers who are part of the town's dwindling fleet of photographs will be displayed during an exhibition, Harvest from the Deep, from 22 July to 30 August at the Old Low Light Heritage Centre. Follow BBC North East on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram. Send your story ideas here.
Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Our greatest football photographer's secret? Ignore the game
The world of football is not, you would have thought, a world that concerns itself overly with events in art. These two great spheres of human endeavour appear fiercely separated. And in most locations they are. But not in the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where, unbelievably, a gallery has inveigled its way into the hall of balls and is now luring unsuspecting football folk on to the aesthetic quicksand of art. The Oof Gallery is inside the huge Spurs merch shop, secluded in a small Georgian building that the planners, in their infinite English perversity, insisted must remain untouched while the club's new stadium was built around it. It now lurks there, almost invisible, surrounded by mountains of Spurs paraphernalia, a small pearl in a huge oyster. The shows they mount here are usually on a football theme of some sort. The latest offering pairs the football photographs of Peter Robinson with the creatively vandalised football shirts of Nicole Chui, who, on this evidence, ought never to have been allowed near a sports kit. More on that and on the adjacent issue of the awful 2025 Tottenham shirt in a moment. First, we need to plunge into the soccer sadness of Robinson, 81, hailed by The New York Times as the 'greatest living football photographer'. Amazingly he has recorded 13 World Cups and nine Olympic Games. For five decades he has been photographing the pigskin sport, and the show confirms he has visited and watched pretty much everywhere it has been played. In 2003 he was in Japan photographing the space-age Yokohama Stadium and noticing how a field of cabbages had grown plentiful right outside it. In 1993 he was in Beirut, shedding a tear for the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium after an attack by the Israeli air force had turned it into a bombed-out crater filled with refugees. What's fascinating here is how much of Robinson's interest lies at the game's peripheries and how little actual football he has recorded. When Portugal played Spain in Porto in 1981, he watched a disembodied hand reach out to collect the tickets from a walled-up bunker masquerading as an entrance kiosk. In the groundsman's hut at Southend United in 2004, he noticed that the groundsman was watching another game on the telly while his own team were playing outside through the open door. • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews What really interests him is the humanity of football rather than its skills: the way it bleeds off the pitch into the surrounding life. He likes a joke too. In 1970, at Wolves v Man Utd, he caught a moment when Bobby Charlton was approached by a policeman while taking a corner. Robinson called the photo The Two Bobbies. His picture of Bill Nicholson entering the gates of White Hart Lane in 1970 with a cheeky smile and a shapeless Marks & Sparks suit has become iconic, because Nicholson looks more like a dusty geography teacher than the most revered of all Tottenham managers. Humanity done, the rest of the experience at the Oof Gallery and its surroundings feels as if it is emphasising how football has changed for the worse, and how delusion has crept into its world. Nicole Chui is the founder of Baes FC, 'a grassroots football community for women, trans and non-binary people of Asian heritage aiming to play football in a safe space'. It sounds like a healthy and jolly London arrangement. Good on her. Where things start to unravel is that she also imagines herself to be a football artist, and in that role she has been given a space at the Oof to display her wares and to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that she should stick to founding community soccer teams. Chui's creative ambition is 'to disrupt perfection and inspire others to embrace their raw emotions'. This involves taking a needle and thread to an assortment of football shirts and sewing spider patterns across them, ruining their shape and disfiguring the design ambitions of the shirts' makers. If she improved them, even slightly, this would be a noble task. She doesn't. Instead the gaudy patching feels like an act of aggression, death by a thousand stitches, a killing of the football shirt. Somewhere along the line she has persuaded herself that being messy (as opposed to Messi) is the same thing as being creative. It isn't. As it happens, football shirts have experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. My fellow Sunday Times writer Joey D'Urso has just written an entire tome on the subject. Called More Than a Shirt, its big point is that every football kit in every land 'tells a deeper story about the world we inhabit'. To gather his evidence, Joey travelled the world, but I guess he never made it to the Tottenham stadium and the merchandising souk that surrounds the Oof Gallery, where rack after rack of 2025 Spurs kit makes you cry with its lack of fizz or ambition. To see where football shirts really have advanced, you need to leave behind the moneyed casinos of the Premier League and head down to the lower divisions. Walthamstow FC, from the Isthmian League North Division, recently brought out a fabulous turquoise kit based on the famous wallpaper designs of the Walthamstow local William Morris. My own team, Reading FC, now having fun in League One, issued a kit featuring a purple turtle design inspired by a local nightclub. This year their shirt is based on a Victorian biscuit tin designed by the local cake makers Huntley & Palmers. This is the football shirt cementing important links with the local community and pushing out the boat in invention and excitement. Sad, robotic Tottenham Hotspur should definitely try it. Peter Robinson: Double Vision is at the Oof Gallery, London, to Aug 31; Nicole Chui: Ruined, to Aug 2; What exhibitions have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments below
