it comes just a day after a gunman killed ten people in a suspected racially motivated terror attack at a supermarket in the city of buffalo. now on bbc news, dateline. hello and welcome to the programme, which brings together the foreign correspondents who write, blog and broadcast for audiences back home from the dateline london. it s been a convention busting week, this one a queen s speech delivered for the first time in 70 years by a royal other than the queen. two countries strictly neutral for 80 years, preparing to take sides. in northern ireland, a party in favour of reuniting the island of ireland topped the poll for the first time in the centuries since ireland was partitioned. to discuss all that and more, in the studio are brian 0 connell, former bureau chief in london for the irish broadcaster rte, eunice goes, portuguese journalist and university lecturer and newly created british citizen, and jeffrey kofman, who s been both a war correspondent and news anc
74 years old, and there was a kind of tragic aura to it. - here s a this is a guy who s waited all his life for a job - that he didn t really choose to inherit i and now, he s finally kind of phasing in, sort of, - and he s pretty frail. and it was kind of hard to listen to him because he wasn t very engaging - and i think i mean, - there are many bigger issues in the planet than talking i about this, i have tojust say but ijust think that it s very interesting to see. i it is, and it is fascinating - because it feels like this man is going to be given this job and he sjust not l he s too frail and not - magnetic enough to carry it, and i think that s what we saw. brian, what did you make of it? crosstalk. it was, but to be perfectly honest, i go with what jeffrey s saying, and that is that the opening lines of that speech were, her majesty s government will take measures to ease the cost of living crisis. not a single jot or tittle of any of that was reflected
About this at this stage? brian, i m curious. i first went - to northern ireland as a reporter for the canadian broadcasting corporation- in the mid 905. i felt like i needed - a dictionary and a road map to understand the - shorthand terminology that s used to cover this story - sectarian, unionist. when you re not inside i the bubble of this story. as most of our audience isn t. ..it is so difficult to know who s on what side and to understand the history. well, the history is actually easier than the present. i i remember turning up late for a story one day outside downing street. i think gerry adams was in there. i said to a colleague of mine from northern ireland said, what s the story? he said, well, in 1690. so, my question is, is there so much disenchantment and the population is shifting in northern ireland. - yes. what are the let me make it an open ended question - what is the likelihood
The island of ireland topped the poll for the first time in the centuries since ireland was partitioned. to discuss all that and more, in the studio are brian 0 connell, former bureau chief in london for the irish broadcaster rte, eunice goes, portuguese journalist and university lecturer and newly created british citizen, and jeffrey kofman, who s been both a war correspondent and news anchor in canada and the united states. good to have you back with us. jeffrey, let s start with nato expansion. sweden and finland. finland s president sauli niinisto said on friday he s going to ring president putin and tell him that the situation has changed. how big a change is this, do you think? you know, i think if you d looked ten years ago and said this, it was impossible. this was a religion in these two countries, neutrality. the concept of.of being western, but not not glued at the hip or fused at the hip. and i think that this is really affirmation that, while ukraine is losing in the sense
It was a great deal, a fantastic deal, an oven ready deal and said it was fabulous. it sorted all the problems and so on. so, what the european union sees is an incredibly bad faith because they signed it clearly with a view to break it soon after. and so, they are saying, well, this is a government that is not serious. why are we going to waste our time proposing creative solutions? and they are very bureaucratic. they are very detailed and so on. why are we going to waste our brainpower developing these super complicated solutions if this british government is not is not serious? it s not taking any of these proposals seriously and, more importantly, has not made any alternative proposals and not presented them on the table? brian, why are the implications of this within northern ireland so toxic, given that trading is going on as we speak? it s not as if people have stopped trading goods across between the uk