A week dominated by Sunak deal and Henry McDonald's funeral

A personal letter from News Letter editor Ben Lowry

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News   Sport   What's On              I N S I D E R           Mar 5, 2023             Ben Lowry Editor Tuesday, the last day of winter, was a busy one.   The prime minister, who visited Northern Ireland to sell his protocol deal, wrote for us about it. Whether his long piece will persuade unionists on his deal is unclear but note how he alludes to other unionist political concerns, perhaps almost as compensation, which is unusual for PMs who can be reticent about seeming too unionist.    Henry McDonald's funeral was held in Belfast's Oh Yeah music centre. The music ranged from Bach to Joy Division, which struck me as a reflection of the breadth of his tastes and the range of his intelligence. Watch the video tributes to Henry within this report.    What an irony that Henry was buried that busy political day when he would have wanted to be reporting events. Always in good humour, he would be amused that his exit (the service he planned in his final weeks, mourners were told) pushed even the PM to the side of our news agenda for a brief while.   As the only unionist daily newspaper we have carried reams of unionist reaction to the Windsor Framework. Aside from Mr Sunak, we had the economist Dr Graham Gudgin, who thinks the agreement far from perfect but the DUP should go back, anyway, the haulier Peter Summerton (he is concerned at ongoing paperwork), the economist Dr Esmond Birnie, who wants four clarifications, and the loyalist Jamie Bryson who wrote a letter with his own thoughts after John Larkin KC said the deal does not repair damage to the Union but seems to be keeping a route open to backing a modified deal. Jim Allister, who explains why he thinks it all completely unacceptable, is not.   My own thoughts are here.  We remain outside the UK internal market, and this is not something a unionist can embrace, yet the key likely alternative is very bad for unionists too.   Of other stories, I left Sullivan at the age of 13 but like Dermot Murnaghan and Rory McIlroy have wonderful memories of it.   Ben Lowry Editor              Ben Lowry: Unionist choice on deal is not so much between the unpalatable and disastrous as between two disasters                     To understand the origins of the current crisis over the Irish Sea border, go back to UK-EU long stalemate over Brexit from 2016 to 2019.           Read more +

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