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‘Live and let live’: Northern Ireland historian uncovers surprising era of tolerance of gay men

Northern Ireland carved a grim reputation for homophobia for over half a century, a record of intolerance and bigotry so baroque it was turned into an opera. In the 1970s, Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and Free Presbyterian church, led a “save Ulster from sodomy” crusade to resist the decriminalisation of homosexuality. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Royal Ulster Constabulary used plainclothes officers to bait and catch gay men in parks and public toilets. In 2008, Iris Robinson, an MP and wife of the then DUP leader, Peter Robinson, told an interviewer that homosexuality was an “abomination”, which later became the title of a satirical opera. In 2011, more than a quarter of gay people complained about homophobia in the workplace. Northern Ireland held out against marriage equality until 2019. However, it may not always have been like this. Research suggests that in the Victorian era and early 20th century, Northern Ireland was much more tolerant and accepting of gay men. “I was expecting to find repression but there was a sort of benevolent toleration,” said Tom Hulme, a historian at Queen’s University Belfast and author of Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation, which is published this week. “Among friends and families and employers it was sort of known and understood that a man may have desires for another man and that might be why they remain unmarried or live alone or have many close male friends. “To reveal the open secret would have been problematic. While these things remained unsaid they could essentially kind of exist. We’re not talking about people walking down the streets, holding hands. It’s a much more closed, secret kind of culture.” Hulme said tacit ignorance and public silence enabled male queerness to flourish with only rare exposure, condemnation or regulation, with a “live and let live” ethos especially prevalent in the working class. The academic drew on public records as well as private letters and diaries, including those of David Strain, a middle-class Protestant who chronicled his sexual identity in dozens of journals, comprising about 2m words, that were deposited at the Northern Ireland’s public records office before his death in 1969. Hulme traced the lives of men who were prosecuted for sexual indecency and discovered that in many cases relatives or employers testified on their behalf, paid bail money and welcomed them home or back to work. This compassion was denied to Oscar Wilde in England after a London court convicted him in 1895 of gross indecency. To be arrested, charged and jailed was an “awful” ordeal for gay men, but on release many returned to their former lives, with communities turning a blind eye to sexual orientation as long as there was discretion, said Hulme. “A careful game goes on between gay men and their friends and families. Knowing nods and winks, ‘oh, he’s not the marrying type’.” Metropolises like London afforded anonymity and a degree of protection to men who cruised public spaces for sex, but the intimacy of Belfast, a provincial capital, also offered shelter by letting men establish relationships, said Hulme. “A glance on the way to work, next week, a conversation.” While London had openly gay bars, and men who used cosmetics, the gay community in Belfast had to be more circumspect and socialise in venues with heterosexual norms. With homosexuality hiding in plain sight, conservative political and religious leaders largely ignored the issue until the global gay rights movements began campaigning for open acceptance and equality, said Hulme. “A major moral panic really didn’t happen until the 1950s and 1960s. All of a sudden the churches and the politicians in Northern Ireland had to take a stance. The idea of being morally pure was an important part of Northern Ireland’s self-conception.” Unionist politicians intervened to hush up court cases involving peers, said Hulme. “It’s a public relations disaster if you have a high-profile unionist member of society caught up in this sort of scandal.” Jeff Dudgeon, a leading Northern Ireland gay rights activist, said gay men were able to lead a full life despite the threat of arrest: “Life was enjoyable for those who made it out into a gay sexual life, despite court catastrophes. It wasn’t unmitigated oppression.” Most, however, were not so audacious. Dudgeon said: “Self-knowledge was sparse, as was information about meeting others, so most didn’t pursue a romantic or sexual life, becoming traditional bachelors or spinsters.” Clerics and politicians ramped up denunciations of homosexuality during the Troubles but LGBTQ campaigners prevailed, said Dudgeon, who won a landmark 1981 European court of human rights case that decriminalised homosexual sex in Northern Ireland. “It was a story of the defeat of newly-vocal antagonists like Paisley and Peter Robinson.” The DUP blocked same-sex marriage until 2019, when Westminster voted to align the region with the rest of the UK, prompting celebrations by gay couples. In 2021, DUP leaders apologised for the hurt inflicted by predecessors.

Spirit pilot gets ‘overwhelming’ send-off from Southwest after his final flight is cancelled

A Spirit Airlines pilot was given an emotional send-off into retirement by another airline after what was supposed to be his final flight was canceled amid Spirit’s sudden collapse on Saturday. Jon Jackson had been scheduled to fly his final flight into Baltimore-Washington international airport on Saturday when the low-cost airline ceased operations after running out of cash and rescue talks with the Trump administration failed. So instead, Jackson boarded a Southwest flight to get back to Baltimore from Fort Lauderdale. During the flight, his son Chris, a Southwest pilot, “casually mentioned” to the crew that this would have been his dad’s retirement flight, according to a Facebook post shared by Southwest, “setting into motion a plan that resulted in a proper retirement party when the flight landed in Baltimore”. Southwest staff organized a water cannon salute over the aircraft when it arrived and Jackson was met with cheers, applause and a bottle of bubbly when he walked off the jet bridge. A delighted Jackson gave a brief speech in the terminal, telling staff: “Very overwhelming, I can’t thank you all enough. As Spirit goes down this is a sad day, and you guys made it incredible, so thank you so much.” Southwest’s post reads: “It was a powerful reminder of the aviation community’s ability to show respect, compassion, and solidarity when it matters most. Above all, this moment was about honoring a fellow aviator. Congratulations, and thank you for your service in the skies, Capt Jackson.” Before its collapse, Spirit operated hundreds of daily flights on its bright yellow planes and employed some 17,000 people. But early on Saturday it announced that after 34 years in business it had “with great disappointment … started an orderly wind-down of our operations, effective immediately”. “To our guests: all flights have been canceled, and customer service is no longer available,” the airline said. “We are proud of the impact of our ultra-low-cost model on the industry over the last 34 years and had hoped to serve our guests for many years to come.” The company had struggled to make a deal with its creditors and secure funding to maintain operations after shuttling in and out of bankruptcy twice in recent years. But the sharp rise in jet fuel prices since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran effectively sealed its fate. The Trump administration floated taking a 90% stake to prevent Spirit’s collapse but the company’s bondholders rebelled.

Canada to be first non-European nation at EPC summit as Carney seeks allies

Canada is to become the first non-European country to attend a meeting of the European Political Community when the prime minister, Mark Carney, joins Monday’s summit of the 48-plus nation grouping in Yerevan, Armenia. Carney has said he is determined to build a new network of trade and diplomatic alliances after the loss of US markets under Donald Trump. His presence will also represent a show of western support for Armenia in its efforts to distance itself from Russia at a time when Washington’s approach to Moscow’s opponents, such as Ukraine, is at best ambiguous. Canadian diplomats have rejected suggestions Ottawa might seek EU membership. Trump’s plan to pull more than 5,000 troops out of Germany over the next year and the economic impact on western economies of a prolonged US-Iran conflict will be among the main subjects of discussion in Yerevan. Armenia shares a border with Iran, but unlike neighbouring Azerbaijan has not alleged Iranian missiles have landed in its territory. Yerevan was chosen to host the EPC – an institution championed the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and which also includes the UK – to give Armenia a chance to showcase its strengthening links with Europe, and so continue its slow decoupling from Russia, its former backer. Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has pursued a policy of diversification that in practice is slowly drawing his country into the European ambit. His Civil Contract party is facing parliamentary elections in June, and is seeking a big win so he can continue efforts to make a peace with Azerbaijan. Pashinyan faces three opposition parties more sympathetic to Russia. Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe specialising in the Caucasus region, said: “European leaders will have to walk a fine line in Yerevan. As they hold what looks like a pre-election rally for Pashinyan, they must also have a bigger conversation about building a more robust and less polarised Armenia. “The country itself deserves full European attention. It is on the verge of a painful but transformative peace agreement with Baku that will lead to the reopening of its two long borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey, which have been closed since the 1990s. The country also has a historic opportunity to loosen its overdependence on Moscow as the war in Ukraine continues to distract and drain Russia.” The day after hosting the EPC, Yerevan hopes the first bilateral summit between Armenia and the EU on Tuesday will result in the bloc offering extra funding to promote democracy as well as visa liberalisation. When the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, visited the country in March, she declared that “Armenia and the EU have never been closer”. The country of 3 million people signed a comprehensive partnership agreement with the EU in 2017. Last year, it adopted a law formally declaring its intention to apply for membership of the bloc, taking the country in a very different political direction to neighbouring Georgia. Armenia is a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) alliance, although it froze its membership of the latter in 2024. Vladimir Putin said in April that Armenia could not be a member of both the EU and CSTO. “It’s simply impossible by definition,” the Russian president told Pashinyan. Macron has been the premier champion of closer European-Armenian ties and his attendance at the Yerevan summit is being given a state-visit-level importance. He is also expected to attend a concert in Gyumri, Armenia’s second-largest city The EPC, which was set up in 2022, brings together full members of the EU and the large constellation of countries outside the Brussels bloc, including the UK, Turkey, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Serbia. The group has no formal secretariat and often avoids lengthy communiques in favour of bilateral leader-to-leader discussion. The EPC was met with scepticism at its inception, with some fearing it was a sop for countries that had been waiting years for their applications for EU membership to be progressed. But the willingness of European leaders to continue to attend the summits suggests the gatherings serve a purpose. With the support of Trump, Armenia and Azerbaijan initialled a peace agreement in Washington last August. The Azerbaijani side said it would fully sign up to the peace agreement once Armenia changed its constitution, claiming that it contains territorial claims against Azerbaijan, which Armenian authorities have repeatedly denied.

‘What dishes did they eat?’: the Beijing restaurant dining out on Starmer visit

Whatever the ins and outs of Westminster politics, Keir Starmer can take small comfort in the fact that there is one place where he is consistently popular. It just happens to be 5,000 miles away. In and Out, an upmarket restaurant in Beijing, has been fully booked since Starmer and his team dined there in January during the first visit by a British prime minister to China since 2018. His visit, pictures of which were widely shared on Chinese social media, has caused such a buzz that diners can now order from a specially printed “prime minister’s menu”, which lists the dishes that Starmer ordered. They include mint leaves wrapped in thinly sliced beef, grilled asparagus with porcini, pork ribs in plum sauce, sweet pineapple rice and deep-fried shards of goat milk cheese. Starmer did not, however, sample the dish for which In and Out (Yi Zuo Yi Wang in Chinese) is most famous: the hallucinogenic mushrooms ordered by Janet Yellen, the then US treasury secretary, on her trip to Beijing in 2023. In and Out specialises in food from Yunnan, a province in south-west China that borders Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. Yunnan food is known for using a wide array of exotic fungi as well as the fragrant herbs that are indigenous to the province’s mountains. Starmer passed on the mushrooms – known as lurid bolete – ordered by Yellen, and stuck to the humble porcini. The vanilla mushroom order has not stopped his menu of choice going viral in China. The restaurant has been booked out since the visit and the specially printed menu immortalising Team Starmer’s order features a cartoon King’s Guard whose bearskin cap has been replaced by a mushroom. Su Yajun and Sun Chen dined at In and Out on a trip to Beijing from neighbouring Hebei province after reading about Starmer’s visit on social media. “We heard the British prime minister came here to eat, so thought the food must be really good for him to choose this place,” Su said, on a busy Thursday lunchtime. “We wanted to have a taste of what they had.” “We kept seeing the news on Douyin,” Sun added, referring to the Chinese sister app of TikTok. One waiter at In and Out who was working the night Starmer visited said about half of the diners visiting the restaurant since then had been influenced by the UK prime minister. “Customers would ask things like: ‘Did the British prime minister come here to dine a couple of days ago?’ and then ask: ‘What dishes did they eat? Can you introduce them to us?’ and things like that,” he said, adding that Starmer was “very friendly and approachable”. It is not just In and Out that is dining out on the PM’s visit. More than 1,500 miles away from Beijing, in Yunnan, the Guardian columnist Martin Rowson spotted more restaurants serving prime minister menus. Despite taking a battering in the post-Brexit years, Britain does retain a soft power appeal in many parts of the world, including China. It is not uncommon to meet football-mad taxi drivers who have never left China but who can tell you who has been up and who has been down in the Premier League over the past 30-plus years. The British actor Rosamund Pike has a surprisingly large fanbase in China. Starmer’s visit to the country was generally welcomed by the Chinese public, in contrast to the criticism that he faced in the UK for pursuing closer ties with Beijing. Sun said she wanted to travel to the UK to visit the University of Cambridge, to encourage her child to study there. Starmer’s visit to China was supposed to reset relations with Beijing. However, the goodwill earned on the trip may be laid to waste if he is forced out of office, or at least forced to neglect international affairs as his political fortunes at home crumble. Reality can be a bitter pill to swallow. Perhaps now he wishes he had some of those magic mushrooms. Additional research by Lillian Yang

Cuba gets trickle of intrepid tourists as Trump’s oil blockade continues

Leslie Simon and Marc Bender had arrived in Havana for a 10-day holiday, despite their president’s repeated threats of military action against Cuba. The two retired union lawyers from Los Angeles flew in via Miami sporting badges reading “ICE OUT!” and shared a somewhat negative opinion of the US’s past. “The history of America is a fucking abomination,” said Bender, ordering a Cristal, the Cuban lager. They were more positive about Cuba. “We’ve been once before and we saw some things,” said Bender. “We love Cuba.” Simon, 67, and Bender, 70, are rare tourists in a time of extreme stress. On Friday, Donald Trump extended already intense sanctions on the island, targeting foreign companies doing business with Havana. He also threatened to place the US’s huge aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, “100 yards offshore”. For the last two weeks, US surveillance aircraft have been circling the island, in an echo of what happened in Venezuela before the 3 January abduction of Nicolás Maduro. The success of that operation led Washington to impose a full oil blockade on Cuba, with the stated aim of felling the nearly seven-decade-old communist regime. Trump has repeatedly hinted the island would be his next target. Nonetheless, there is still a trickle of intrepid visitors. Ever since Fidel Castro opened up communist Cuba to tourists in the 1990s, the island has been a hugely popular destination – if not for Americans, whose government has discouraged its citizens from visiting. In 2018, nearly 5 million tourists came, and the sector was one of the Cuban government’s most important earners. But numbers have been dropping precipitously since the imposition of the oil blockade. In March there were just 35,561 visitors, according to the Cuban statistics office, of whom many would be emigrant Cubans visiting family. “You could argue the number of ‘leisure tourists’ would be between 20,000 and 25,000, when in March 2025 the number would have been about 170,000 to 180,000,” said Jim Hepple, of Aruba-based consulting company Tourism Analytics. On a recent Tuesday, a group of Germans was being shown mangos, mameys and papayas in a market in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana. “We booked long ago,” said Nicole, the CEO of a social enterprise in Trier. “And we’ve worked hard all year, and wanted our holiday. So far, everything is good. There is lots to see. We trust in God.” If God is looking down on communist Cuba, however, it doesn’t show. As Washington had hoped, its oil blockade has devastated the country’s already parlous economy. The estimated 300,000 people who work in tourism are collateral damage. The blockade deprived airlines of the ability to refuel, causing package holiday operators from Canada, Spain and Russia to pull out, along with many scheduled carriers. As the last planes flew in February, holidaymakers wrote of hotel staff crying as they were waved off. A former hotel bartender, who lost his work earlier this year, was cutting wood near the shrine to Cuba’s patron saint, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. He shook his head at the situation. “What do I have for breakfast?” he asked. “What do I eat for lunch?” Some in the tourist industry argue that it is still a good time for foreigners to visit, despite advice from many embassies against all but essential travel. Katya Bleszynska, one of the authors of Lonely Planet’s guide to Cuba, said: “I think it’s an amazing time to come. There are really good local businesses and private hotels that really want your business. Just make sure you plan and manage your expectations.” But others were more wary. Alissa Scheer, a German influencer who offers upbeat tours of Havana’s nightlife, winced when asked if she was encouraging visitors. “When I first arrived, I loved the spontaneity,” she said. “You could meet up with a friend and it would turn into a whole night out. That’s still there, but it is far less.” Nonetheless, Simon and Bender, the retired California lawyers, were looking forward to journeying into the countryside, before returning to Havana for the May Day celebrations. The trip they are on – the “Cuba May Day Revolutionary Tour” – was organised by a tour company called Young Pioneer. Bender discovered the company online. “At first I thought it was North Korean and thought: ‘Wow, that’s cool,’ but it turns out they just run tours there,” he said. Asked if they are worried Trump would order a military assault while they were in Cuba, Bender was sanguine: “If he hits us, he hits us.” They are used to seeing their political dreams shattered on holiday – they honeymooned as observers during the Nicaraguan elections in 1990, when the leftist Sandinistas were thrown out of power.

‘It’s like a cat and mouse game’: on the frontline of Belgium’s fight against drug smugglers

Sara Van Cotthem takes a safety knife and precisely slices open the side of a cardboard box to unpack its contents, an aluminium stepladder made in China. Working under harsh fluorescent lights at the border inspection post at the port of Antwerp, Van Cotthem checks the paperwork and taps the ladder with a magnet to check if it really is aluminium and not another metal. It is an everyday operation for customs officers at Antwerp, one of Europe’s main commercial gateways, which handled the equivalent of 13.6m 20ft-long (6 metres) containers last year. Everything is in order and the lorry, jam-packed with identical boxed ladders, can get on its way to Germany. But it’s not always so straightforward. Along with routine attempts to evade duties or import counterfeit goods, customs officers are grappling with relentless efforts by violent criminals to smuggle drugs, especially cocaine, into Europe. Antwerp is one of Europe’s main entry points for cocaine: authorities seized 483 tonnes of the drug between January 2019 and June 2024, the largest amount among 17 ports reporting to the European Union Drugs Agency. The port, Europe’s second largest, has been the victim of a confluence of factors. Cocaine production in South America – above all, Colombia – has soared over the last decade, while Dutch drug gangs that had been prioritising the even larger Rotterdam port shifted their attention to Belgium. Much of the cocaine arriving in Belgium is thought to be taken to the Netherlands for further distribution. But enough stays in Belgium to cause serious harm, while homegrown criminals have established a foothold in the lucrative trade. The power of the drug gangs has prompted judges to warn that Belgium risks becoming a narco-state, with international drug crime threatening social stability. While cocaine seizures at Antwerp fell to 55 tonnes in 2025, from a record-breaking 121 tonnes in 2023, the problem remains formidable. “It is like a cat and mouse game,” says Van Cotthem, a communications officer for Belgium’s customs and excise. “Every time, the smugglers find new ways to smuggle the drugs.” A few metres away from where she is speaking, six brand-new mobile scanners are parked, ready to check a suspect container any time of day or night. Customs authorities bought nine scanners (the other three are deployed elsewhere) to ensure suspect containers will be checked more quickly, minimising the risk of drug gangs extracting any drugs before a control point. In 2025, 65,000 risky containers were scanned at Antwerp, up on the previous year, and the goal eventually is scanning 350,000 to 400,000 containers along fixed conveyer-belt machines. Scanning is getting more sophisticated in response to fiendishly inventive ways criminal gangs have found to disguise drugs. Cocaine was traditionally packed around fruit. In recent years, port authorities have discovered it mixed with orange juice or coal, disguised in fake pineapples, embedded in cardboard boxes and textiles or hidden inside wooden beams and paving stones. Antwerp customs officers spend at least a year training to spot telltale marks on a scanned container – a break in a pattern, or “something off” in the spaces between the official goods. Drug traffickers’ modus operandi is changing in other ways, says Kristian Vanderwaeren, the head of customs and excise in Belgium. Smugglers are shifting routes: for instance, sending South American cocaine to Europe via west Africa. The circuitous route is an attempt to outwit authorities’ risk protocols on whether to check a container, which are based partly on the country of origin. In 2025, Ghana became the third most significant country of origin for drug seizures in Belgium, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica, while Colombia – the traditional source – slipped to fifth place. Smugglers are also trying to avoid major ports altogether by dropping illegal cargo at sea. “Mother vessels” from South America transfer cocaine to smaller boats or toss waterproof bundles with floats and GPS trackers into the sea to be recovered later. Police have identified these practices as far south as the Canary Islands and up to the Kattegat, the strait separating Denmark and Sweden. It may be only a matter of time before drugs can be sent across the Atlantic without any crew. Europol reported this year that semi-submersible vessels equipped with antennas and modems “are likely already capable of crossing the Atlantic without a crew onboard”. Drug traffickers have also been known to take to the skies: Vanderwaeren recalled Brazilian authorities a few years ago intercepting a cocaine-laden private jet that was destined for Belgium. He says his agency is looking at how to intercept aircraft, drones and submarines. “But it’s not an easy job to do. Very often you need the military also to support or help us with this.” Authorities have hired more police, including a specialised unit to fight smuggling in the port. “We are very tough, we have put in many more state capabilities in order to tackle the problem,” Vanderwaeren says. As Antwerp and nearby Rotterdam have tightened controls, he notes, smuggling had shifted to France and Spain, “a waterbed effect”. Spain reported a record 123 tonnes of seizures in 2024, while France reported a doubling of impounded cocaine from 2023 to 2024. “You see more seizures in Spain, you see more seizures in France, because it’s getting tougher and tougher for the Antwerp mob to enter their stuff into the port,” Vanderwaeren says. Letizia Paoli, the chair of criminal law and criminology at KU Leuven, says nobody knows for sure how much cocaine is getting into Antwerp. She believes smugglers are now trying less-protected ports and have changed tactics when targeting Antwerp. “Traffickers more rarely send multiple tonnes in a shipment, but rather they send more shipments with small amounts in order to distribute the risk,” she says. That hypothesis is supported by data showing a rise in seizures of cocaine under 100g and decrease in big hauls between 2023 and 2025 at Antwerp. Paoli considers claims that Belgium is becoming a “narco state” unfounded as drug-related corruption remains “quite rare” and “low-level”, she says, especially when compared with countries such as Mexico and Honduras, where very senior figures have been convicted of taking bribes from cartels. Moreover, she found a low level of drug-related violence in Belgium, while emphasising she had a lot of empathy with the warnings. But cocaine use is widespread. “Cocaine remains widely available at a very high level of purity,” Paoli says. “The drug traffickers here do not even bother to cut the cocaine with other substances, they sell it almost pure at 80%, 90% purity, which didn’t happen in the past. So this suggests that there is really more cocaine that they can get rid of.” With academic colleagues, she estimated in 2021 that EU consumers were using 160 tonnes of the drug, which she says police consider an underestimate. But even were it much higher – say, 250 tonnes – she suggests that could still easily blend into legal trade: 2.1bn tonnes of goods enter EU seaports each year from the rest of the world. Given this, she says: “You have to come to the conclusion that one way or another, the traffickers will find a way.”

Nato meetings with TV and film-makers prompt claims it is seeking ‘propaganda’

Nato is holding closed-door meetings with film and TV screenwriters, directors and producers across Europe and the US, the Guardian can reveal, prompting accusations the alliance is seeking to use the arts to generate “propaganda” for the bloc. The alliance has held three meetings with film and TV professionals in Los Angeles, Brussels and Paris and is due to continue its “series of intimate conversations” next month in London, meeting with screenwriter members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB), which represents professional writers in the UK. The planned meeting in London has caused consternation among some of those invited, who felt they were being asked to “contribute towards propaganda for Nato”. The topic of conversation at the meeting, to be held under the Chatham House rule – in which participants are free to use information received, but identities of attenders are not revealed – will be the “evolving security situation in Europe and beyond”. Former Nato spokesperson James Appathurai, who is now deputy assistant secretary general for hybrid, cyber and new technology, is understood to be planning to attend, along with other officials from the alliance. In a WGGB email seen by the Guardian, it was suggested that the meetings had already led to “three separate projects” in development, which were “inspired, at least in part, by these conversations”. It also said that Nato was “built on the belief that cooperation and compromise, the nurturing of friendships and alliances, is the way forward”, adding that “even if something so simple as that message finds its way into a future story, that will be enough”, according to the organisers of the event. Alan O’Gorman, writer of the film Christy, which won best film at the 2026 Irish Film & Television Awards, called the planned meeting “outrageous” and “clearly propaganda”. “I thought it was tone deaf and crazy to present this as some sort of positive opportunity. A lot of people, myself included, have friends and family or themselves come from countries that are not in Nato, that have suffered under wars that Nato has joined and propagated,” he said. He thinks the meetings are an attempt by Nato to “get some of its messaging out there in film and TV”. “I think there’s fearmongering throughout Europe at the moment that our defences are down,” he said. “I see it in an Irish context, where there’s been a push through some of the media and government to present Nato in a positive light and align ourselves more closely with them. I think the Irish people, for the most part, don’t want anything to do with wars on foreign lands.” Defence spending in Ireland has increased to record levels following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has received cross party support and broad approval from the public, though support for joining Nato remains low. An Ipsos poll last year found, should a united Ireland be formed, that 49% half of all voters in the Republic of Ireland are opposed to joining the alliance, with 19 per cent in favour and 22 per cent not sure. O’Gorman said other screenwriters invited to the meeting were “pretty offended that art would be used in a way that was supporting war” and felt they were being asked to “contribute towards propaganda for Nato”. Faisal A Qureshi, a screenwriter and producer who has worked in the industry for more than 20 years, applied to attend the meeting “to see what it would be like first-hand” but had to pull out over a scheduling conflict. He said the “risk for any creative who dips into this unattributable world of intelligence or military briefings is that they can get seduced into thinking they now have some secret knowledge. That there exists a world of greys where morality is stretched and human right abuses are acceptable when done for the greater good”. Qureshi questions whether a creative would sufficiently “challenge or interrogate” information passed along to them in such meetings. “They’ve just been given something that has the veneer of truth given to it by an authority that rarely deals with the public and there is a sense of privilege about getting that access,” he said. Supporters of Nato have advocated for greater relations with the arts. The Centre for European Reform thinktank released a report earlier this year calling on governments to engage with cultural leaders, including screenwriters and film producers, to build public support for greater defence spending and to “better tell the story of why these investments in defence are needed”. In 2024, eight screenwriters, including a writer and executive producer on the sitcom Friends, were invited to Nato’s headquarters in Brussels by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, to learn about security policy. The group, which also included a writer on the long-running crime procedural Law and Order, and a producer on the comedy detective drama High Potential, met the alliance’s then-general secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, during the trip. A Nato official said: “The mentioned initiative is the fourth in a series of sessions for writers of fiction in the entertainment industry (including screenwriters, showrunners and authors). “It follows from interest expressed by members of the industry to know more about what Nato is about and how it works. These events include engagement with representatives of Nato, civil society and the thinktank community.” A WGGB spokesperson said: “As a trade union representing screenwriters, we receive invitations from third-party organisations about events that may be of professional use or interest to our members. These interactions do not necessarily represent an endorsement of these organisations. “The invitation we passed on from Nato to our screenwriter members was to an event offering a two-way conversation where attending writers can ask their own questions, talk freely and take whatever they feel is useful from the session. Our members are free thinkers – a valuable and vital skill that they bring to their craft.”

Ukraine war briefing: Russia tries for a foothold in Ukraine’s eastern ‘fortress belt’, continues attacks on civilians

Russian troops are inching towards the city of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, trying to establish a foothold close to a heavily defended area, Ukraine’s top army official said on Saturday. Kostiantynivka, along with other cities, forms a so-called fortress belt in the country’s east – an area well fortified by the Ukrainian military. Ukraine’s army chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said on the Telegram app that ‘counter-sabotage measures’ were being undertaken in the city. A Ukrainian battlefield mapping project called DeepState shows that Russian troops control an area about one kilometre (0.6 mile) from the city’s southern outskirts. Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Wednesday its forces had taken control of Novodmytrivka, just north of Kostiantynivka. On Saturday, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had seized the village of Myropillia in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region, where Moscow says it wants to establish a buffer zone. But the Kursk group of the Ukrainian military, writing on Facebook, dismissed the Russian report as a “complete lie” and said its units controlled the area. Also in Sumy, the regional governor said a Russian airstrike near the town of Krovelets had injured six people, including two in serious condition. Two people were killed and seven wounded after a Russian drone attacked a minibus in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, local officials said Saturday, in the latest round of attacks on civilians across Ukraine. Hours later Russia attacked another minibus in Kherson, wounding the driver, said regional head Oleskandr Prokudin. On Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, a Russian strike damaged port infrastructure in the city of Odesa but no casualties were reported. In a blow to Berlin, which had pushed for the move as a powerful deterrent against Russia, a planned drawdown of 5,000 US troops from Germany includes a Biden-era plan to deploy a US battalion with long-range Tomahawk missiles to Germany. The US plan should spur Europe to strengthen its own defences, German defence minister Boris Pistorius said on Saturday, but two top US Republican lawmakers expressed concern, saying the troops should not leave Europe. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met delegates to the ruling party’s youth league congress in Pyongyang, state media KCNA said on Sunday, as the North Korean government has again cast young people as central to both domestic mobilisation and its military role in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Eleventh Congress of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League is a once-in-five-years political gathering aimed at mobilising citizens aged roughly 14 to 30. In a letter published on Friday, the ruling Workers’ Party explicitly linked youth loyalty to Pyongyang’s involvement in the Ukraine war, telling the congress that young soldiers sent on overseas operations had “become bombs and flames” in defending the country’s honour. North Korea sent an estimated 14,000 troops to fight alongside Russian forces in the Kursk region, according to South Korean, Ukrainian and western officials.