It's been over 20 years(!) but this is still the biggest travesty of justice Pitchfork review of all time. A solid 10.0, one of the best albums of the 2000s.

Teleradio-Moldova are streaming their New Year's Eve show on YouTube now and it is incredible

There has been a significant decline in incidents of anti-social behaviour in NI since 2011, with the summer peak in 2025 around 42% lower than 2013.

Electro-diesel Stadler Flirts selected to replace Dublin – Belfast Enterprise trains www.railwaygazette.com/traction-and....

I added another dashboard on my site on Northern Ireland crime statistics. It has data on reported crimes by category for NI, the councils and down to DEA level, since 2011. salmonofdata.com/dashboards/n...

Not something I would have known from media coverage - bicycle theft prevalence in England and Wales for 2024/25 was the second lowest on record in a data series going back to the early 1980s.

I wonder why the OpenDataNI page is partly written in Galician

Something I found in the UK police data - there has been a collapse in the number of burglaries in NI over the last 15 years. There were 192 burglaries in September 2025; the lowest since records began and an 77% reduction from September 2011.

Added another dashboard on my site on PISA data for the UK and Ireland since 2009. NI was ahead of both England and ROI for maths in 2009 and has since fallen behind; driven by a decline in grammar schools from 2009-15, and then another decline in secondary schools. salmonofdata.com/dashboards/p...

I thought this was interesting from the PISA 2022 data. Having more highly educated parents is associated with better performance at school until Master's level. But scores are much lower amongst pupils with a parent that has a PhD.

I made a new dashboard on Northern Ireland election results since 1921. You can explore results by party or community designation and filter by different election types (Westminster, Assembly, etc.) salmonofdata.com/dashboards/n...

how_do_you_do_fellow_kids.gif

Added total spending per capita to the spending dashboard. Northern Ireland had the highest spending per capita in 2024-25, followed by Scotland and then London. The Southeast of England had the lowest. salmonofdata.com/dashboards/u...

I made another data dashboard for my site - this one shows UK government spending per head for the regions and countries of the UK by category. salmonofdata.com/dashboards/u...

There's this weird mindset that voters won't object to a breaking of tax promises is if it's done in a sufficiently convoluted way. Like they're fae creatures impressed you found a way around their contract terms or something.

I've restarted my website and intend to start publishing datasets I have lying around. First - the ONS item price data on average consumer prices across the UK. See how much more pints cost in NI compared with elsewhere. Features small caged mammal. salmonofdata.com/dashboards/u...

The latest UK regional spending data was published this week. Northern Ireland spent £16.1k per head in 2024-25, £3k more than England (£13.1k). Incapacity, disability and injury benefits were the single biggest difference (£941), followed by agriculture (£417).

San Marino scoring after 2 minutes in a game they're trying to lose on purpose

i do not know if this justifies the URGENT

Possibly concerning news for Sinn Féin? For nearly 3 decades, the SF share of the vote at Irish general elections has been correlated with the length of the title of Rob Zombie's most recent album. If the pattern continues, it could be ominous for SF at the next general election.

This could cause a deflationary spirali

It's striking how there was very little change in the demographic makeup of Northern Ireland for the first 50 years after partition, followed by rapid change in the 50 years from 1971. factcheckni.org/articles/dem...

By the end of the 2020s we could end up with: - Nigel Farage as Prime Minister - TUV as the largest unionist party - A nationalist plurality in Stormont

The shortest distance across the border from England to Scotland is over 130 miles

I wonder why spending on schools in Northern Ireland has fallen so far behind GB since 2020.

Print sales are, amazingly, still the main revenue base for most mainstream local newspapers and cross-subsidise the online journalism. As the remaining print readers die, and with online ad revenue flatlining, that journalistic cross-subsidy will fall. So that's an 18% decline year-on-year.

An obviously unsustainable situation. When the Millennials approach retirement age, there will be fewer than 2 working age people for every person over 65 across Europe, with the ratio in Italy close to 1:1. Without enough taxpayers to pay for pensions the system will collapse.

Incredibly, it has now been nearly two years since the last Northern Ireland-wide hospital waiting statistics were published because of the ludicrous time it has taken to roll out the new "encompass" patient record system.

Comparing the Copernicus imagery of Lough Neagh between 2023 and 2025 shows how the blue-green algae situation has been even worse this year.

Andy Burnham is not gonna become Labour's next leader, come off it, I mean how would that work, needs a winnable by-election in frankly, a handful of seats, to be able to quit as mayor, this is 'Ruth Davidson to save the Tories' all over again.

Until this year, Northern Ireland had cheaper electricity than the UK average, but prices are now marginally higher. Prices in the Republic are around 18% higher but NI still one of the most expensive electricity markets worldwide (prices 17% higher than France and 108% higher than the US).

Something I hadn't realised - Ireland has the most expensive electricity in the world (apart from 65k population Bermuda), with prices 59% higher than France and 2.4 times higher than average prices in the United States.

WWE Raw is coming to Belfast in 2026. It hasn’t had much notice outside wrestling circles, but it’s a major coup - the biggest international broadcast event from the city since the 2021 UEFA Super Cup.

By the 2050s Millennials will discover the state pensions system was a Ponzi: pay in for decades, collapse at payout. The electoral nihilism of the Boomers today will seem tame by comparison.

In the UK in 1950 there were 5 people aged 25-64 for every person over 65. When the Millennials start to reach retirement age in the 2050s there'll be fewer than 2, falling to 1.4 by the end of the century. That seems... unworkable?

Surprising that the increase in the foreign born population in the UK in the 2020s wasn't that large by European standards over the period; much smaller than in Ireland or Austria. And the immigrant population % in the United States has barely increased since 2015.

The US-EU deal will greeted with the utmost sensitivity in Ireland, not just because pharma is still not out of the woods, but because it creates a differential in trading rates between Northern Ireland (10% as part of UK deal) and Republic of Ireland (15% as part of EU)

Looking at the updated UN migration data for 2024: - Share of the UK population born abroad up 1.5 percentage points from 2020-24; lower than most other European states - Ireland’s foreign-born population share rose by 4.0 points in four years; one of the highest rises globally

On votes at 16 for the 2029 GE in NI. Will mean around an extra 51k potential voters (people aged 8 or 9 at the 2021 census): 49% Catholic 33% Protestant 18% Other The electorate in 2024 was 1.36m, so it will increase the number of potential voters by about 3.5%.

At a very rainy Mikheil Meskhi Stadium in Tbilisi last weekend for the Georgia v Ireland rugby match.

Sinn Féin at the 2029 Westminster election when Reform announce that they're running candidates

I imagine all these jobs will go with AI

Something I hadn't realised before today - there won't be any individual level records released for the 1926 Northern Ireland census as the records were lost and presumed destroyed in WW2. It means there's a 26 year gap in census information on individuals from 1911 to 1937.

Eventually the relaxed attitude of social media firms towards people organising pogroms on their platforms combined with Northern Ireland's tolerance of seasonal recreational rioting was going to cause issues.

The main driver behind changing attitudes on the constitutional question in Northern Ireland over the last decade has been the shift amongst Alliance Party supporters. 88% of those responding in 2012 thought that NI should stay in the UK; this has fallen to 52% in 2024.

The impact that Brexit has had on attitudes towards the constitutional question in Northern Ireland is huge. Ten years ago staying in the UK had a 64 percentage point lead over Irish unification in the NILT survey, the lead has now shrank to 16 points, the lowest ever.