Janus was the god of beginnings and transitions in Roman mythology.
He was depicted as having two faces: one looking back to the past and one facing into the future. He gave his name to the first month of the year, January.
The period between Christmas and New Year is apparently referred to as Twixmas, a time when it is easy to lose track of the days of the week and even the hour of a given day.
The usual routines and daily stresses of life are suspended, with downtime elevated to the norm for a precious few days, encouraging a Janus-like reflection on what has come to pass in 2024 and what lies ahead in the year to come.
Looking back on 2024, a number of political developments were dominant.
At a local level, the most significant was the inauguration of a nationalist first minister, Michelle O’Neill, to the newly-resurrected Stormont institutions.
The history books will record this event as a further advance towards Irish unity, reflecting the dramatic and irreversible electoral and political changes that have defined northern politics for the past decade.
The political demise of the one-time leader of unionism, Jeffrey Donaldson, and the shocking nature of the charges against him, will also feature heavily, with the Westminster election illustrating the hopelessly fractured state of a unionism struggling to accept its minority fate both within a rapidly-changing northern state and island as a whole.
The re-election of a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-led coalition government may not have come as a surprise, but the relative collapse in support for Sinn Féin (who stood at 29% in the polls exactly a year ago) betrayed in particular the depth of feeling over an immigration crisis that was a new experience for an Ireland which had always experienced the phenomenon from the other end.
The new year will bring confirmation of the full composition of the coalition government and whether the Sinn Féin opposition continues to be led by Mary Lou McDonald or a party successor in the event of her calling time on political leadership.
Either way, the party will have to decisively deal with what Brian Feeney correctly identified in this paper last week as the twin challenges of professional managerial reorganisation in the north and reorienting key policies in the south to position itself to successfully make the next big breakthrough.
Labour’s return to government in Westminster was well predicted a year ago, as the Tories continued to stumble from crisis to crisis under Rishi Sunak.
Alas, Keir Starmer has not enjoyed a Blair-like Cool Britainnia political honeymoon.
Intriguingly, the polls are confirming Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is challenging both of the established parties, and the local elections will be watched closely in 2025 to see if his ever-populist message sends Labour and the Tories into alarm mode, allowing Farage to continue defining the UK political agenda in a post-Brexit era.
The return of Donald Trump in 2024 surprised many, though the regular anecdotal observations provided by my sister in Arizona regarding the voting intentions of Hispanic colleagues in her health sector job, the Vietnamese women running the nail salon she frequented, and many others who had previously backed Biden, meant it seemed much more probable by election time than had appeared likely a year ago.
The Democratic Party’s arrogance in persisting with a Joe Biden candidacy well beyond the point at which his mental state was transparently a legitimate concern betrayed a mindset contemptuous of public sentiment.
In Kamala Harris the Democrats had a poor candidate who proved incapable of inspiring voters or reminding them sufficiently of Trump’s many personal and political shortcomings.
A second Trump term could be very significant for Ireland if he actively and successfully maneouvres large US corporations into relocating their headquarters from Ireland to the US.
The impact of a Trump presidency on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East will be of global interest in the immediate future, though history tells us America’s policy of sponsoring Israel’s persistently violent and illegal conduct will continue regardless of who resides in the White House.
The person of the year has to be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, for her bravery in consistently exposing Israel’s human rights violations in great detail, leading her to conclude that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe acts of genocide are being committed by Israel in Gaza.
Amidst the continuing slaughter of innocents, the moral clarity defining her words and interventions have stood in stark contrast to the actions and utterances of so many global leaders whose cheerleading of the Israeli campaign and/or deafening silence was a product of cowardice, prejudice or cynical political calculations.