A Man for Ulster's New Politics

Mark Durkan is smart and funny in private and at 41, the youngest leader of a major political party in Western Europe. He's the joint chief of Northern Ireland's government and helped craft much of the subtle, resilient language in the 1998 Good Friday agreement which has kept that government afloat through many storms. So why, when a group of veteran Belfast politicians held forth at the World Economic Forum in New York last week, didn't he leave the graybeards in the dust? He was perfectly competent, sometimes eloquent. But he didn't light up the room — which is not good...