The Shinners, the queen, a message and an invitation

Have Sinn Féin backed off in their opposition to the royal visit? Commentators like Sam Smyth say they have. Smyth figures the Shinners have sniffed the wind of public opinion and are trimming their sails accordingly. There may be something in what he says. I was down in Kildare on Saturday and Sunday, running in the Kildare Half-Marathon ( yes, 1 hour 49 mins, thank you, and you can still sponsor me any time over the next month at http://www.mycharity.ie/event/judes-half-marathon/ , but MUCH better to do it now) …Where was I ? Right. I chatted to several people at the Kildare Half-Marathon and they said they thought the visit was fine, no problem. In fact, a number of them used the same statement, word for word: “It’s time to move on”. Gerry Adams is a politician who know how to make the best of a bad job and he claims that, while still opposed to the royalfest,  what the queen has to say during her visit will be crucial.

He’s wrong. Except the queen were to say something sensational, which she won’t, the core message of her visit is an unspoken one. Every hour of her visit tells anyone who’s listening “Partition is fine”. Spoken words have really no chance against that.

In the south, with the exception of Sinn Féin, all the political parties are indulging in massive doublethink. The people who now speak of friendly and equal relations with our neighbour – people like Enda Kenny and Micheal Martin – are the same people who, in a few short years, will be busting a gut to honour the men who gave their lives for Irish independence. Takes some doing, eh? One part of your brain says “Partition is fine’ and another part yells “We honour the men who died for Irish independence”.

The last time a British monarch visited the south of Ireland was exactly one hundred years ago. That visit too was received with public cheers and flag-waving. Five years later a group of men intent on wakening the Irish people from their sleep-walk seized the GPO and the rest, as they say, is history.  Maybe, along with its unspoken message, this visit is sending an invisible invitation to dissident republicanism: “Do something drastic”.

Fourteen: is there a worse age for deciding anything?

It’s funny how quickly people forget. Gerry Kelly, Arlene Foster, Danny Kennedy, David Ford and Alastair McDonnell were on BBC’s Hearts and Minds yesterday and all of their minds have been scrubbed clean of teenage memories. Noel Thompson asked them about the Eleven Plus and transfer to secondary school. All looked very wise and said putting a child through exams at eleven was far too demanding and fourteen was a much better age.

EH? How can you have forgotten being fourteen, Gerry, Arlene, Danny, David and Alastair? Or were you ever fourteen? Fourteen is the worst of ages – ask any teacher. It’s when puberty has seriously kicked in, the hormones are bouncing and ricocheting around the young mind, heart and other parts. One minute they’re screaming with laughter, the next minute they’re just screaming. They sulk, they cry, they push boundaries, they break rules, they worry about sex, death, world hunger and if that girl/guy two seats back fancies them. In other words, they are at the peak of their irrationality. You don’t believe me? Ask any teacher which would they rather face, a class of 12-year-olds or a class of 14-year-olds.

And it’s at 14, the centre of the whirlpool, the core of the twister, that Gerry, Arlene, Danny, David and Alastair think young people will be able to make decisions about the direction of their lives.

Dear God. Let’s pray the new Education Minister remembers what fourteen feels like.

Neil Lennon: he's not hated just because he's a Catholic

Neil Lennon, Glasgow Celtic manager

Note: this post was put up two days ago and deleted at some point over the past twenty-four hours. Who by? Pass.

 Neil Lennon says he’s been targeted by the hate-mongers in Scotland and in the North here because he’s a Catholic. He’s wrong. Well no, that’s a bit harsh. He’s half-wrong. Or half-right, if you like. It’s true that Glasgow Rangers for years operated a policy of No Catholics Need Apply, just as Linfield did. But over the past decade and more, both those teams have employed Catholics, on  and off the field.  Being a Catholic on its own is not enough to get the bile boiling. Hatred in Scotland and here in the north of Ireland is, like football itself, a unit of two halves. In the Glasgow Celtic manager’s case, the second half that releases the rage against him is that he’s Irish. 

Not Northern irish, which is how the British papers, even broadsheets like The Guardian describe him. Being Irish and Catholic = Irish nationalist  = for some people unacceptable, to the point where they’d like to kill you, especially if, like Lennon, you’re high-profile. You don’t have to say you believe in Irish reunification by violent means, you don’t have to say you hate all unionists.  You just need to believe  that Irish reunification makes sense.  More accurately, you just need some canary-brain to believe that you believe in Irish reunification. Lennon, to the best of my knowledge, has never spoken a public word on Irish politics but sure luk, isn’t he a fuggin’ taig from Lurgan,   and you know what they’re like, IRA every wan.

The excuse that’s sometimes put forward for activities like those of the shaved chimp who made Wednesday night’s attack is that Lennon is a ‘combative figure’.  Right. A combative figure who played soccer for Northern Ireland, a team followed by bigots who chanted their contempt of him every time he appeared on the field. A combative figure ready to captain Northern Ireland until death-threats drove him out, whereupon some ‘respectable’ unionists expressed disappointment that he should let a mere death-threat push him away.

One last thing on this and then I’ll shut up on this, because I’ve a feeling I might start screaming:  the one-side/ other-side talk is an insult to the listener’s intelligence.  You like to say it’s on both sides really, you like to compare Celtic and Rangers in terms of bigotry?  Walk off the nearest high building, would you?  That or check which team for decades didn’t just shut the door but nailed it closed against Catholics. Check which team manager has had bombs, bullets, physical attack on at least two occasions launched against him.  Then come back and try your stupid-arse one-side/other-side argument and be prepared to be laughed to scorn on every side.

The Lennon case shows there’s a cancer in Scottish and Northern Irish football, it’s there’s because   there’s a wider cancer in Scottish and Northern Irish society. It’s called hatred of Irish nationalism. 

Can we amuse you, Ma'am?

Elizabeth II

Somewhere in his writing,  that great Irishman George Bernard Shaw says that the Irishman, faced with a group of expectant English people, tends to play the fool.  I thought of Shaw this morning when I heard that Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, when she visits the twenty-six counties next week, will be entertained by Riverdance and Westlife.

With the help of two big gins I can usually get myself to tap one foot in half-hearted time to these groups, but that’s it.  Maybe it’s because I don’t like the way Westlife, an Irish group, sing in an American accent. Maybe it’s the way Riverdance have turned Irish dancing into a  thigh-pumping line of Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. But hey. Westlife and Riverdance have made mountains of money over the years and you don’t do that by refusing to amuse a visiting monarch. 

Or president. There was an occasion back in the 1980s, when President Ronnie Regan visited Ireland and my old music classmate Phil Coulter was scheduled to play for him. Alas,  when Phil arrived at the Munster castle where Ronnie was staying, the bodyguards who had never heard of him turned him away. No music today, thanks. A cruel friend commented that Phil had sold his soul for a mess of pottage and then didn't even get his pottage. 

It’s the old dilemma, isn’t it?  Do you try to live your life by standards of self-respect or, confronted by power/the English/the Americans, do you grab the chance to make money/further your career? The south’s bankers and developers made their choice;  next week Riverdance and Westlife will make theirs.

Unionism today: in the driving seat or careening downhill?

Tom Elliott, UUP Leader

We had our last book-club meeting of the season last night  (Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, and very good it was too) and after we got to discussing politics. All those present, I’d feel safe in saying, were nationalists, but not everybody in the room saw things, post-election, the same.  At least one person was convinced that unionism was in a confident, up-swing mood  - if you were a DUP unionist, that is, unlike the endangered species, the lesser-spotted UUP. The  physical force threat to the state of Northern Ireland which flourished for some thirty years has quit the field.  The forces of law and order now have the backing not just of unionists but nationalists and republicans as well. And nationalists/republicans have pledged to accept the status quo here until such time as a majority – maybe even a majority of unionists – decide they want to change it. Which will be when hell freezes over.

As I say, that was one view. The other was that unionism here is  in  a state of bewilderment and it’s getting worse.  On the inside, it’s being hollowed out. The state that was deep Orange in colour has gone an upsetting tinge of neutral. In  gerrymander, in housing, in jobs, in government, the old certainties have been wiped near-clean. On the outside, there’s a deep suspicion that the Tories are going to start cutting the annual subvention to a point where the benefits of links with Westminster will be harder to spot than a copy of  Á la recherche du temps perdu  with Tom Elliott's name on it. And when you go to Westminster as an MP, it feels awful  the way everyone clears the House of Commons chamber the minute a debate on your beloved wee region is mentioned. It gets so you  begin to ask yourself: inside and out,  bone-marrow to skin, what is the point? Until one day you realise there is  an alternative and you sit down with the Shinners and others to plan a new Ireland.

Two views of the present and future.  Take, as Hughie Green used to say, your pick. 

The election - what will people think of us?

Pat Sheehan MLA

“What will people think of us?” the BBC presenter asked, and when he said it he reminded me of my Auntie Maggie. “What will people think of you?” she would say “with your elbows on the table and you chewing with your mouth open?” The BBC man – I think it was Seamus McKee – was talking not about elbows or mouths but the delay in getting the Assembly results announced. Over on UTV Brian Feeney and Deirdre Heenan were making similar tut-tutting sounds. Apparently we’d made ourselves a laughing stock in England and Wales and Scotland – or “nationally” as Deirdre put it.

When Auntie Maggie went on at me, I used to  murmur to myself what they now say ask in online discussions – wtf?  I cared what I thought, not  what they thought. And on Saturday I thought it again – wtf?  So we had to wait an extra twenty-four or forty-eight hours  - it really isn’t up there with world hunger or HIV as a problem.  And if we believe it is a problem let’s fix it for us, not the “nation” across the water.

Fussing about the delay was a distraction, just as  the prediction efforts of the TV pundits was a distraction. Pure guesswork and most of it off the mark. I was in the King’s Hall early Saturday afternoon and I asked Sinn Féin’s Pat Sheehan  about the prediction in some quarters that his seat – Gerry Adams’s old seat – was at risk. Sheehan smiled and reminded me that a unionist candidate in South Belfast that very morning had predicted she’d take the fifth seat and was now busy wiping egg off her face. “I usually wait until the results are in and then give my predictions” Sheehan said.  Quite.

So who won?  Well the DUP made the biggest seat-gain,  and its leader firmly fenced off the unionist middle ground by dedicating the party win to the late Ronan Kerr. Even more significantly, the softening of the DUP line was exemplified by Nigel Dodds referring on TV to Gerry Kelly as ‘Gerry’, although Dodds’s body language suggested he’d rather be sitting beside a dry toilet that hadn’t been emptied for the past month.  But middle ground is now the DUP ground of choice. Jim Allister is the wrecker, they are the builders.  Better still,  they’re building on their terms, with Sinn Féin having been forced to accept the police, forced to accept the state and with a bit of luck forced to polish the queen’s shoes when she visits the south later this month. Sinn Féin, for their part,  presents the election outcome as consolidation,  although as always they’re looking ahead to next time. In an interview on Saturday morning Gerry Adams said the party had already had a meeting about the next Assembly election. You can be sure Foyle, Mid-Ulster and North Belfast were on the agenda for that one. Maybe even some table-banging.  It’s easy to be dismissive of jam tomorrow, but this jam the Shinners can see and smell already.

Whether earned or not, the last Executive got the tag of being if not impotent then a bit less than priapic. An SDLP politician I spoke to on Saturday figured that the last lot of Stormont ministers were keen on getting power but useless at using it – with the exception, naturally, of the SDLP minister. Papa Paisley (God, he seems a long time ago) was fond of quoting that bit from the Bible “By their fruits shall ye know them”.  I suppose we may all offer a decade of the rosary that the next set of ministers is as good as the SDLP thought their man was, in the last one.  

[This article also appears in The Belfast Media Group newspapers this week]

Open the box! (Old catch-phrase, new Assembly)

Maybe it was the lack of gouge and head-butt during the campaign or the failure of the media to treat the election with half-decent attention. (RTÉ on its nine o’clock news bulletin the day before the election had an item on AV in Britain, nothing on the North.)  Either way, there’s a noticeable quickening of interest, now that the votes are in. Lots of breath-holding and teeth-gritting. This is the point where most  pundits back off and make vague sounds. However, as my critics will be happy to remind you, I'm good at making predictions, not too hot at getting them right. With that health warning,   here goes. 

The DUP will do less well than they’d like. They might even shed a seat or two. Overall, though, they’ll emerge as the biggest party. Considering Peter Robinson's year, that'll be some achievement.

Sinn Féin will do better  - they could pick up, on a good day, three or four seats. They’ll be well short of top party but if they hit or pass 30 seats the DUP will begin to twitch. 

The SDLP will do OK -  might even pick up a seat or two. People like Conal McDevitt are user-friendly enough to counteract the lead-weight that is Maggie Ritchie.

For the UUP it's crunch time. They were in bad shape before Tom Elliott,  they look even flakier now. Melt-down is a real possibility.

Alliance will do OK but not  as well as they’d like to, given David Ford is Justice minister role and Naomi Long is in Westminster. 

The Greens? Forget it.  The positive tide the Shinners will get from their southern success will turn into a dirty, choking backwash for the Greens.

 I’ll be watching in particular Oliver McMullan  in East Antrim,  Sinn Féin generally in North Belfast,  whether  Fred Cobain gets choked to electoral death in said constituency,  my native West Tyrone where Barry McElduff could give lessons to a bag of weasels (that's a compliment, Barry - some of my best friends are weasels). Oh  and South Belfast, to see if Sinn Féin can  do some real building work in a middle-class constituency.

The council elections? No results until next week and a totally different can of, um, councillors. Sinn Féin will do very well and Balmoral will send Mairtin O Muilleoir back to the Dome of Delight.

Not all politics is boring.