THE tired old metaphor of the elephant in the room/on the doorstep/in the BBC studio has been resurrected by Dennis Kennedy and Brian Feeney. Kennedy argues that the Government’s elephant – an massive issue right in front of your eyes that you still ignore – is ongoing paramilitary activity, while trying to seek a way forward on Truth & Reconciliation. Feeney’s elephant is the Sinn Fein vote in the Republic, which may have an impact on business here in future.
Feeney wrote: “It may be that the DUP want to wait to consolidate their position in 2005’s British election, to see off Trimble, whom they clearly despise, perhaps also to see if they can take advantage of a weakened Tony Blair, to see if they can exercise some leverage on a Labour government with a reduced majority.
“Perhaps. That still means 2006 is the last chance the DUP have to make a deal advantageous to unionism. Guys like Robinson and Dodds are well aware of the basic ingredient in the history of unionism’s decline over the last 40 years. They know that every time unionists walked away from the table, there was less on it for them the next time they returned.”
Kennedy wrote: “There is no consensus on the background – nationalists continue to assert that partition was wrong and that they were the victims of oppression while unionists point to their democratic majority on the constitutional issue and, while admitting abuses, deny widespread systematic oppression of the minority.
“These are the realities which Mr Murphy seems eager to ignore, and which constitute the obstruction on his doorstep. Instead he tells us, in his latest Irish Times article, that ‘we must focus on a shared vision of the future as our goal’.
“To achieve such a focus we would have to manage not to see a very large elephant indeed.”
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