Irisgate roundup

My selection of recent MSM comment pieces about Irisgate divides up roughly into Ulster as Gomorrah (better not say Sodom) and Ulster still as Christ’s Little Kingdom. Brits, wouldn’t you know it, and Brit women squeeze a feminist line out of it. The natives are more shocked and sober. The palm goes to the Times’s Melanie Reid, who performs the columnist’s standby of stretching every line of comment to breaking point.

Everyone has missed the point about Iris Robinson. Why, instead of regarding her as a sinner, we should be celebrating Iris for her modernity, her spirit, her black lacy underwear and her sheer chutzpah in breaking centuries of convention

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Iris far from alone it seems

Research found that 40 per cent of mature women would like to experiment with a toyboy, like Iris Robinson, wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister Peter Robinson

A Boston Mass blog notices that thanks to Iris, the theme song of the favourite movie of my youth is heading back up the charts.

Malachi who has never thought God was in his pocket, reflects on His role in the spate of text messages that so took Peter by surprise.

ex-BBC old mate Denis Murray enacted this piece on the BBC’s This Week before a bemused Andrew Neil and Diane Abbot. Fellow panellist Michael Portillo has his own bit of Belfast history we’ll glide over. I wonder if Denis isn’t overdoing the shock angle? Surely we know that just beneath surface, sexuality beats as strongly as a Lambeg drum?

Strewth. I wonder if people outside the province grasp just how cataclysmic all this has been

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Also registering the shock of the faithful is Clifford Smyth. who has his own axe to grind against the DUP.

The DUP will either get rid of Peter Robinson or the voters will get rid of the DUP.”

Reformed Derry Prod ( but only from Drumahoe) Susan McKay does a pastiche of remembered rants.

There is abomination at the house of Robinson, and it is fortunate for Ulster’s first couple that most of us are less inclined to reach for the Old Testament than they are.

And finally an all too plausible last word from Marxism

Aside from being a farce in itself this development only further demonstrates the massive gulf that exists between the leaders of the Unionist parties and the protestant workers that vote for them

Brian Walker

Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London