“Nationalism’s sectarian success is not surprising, but its triumphalism is a shock…”

Did you notice when Sammy Wilson called Robin Swann a poodle? The outrage was such that Arlene Foster had to distance herself from him. Then there was the meltdown when a Dublin cartoonist dared to depict Mary Lou McDonald as a witch.

The latter was a rather clever rendering of Sinn Fein’s persistent strategy of deploying the Trumpian technique of bombarding the public with ever shifting provocations in order to achieve what psychologists call cognitive overload.

But did you hear about the time Michelle O’Neill described unionists as a dog? Yes, just a dog chasing its tail, but then her previous party leader also described unionists has bastards who have to be broken with the use of equality legislation.

As discourse it is pretty tendentious. No one was seriously calling Mary Lou a witch, just as Michelle was not calling Arlene a dog. These are metaphorical figures of speech. Even my youngest (at 12) gets the difference. We’re really not that daft.

Just as Trump reduced US democracy to a jibbering literalist wreck, Sinn Fein seems intent on doing the same to Irish democracy by hollowing out our political language in order to undermine its political opponents’ very right to exist.

Orwell railed against two things he thought led folks inexorably towards bad politics (in his era, personified in the twin evils of Stalin and Hitler), staleness of imagery and lack of precision in language (think, dog, witch, crocodile).

More recently, in Chapter 9 of his dissection of the mangled reality of Trump’s populism On Tyranny, Professor Tim Snyder appeals to those of us who still care a damn about the quality of democratic discourse and requests we ‘be kind to our language’.

Relevant to the debasement of language (and political criticism) he also notes that:

More than half a century ago the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies and the associated difficulties of though.

Crucially in Orwell’s 1984, he observes that “the language of visual media is highly constrained to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past and consider the future”.

The idea of a border poll with its stupifying majoritarian logic brings us to Patrick Murphy’s Irish News column which notes how under SF’s leadership Irish nationalism is transforming itself into a new (if largely delusional) ascendancy.

Is nationalism the new unionism? An odd question, you say, but it is difficult to avoid the observation that in the fifty years from Terence O’Neill to Michelle O’Neill, sectarian domination did not go away, it just changed sides.

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…Stormont’s former one party system is not directly comparable to current power-sharing. But today’s Stormont is built on that same institutionalised sectarianism, which Sinn Féin has exploited much better than the DUP.

The RUC was the armed wing of unionism, so we chanted “SS-RUC” during the civil rights marches. The police worked secretly with the Orange Order to allow parades showing unionism’s sectarian strength. Under today’s Stormont, the PSNI worked secretly with SF to allow it to hold a funeral procession in a possible breach of the law.

You can rightly argue that one funeral is not comparable to hundreds of parades. But the difference is in scale, not principle. Following the arrest of Gerry Adams, the late Bobby Storey said: “How dare they arrest our leader.”

That view lived after him, because 2,000 SF members at his funeral were apparently also above the law, while two former members from Tyrone were not.

The whole column is worth reading, right to the end:

Nationalism’s sectarian success is not surprising, but its triumphalism is a shock. Some nationalists have even suggested that Arlene Foster, whose people have been here for 400 years, should leave the country. Is Cromwell’s “To hell or Connacht” to become “To hell or England?”

Loyalist violence (which this column predicted) is wrong. But was Leo Varadkar right to brief EU leaders on the possibility of violence at an economic land border, while ignoring the possibility of violence over an Irish Sea border (the violence he now condemns)?

Responsibility for our present mess goes beyond unionism. It can also be traced to the post-Brexit demonisation of unionists by Dublin and Brussels and their betrayal by London over the Irish Sea border. Locally, both sides saw Brexit as an opportunity for victory, not a responsibility for compromise.

The shift in sectarian power is just different, not better. Sectarianism avoids addressing our huge social and economic inequalities and our failing public services. But who among our political parties has the humanity to see that, the selflessness to say it and the heart to do it?

Instead, they have just brought us back to where it all started.

This morning Éilis O’Hanlon starts her column ominously…

Is this what it felt like back then, watching the Troubles begin? It seems absurd to suggest such a thing could happen again, more than two decades after the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to have buried the past where it belonged. However, if the loyalist protests that broke out in the past week have proven anything, it’s not just that the past can repeat itself, but the mistakes made back then in response to the original grievances and provocations will be repeated with uncanny familiarity.

The only difference is the roles played by the principal actors are being reversed. Now it’s unionists, who said of the IRA for decades that there could be no kowtowing to or making excuses for violence, who are calling for understanding of the reasons behind the disorder. Republicans, meanwhile, are sounding hawkish on security, insisting the forces of law and order must be obeyed. The irony cannot be lost on either side.

it is remarkable how unreceptive to calls for empathy for the protesters young nationalists (with little direct experience of the actual Troubles) are. SF’s politics of inevitability has taught them they need not compromise.

In Chapter 19 Synder implores citizen’s in Trump’s America to “be a patriot” and in 20 to ‘be as courageous as you can” and in the Epilogue he quotes Hamlet, “The time is out of joint/O cursed spite/That I was ever born to set it right”.

Yet we are in thrall to the spectacle of burning buses, the sense of losing control, regaining it through Brexit, and then losing it again through the protocol. Tá daoine fásta de dhíth orainn, go deimhin caithfimid a bheith inár ndaoine fásta fein.

Whether it’s unionism or nationalism doing it, disruption does not represent control any more than it represents a destiny.

…the whole notion of disruption is adolescent. It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess the adults will come and clean it up.  But there are no adults.  We own this mess.

-Tim Synder on “the politics of inevitability”

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