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
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Far from more familiar ranting and raging Mick’s evocative post captures spot on how Catholic sentiment built up from the start of the Troubles, grew in intensity during the long killing seasons and has finally been enshrined in myth. Myths are more than made up stories. They are versions of reality recalled and under pressure, re-enacted No question who were the underdogs. Nightmares persist. Quite different Protestant sentiment grew up in parallel expressed in the current upheaval but has reached a similar point of myth. It is not the triumphalism of old some think it is , but a desperate need by a few to assert an identity by playing a zero sum game treating every Catholic advance as a challenge they have to resist or die. In our hearts most of we have learned the hard way how to navigate between the two.
For all the obvious similarites we are in a different era from the horrors of Garvaghy Road in the 1990s. Mick puts it kindlier and better than Fintan O’Toole’s rhetoric from distant Dublin, pouring scorn of what he sees as the competitive victimhood of MOPE ( “most oppressed people ever”) He can afford his contempt. We must try to be kinder to ourselves than that.
Sure wasn’t it a terrible accident committed by the powers that be we can get over quicker than violence? That at least would be a simpler myth . From Mick’s elegy I extract the limitations of a rights culture, after equal rights have been established. Which they have been. Parity of “esteem” is all very well but “esteem” is a sentiment you can’t make people feel unlike the “parity” bit which is enforceable. Thus the tension within the same little phrase. The result, in Prof Onora O’ Neill’s formulation, is the more rules, the less trust and confidence.
But you have to work at it forever. Once established it can slip. Evoking the law without widespread consent won’t put things right again.
I resist the conclusion that politicians elected and unelected have a vested interest in division. But as a people we have have progressed further than they seem to think and certainly behave. From faraway London I’m fairly confident that a silent majority exists in favour of closing a book on Drumcree that should never have been re-opened , as Malachi O’ Doherty with far deeper knowledge than I has just written.
Without labouring on the details, the DUP and SF can write off Drumcree if they wish as an unsought accident of process that trapped them. Nobody wants a fight including Portadown Orange.
As for The Law, the Court of Appeal could change it this week. What a movable feast it has been.Those who appear to have.violated the ruling to allow 35 to walk may find mitigation in the Appeal Court’s decision to confirm it only five hours before takeoff. It has created weak grounds for punitive enforcement.
Whatever the Court’s latest ruling this week, how does this translate into the Assembly? Hot on rhetoric, cautious on action? Five months of election campaigning over a Border poll to drive us all crazy?
The.Secretary of State is threatening to impose a budget. SF already oppose his intentions as a breach of the GFA. This would be hugely big deal were it not overshadowed by Garvaghy Road. Might it not present the ideal excuse for the parties to unite on this issue? Idealistic I know. But do they reeely reely want to abandon the Assembly , especially as the NDNA rules award a clear strategic advantage to the party that remains, having nudged the other to jump first ?