Psst, Mike. Wanna bet?

Mike Nesbitt is a nice man. Or he was a nice man when he used to work for the BBC. At that time I found him pleasant, friendly and intelligent. Have I changed my mind since those far-off days? Mmm, not sure. But he’s certainly doing all he can to get me thinking differently.

Since becoming UUP  leader he’s managed to lose Ken Magennis, David McNarry, John McCallister and Basil McCrea from the party. These losses came for many reasons but principally because of thinking which sent Mike into a huddle with Peter Robinson, after which they selected an ‘agreed‘ unionist candidate for the coming election in Mid-Ulster. Were these losses worth the possible gain in selection agreed-man Nigel Lutton?  Mike thinks so because...

Well, the because of it is a bit hard to spot.  Nigel Lutton is not going to beat Francie Molloy of Sinn Féin to the seat in Mid-Ulster. Willie McCrea in his, um, not-totally-gracious speech after being defeated by Martin McGuinness for the seat in 1997, warned the electorate of Mid-Ulster that if they lay down with dogs, they would rise up with fleas. For sixteen years now the voters of Mid-Ulster appear happy to carry on scratching,  including scratching their voting mark against name of Martin McGuinness. 

But Mike Nesbitt is now hopeful all this may change. 

“Nigel Lutton has worked for many Catholic victims. He’s worked for WAVE, which is absolutely across all sections of our community, he has worked for victims in Mid-Ulster, both Protestant and Catholic, and I see no reason why you would assume that Catholics or indeed that some nationalists would not vote for Nigel Lutton, particularly nationalists who would prefer that their Member of Parliament sat on the green benches once in a while”. 

Basil McCrea begs to differ. In fact, he believes the selection of an ‘agreed’ unionist candidate will work against unionism. “From the experience of Fermanagh/South Tyrone we have seen that unionist unity candidates tend to energise the electoral opponents more than their own supporters”.

I think Basil (another nice man) has got it right on this one. Those of you who know me will know that I am not normally a betting man. But I am prepared to bet Mike Nesbitt  £50 at odds of 5-1 that Nigel Lutton, despite all those Catholic and nationalist votes he sees swinging behind unionism, will be defeated on 7 March. Over to you, Mike.

Polls apart

In the run-up to the 1997 Westminster election, the Labour Party used play over and over the pop tune Things Can Only Get Better by D-Ream. It was a bouncy, driving number and it caught something of the rising hopes of the Labour Party at the time. Is it possible that the Fianna Fail party have been sitting  in smoke-filled rooms for the last couple of years,  listening to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass? If they have, it’s worked. According to the last opinion poll, Fianna Fail were at 26% - the most popular political party in the twenty-six counties. 

You heard me -  Fianna Fail are top of the heap. Ahead of everyone, including Fine Gael (25%) and Sinn Féin (18%), with the Labour Party vanishing at speed  with 10%.  That’s Fianna Fail, the party that lost 51 seats in the general election in 2011, the party that arranged for the twenty-six counties to  morph from Celtic Tiger to €85 billion-in-debt arthritic mouse. The party whose very name, two short years ago, was enough to bring the southern electorate out in hives. How did they do it, you may be wondering. How did they climb out of the pit that just two years ago looked as though it might be their grave?

Well, there are a number of reasons. One is their leader. Brian Cowen was generally acknowledged to be a smart man but he looked...rough. Biffo, they called him, and Fianna Fail couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. So they installed instead Micheál Martin.  Micheál is the opposite of Biffo. He’s a soft-boiled-egg man.  Close your eyes and you could be listening to Jack Lynch. Or even, accents aside,  Enda Kenny. Both  guys are difficult to hate. It can be done but you have to work at it.  A bare 1% separates their parties  and you could say  the same thing about their leaders. Peas from the same pod. 

While the two parties grew from opposing sides in the Civil War, that was a long time ago. Now, it’s the similarities between them that impress. Remember how Fianna Fail warned that, due to the mess they’d made of things, hair-shirts were going to be the order of the day? And  Fine Gael  threw its collective hands up in horror, before winning the election and implementing those very same policies. A final binding element for both men and their parties? They are united in detestation of Sinn Féin. 

That’s because Sinn Féin  could do the one thing successive governments in the south have been desperately trying to avoid:  bring the north down south. Not literally but by being an all-Ireland party,  by walking in muddy boots all over the traditional  carpet of southern politics, by raising the north as an issue in the Dail.  Sinn Féin have done terrible things to the blood pressure of Enda and Micheál and even little Eamon. 

So. Is that it? Will Fianna Fáil arise from their political dead and win power next time out with an electorate sickened by the gap between Fine Gael rhetoric pre- the 2011 election and Fine Gael action post- the 2011 election? Who can say? Sometimes it seems that much of the electorate in the south is suffering from political Alzheimer’s, given its readiness to forget the truly mortal sins of the Soldiers of Destiny. Maybe, when the next general election rolls around, Fianna Fail will return to power as though nothing had changed. If Peter Robinson could survive Irisgate and those 40,000 leaflets, why not  Fianna Fail, despite their taking a wrecking ball to the south’s economy? 

But Sinn Féin can take one consolation from that 18%. There was a time when wise heads in the north explained that the Shinners had peaked in Northern politics when they hit 19%. There were people who predicted - even bet money - that Sinn Féin would lose their remaining four seats in the 2007 election to the Dail. 

The one thing we can be sure of is that we’ll be surprised. Otherwise we’d scrap elections and save money by using opinion polls instead. Scottish independence would be dead as a dodo, the Irish border would be permanently in place, and we could all stay at home and watch the Brit Awards. But we don’t and we won’t, because,  as  Chuck Berry sang so long ago,  “You Never Can Tell”.

More questions than answers

I have a question: why is Sean Kelly hated so much by unionists? “He murdered nine innocent people,you idiot!” might seem a reasonable reply. Except that my dictionary describes murder as “the unlawful premeditated murder of one person by another”. What Kelly did was unlawful - he helped carry a bomb into a crowded area of people - but the premeditated bit is slightly less clear. He was bent on killing people, but the people he killed weren’t those he had premeditated on killing. The reason behind the bomb was that it would catch a UDA meeting that was said to be happening above the fish shop in the Shankill. Those were the people that Kelly and his companion Thomas Begley were intent on killing, not the people in the fish shop. Then the bomb went off prematurely. The evidence for this is that they very nearly were both killed themselves in the blast. If that is the case - and it seems to me impossible to construct it any other way - then Kelly was not guilty of the premeditated killing of the ten people  - including his companion - who died. He was guilty of the premeditated intention to kill the UDA people but failed. Only if you ignore that fact does the unique hatred he generates make sense. 

Here’s another (unrelated) question: why does Peter Robinson say the arrest of Kelly puts the whole peace process in jeopardy? Oh, that’s easy. It might mean that the young man shot was the victim of an IRA unit - a non-dissident IRA unit. A they-haven’t-gone-away-you-know unit. Which would be terrible, because the IRA is supposed to have decommissioned and disbanded years ago. Mmm. Assuming that the First Minister got that one right - a big assumption -  why was he not on his feet saying the peace process was in jeopardy when the flag protestors, who by general consent were being supported in their actions by the UVF, were going about their merry work? Not a peep out of him. Or at least not a peep about that. Lots of peeps about the Alliance Party, and after them about Sinn Féin and the SDLP being deliberately provocative. But the UVF? Ach sure they’re OK. They’re on the side of the forces of law and order. Even if they did toss a petrol bomb into a car in which sat a police officer. 

And a last one. Why are the DUP and the UUP fielding a joint candidate in Mid-Ulster? It clearly can’t be about winning the seat, since last time out  Sinn Féin won by a country mile over the combined unionist vote. That was back in the days when Martin McGuinness was the hate figure of unionist politicians. In fact, I can still see and hear Willie McCrea make his gracious acknowledgement of defeat, when Martin McGuinness first won,  by telling the Mid-Ulster electorate that if they “lay down with dogs they would get up with fleas”. In which case there must have been a lot of scratching going on in Mid-Ulster over the years.  But back to the question: why are the DUP and the UUP field a joint candidate? Who just happens to have some fairly noticeable links with the DUP? Because Mike Nesbitt clearly has a political death-wish. Not content with a party that’s in tatters anyway, he now is busy shooing that party towards the gaping mouth of Peter Robinson,who will swallow them whole before congratulating the unionist community on their wisdom in singling out his party, the DUP, as the only true voice of unionism. 

Will Buckingham Palace go green?

“I’m sitting by the telephone/Waitin’ for a call from you” - aren’t those two lines from some old song - Fats Waller, maybe? Anyway they’re true of me this morning - I’m sitting here waiting for a call from the Nolan Show. (Which, like Fats Waller’s call, may never come. Life’s like that.)

If I am called, the topic for discussion is this request by Tourism Ireland that Buckingham Palace go green for St Patrick’s Day. I gather they’re not actually talking about Buck House being given a paint-over: the play of several green lights on the building should do the job. 

What will I say? Well, if I get the chance I’ll point out that the whole aim behind this request is to boost tourism figures. Under that heading, it’d be a considerably cheaper option than QE2’s visit to Dublin. Like the greening of Buck House, the royal visit was sold to the Irish people as a way of generating increased tourism. Yes, it’d cost the state somewhere around €25 million euro, but think of the money from increased British visitors, who’d flock to follow their monarch’s footsteps. Except that what actually happened over the past year was, British tourism to Ireland went down 3%. Oops.  Sorry about that €25 million, folks. 

It’s not just Buck House that’s been asked to go green on Paddy’s Day. Sydney Opera House, Niagara Falls, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Little Mermaid statue in in Copenhagen, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio  - all are going to go green. And if it’s good enough for Christ the Redeemer, you’d think it’d be  good enough for Queen Elizabeth. 

The objection that’s being raised is that the queen doesn’t do commercial stuff. Right. Like,  monarchists don’t keep telling us how useful the Royals are in drawing tourists from around the world? And we’re forever hearing of various members of the royal brood heading off to somewhere “on a trade mission”. Though I would have thought the sight of Prince Andrew would be enough to stop the strongest trade deal square in its tracks.

But it’s here, in our own tormented little corner, that the main opposition will surely come. Having Her Majesty’s residence lit up all in green!  How dare they.  Where’s the respect? And what about those of us who don’t subscribe to a green agenda?

Relax, guys. I’ve thought this one through. If Her Maj does give the thumbs up to green spotlights on Buck House come Paddy’s Day, that could be counterbalanced by having it bathed in orange on the Twelfth. All right? Even the Alliance Party could hardly improve on that - perfect balance. And in the intervening months, Buckingham Palace will be its normal creamy-white self. So that’s green, white and orange. Sunds like a nice combination of colours to me. 

Ian Paisley Jr, 1912, 1916 and all that

[This is an abridged version of the interview with Mr Paisley in my book 'Whose Past Is It Anyway?]

I have to wait an extra half hour to see Ian Paisley Jr., I’m not sure why. But eventually I get to the inner office and he leans back in his chair and eyes my microphone. Am I planning to broadcast this? I reassure him that no, as I mentioned in the letter it’s for getting interviews for my book.   I start by asking him if politics was discussed in his house when he was growing up. “Funny enough - not at all!” He laughs at his own joke for a few moments, then becomes more serious. 

“I grew up in a situation where there were police guards at our house, where for a period of time I had to go to school in the back of a police car. So that obviously had an impact, especially when I was a very young child. When your father carries a weapon - a gun - and you see that as a child, it does provoke thoughts as to why.”

He goes on to contrast that with his daughter’s experience of growing up. 

“Two years ago my daughter said to me ‘Dad, I’m doing something in school in my history class. What were the Troubles?’  It was a word she’d never heard, because it was history she was talking about, it wasn’t actuality. She was fifteen then and her words were quite inspiring”.

When we talking of the signing of the Covenant, he stresses the range of people who signed it: “The tycoons of industry, influential religious figures on the Protestant and Evangelical and Episcopalian side. Not only captains of industry and people of religion, but major politicians, from prime ministers down - I mean really significant figures. My grandfather signed the Covenant in his own blood. I think I’m entitled to say what that means to me, not to be told by someone what it means to me, and I think that will be the feeling that will influence most people”.

I ask if commemoration of the signing of the Covenant - or other centenaries - might deepen division between people here. 

“We’re a divided people anyway. What is important is how it’s handled and how it’s managed. The fact that the union is so safe now - for a whole host of reasons, including the outcome of the political negotiations and the economic situation that we find ourselves in today - means that I don’t think commemoration poses a threat”.

We move on to the subject of the Easter Rising. 

“It was very much a case of ‘England’s disadvantage, Ireland’s advantage’, and there’s the view that the Easter Rising was the stab in the back.” He has no problem with the Irish government - “the current Irish government in the Republic of Ireland”  - organising commemoration and celebration of the event. “But there was hardly anything of a Rising in Ulster, and to try to portray something up here that didn’t occur would be the airbrushing and rewriting of history...I’ve absolutely no doubt that some people will want to usurp the occasion and use it as a political tool; we have to caution against that and say that would be silly. That’s why I think the government in the south should take command and drive it. If they don’t, they will be the biggest losers”. 

Would he be interested in attending any of the ceremonies around the Easter Rising commemoration? 

“I don’t see why I would be inspired to attend. I’ve read about that history. It’d almost be like going and celebrating and understanding what happened in some of the death camps. I’ve always wanted to avoid going to Auschwitz. I’m just saying there are parts of history I’ll learn about, read about, understand. There are dark parts of history that wouldn’t inspire me to want to go and see it, or to want to go and commemorate it, but I would still want to understand it.”

He sees the commemoration of both the signing of the Covenant and the Easter Rising as preludes.

“I actually think that 2020 - whatever happens around that celebration or recognition - is probably going to be the most telling one. Because that was about cutting the island and saying that’s how the succession will be handled, that’s how it will be cut. I suppose these are two dry runs - 1912 and 1916 - for how we handle the big one in 2020.”

He stresses the complexity of history, both for unionists and nationalists. 

“I studied what happened with Pearse. i think he was a lunatic. There are other people, however, who fought at the Easter Rising who had what I can only describe as noble ideals...I’ve seen the same thing all over the African continent where people awoke and said ‘No, we want to move away from this imperialism’.  I can understand that. But I can also say that Pearse was, in my view, a madman. In his own writings he compares his blood to that of Christ’s. Those are the words of a lunatic. I mean, he was going there deliberately to die. You go into battle to win - even if you know you’re going to die”. And he laughs again. 

He doesn’t think any of the centenaries will do anything to change people’s views. “There might be a few people around the fringes who’ll say ‘Ah I get it now!’  Will it make republicans become unionists or unionists become more republican? I doubt it”.

He believes that, as the government in the south should “drive”  2016 commemorations, so the government in Westminster should “drive” centenary commemorations. “Can an Executive that’s made up in the way ours is drive it? I don’t think it can, because of the complexities and differences that exist”. 

He doesn’t believe that the centenaries will lead to a fresh version of the Troubles. 

“I heard all this before Her Majesty’s visit: ‘Oh, this could spark things off. It’s not the right time.’ It happened, it passed and I think it’s been an acclaimed success. While I don’t know if these centenary commemorations will be on the same par, who knows? But they have the potential to be really positive and they have the potential to be positive marketing tools as well. Why not seize the opportunity?”

Never mind the Pope - God save the Church

I'm just off The Jeremy Vine Show  on BBC Radio 2, where I was debating the needs of the Catholic Church. My sparring partner was a young (I think) Englishman who appears to embrace the Church as it is. Maybe it's different in England. In Ireland, the Catholic Church is on the ropes.

Let's, with an effort, leave aside the clerical sexual abuse scandal - not because it doesn't matter but because it has been highlighted already as a ghastly stain on the Church. (Mind you, you're more liable to be abused by a relative than by a Catholic priest.) A number of things about the Catholic Church in Ireland appall me.

1. Its attitude to young people. Or rather non-attitude. Young people of Catholic background very largely find the Church at best boring and irrelevant, at worst cold and repellent. The Church's response? Nothing. Zilch. Rien. I know there are honourable exceptions to this but for the most part, young people leave the Church to the oldies.
2. Democracy. Or rather, non-democracy. From the Pope at the top to the parish priest at grassroots level, there's an obsession with keeping control, making sure those seen as further down the faith ladder don't come tramping where they don't belong. The windows of the Church which John XXIII tried to fling open have been nailed shut. Priests like Tony Flannery, Owen O'Sullivan, Brian D'Arcy have been silenced. Even to discuss topics such as celibacy, women priests, homosexuality is, to use Thatcher's word, out.

3. The liturgy. The Mass for young people particularly, but for older people too, is often a total yawn. Pope Benedict's intervention recently, making sure that jaw-breakers like 'consubstantial' were inserted into the wording, sums it up. And no, I don't know the answer to it all. But I know what I don't like.

I could go on but life is short. Anyone who thinks that by clinging to the orthodox, following the rules 'faithfully', putting your brain in neutral, is deluding themselves.  There are good and even heroic priests  and Catholic people in Ireland. But as an institution, the Catholic Church in Ireland is a mess.

Pope Benedict packs it in

The most telling tweet I read today was from Alastair Campbell. It said “Anyone who thinks religion not relevant to modern life (writes a pro-faith atheist) just look at how Pope announcement is dominating all”. And he was right. When the news of Pope Benedict’s planned retirement broke, Twitter had tweet after tweet after tweet on the subject. I’ve never seen it that one-topic.

So. Am I glad or sad he’s going? I could say ‘sad’, in that I believe he’s a sincere and holy man, and a man of considerable intellect. But my main emotion is one of gladness. Despite his quiet charm (which floored most of Britain that time he visited them) and despite the great charisma of Pope John Paul II, their terms as Pope were not good for the Catholic Church. In the early 1960s, that extraordinary man Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council to, as he put it, open the windows of the Church and allow the fresh air of renewal to invigorate it.  Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI did all they could to close those windows. Dissent, even discussion was forbidden; good and thoughtful people were not allowed even to discuss such burning issues as married priests or the ordination of women. I don’t for a moment believe that either of those steps would remedy all the ills of the Catholic Church, but to block discussion and real involvement by gifted people was misguided and counter-productive. 

So will I feel bad as Pope Benedict rides off into the sunset? Not really. He’s 85 years old. In any other profession to retire at that age would be seen as long overdue. I have no doubt that Benedict did good things in his term of office - among them addressing the issue of child abuse -  but he didn’t do the kind of things that would bring back to the Catholic Church people (particularly young people) who have abandoned it, nor did he encourage structures that would have allowed the Church at grass-roots level to be the people of God rather than the parish priest. The one thing the Catholic Church truly needs is a vigorous and abiding blast of democracy, and neither the present Pope nor the one before provided that. In fact they did all they could to block it. 

The question now is, will the next Pope provide a new beginning? I’d like to think so, except that the overwhelming majority of the College of Cardinals, who vote in Gregory’s successor, have been appointed by John Paul or Gregory. The sign are not good.