YOU can be damn sure the civil servant who thought it was a good idea to have the taoiseach and prime minister fly over at the start of the week is now on their way to a posting in Afghanistan.
The idea of Theresa May coming to seal the deal is akin to someone with Ebola visiting someone with the flu. Theresa can’t even control her own party, much less sort out our difficulties – something Arlene and her would have had in common to chat about.
The optics from the start of the PM’s visit weren’t good. Her fashionable shoes echoed hollow during her victorious stroll around Bombardier, as everyone now knows the British government had virtually nothing to do with the positive outcome of that company’s run-in with the US Department of Commerce; credit for jobs remaining in Belfast belongs to the work done by the Canadian administration, not the British.
And if Leo and Theresa thought by showing up they would intimate the DUP into making a deal, they greatly underestimated both Arlene and her party. At the end of an exhaustive day of talks, the PM was left begging all parties to give the negotiations ‘one last push’. Pertinent, as it’s something a mother would say to an infant sitting on it’s potty – and the end result has turned out to be the same.
Arlene faced such antagonism from within DUP ranks towards an Irish Language Act she was forced to clarify that no such act, in any shape, was ever a possibility. Voicing the paranoia of many in her party, she talked of road signage in Irish and civil servants and children being forced to learn the language. I was half expecting her to say all Protestant Bibles would be translated into it and that in future it would be compulsory for the queen to give her Christmas speech in Irish.
If only Arlene had realised the making of any language compulsory is a guaranteed way to kill it. Proof of this can be seen in the Republic, where Irish is taught to every child yet spoken by few.
Let’s get real for a second. We are now without governance for 13 months because one party is intent on promoting a language which, let’s be honest, few speak, while the other major political party is intent on promoting a language which, let’s be honest, doesn’t even exist.
Just where the process goes from here is anyone’s guess; we are definitely in uncharted territory, even for a society as dysfunctional as ours. With a polarised electorate there is little to be gained in another election, and direct rule will be no rule at all. Here’s my humble suggestion, and don’t dismiss it out of hand.
Instead of an election – for, let’s be honest, they’ve hardly proved a great success – let’s have a ballot for the assembly. We ask everyone if they want to serve – those who answer ‘yes’ are immediately banned. Next the names of every man and woman over 17 are entered into the ballot – and yes, that’s not a mistake; I think the age needs lowered. The 90 people picked at random are then given a full medical and psychological test to weed out the unsuitable, something that if done in the past, would disqualify the vast majority of those presently in position. The 90 winners are then handed the keys of government.
But what if they don’t want to serve, I hear you ask? All the better, says I, for they will be much more likely to compromise and find solutions than our present bunch of dogmatic fanatics. Imagine a 17-year-old with a hot date; he’s not going to talk long into the night for the sake of talking; no, he’s going to get the deal done as quickly as possible. It would be the end of our political groundhog day.
I know, you think I’m delusional, but at least living here I’m not alone. Take Sinn Fein chairman Declan Kearney’s recent claim that the IRA were instrumental in the formation of the Civil Rights movement. Such was Mr Kearney’s humility he forgot to mention it was volunteer Colum Columbus who discovered America or volunteer Phelim Fleming who invented penicillin.
He even forgot to mention it was Michael Collins himself who piloted Apollo 11 which landed men on the Moon. But then, why let historical fact get in the way of a bit of revisionism?
