Life

Jake O'Kane: We're all Paddies and Micks to the Tories, Arlene

Irrespective of how British you consider yourself, if you’ve a northern Irish accent then, in Britain, you’ll always be just another Paddy or Mick and expendable

Jamie Bryson at The Con Club in Belfast this week where loyalists voiced opposition to Boris Johnson's Brexit deal. Picture by Alan Lewis/Photopress
Jamie Bryson at The Con Club in Belfast this week where loyalists voiced opposition to Boris Johnson's Brexit deal. Picture by Alan Lewis/Photopress Jamie Bryson at The Con Club in Belfast this week where loyalists voiced opposition to Boris Johnson's Brexit deal. Picture by Alan Lewis/Photopress

I’VE only appeared on a London comedy stage around three times, way back in the 1990s, when I started doing stand-up. The reason for this is a combination of my innate laziness, my hatred of travel, and the fact that trying to be funny in London with a Belfast accent in the early 90s was comparable to being a Vietnamese stand-up playing New York in the 60s.

Not that I went out of my way to endear myself to London audiences. One of the first jokes I did was an observation that I was certain I’d not one, but two, doppelgangers wandering the streets of London. While I hadn’t seen them myself, I did know their names: one was called ‘Paddy’, the other ‘Mick’.

My point hit home and last week the same point hit Arlene Foster and her DUP colleagues right between the eyes. For, irrespective of how British you consider yourself, if you’ve a northern Irish accent then, in the UK, you’ll always be just another Paddy or Mick and expendable.

The reality that the UK is confined to the Home Counties has long been realised by Scotland’s SNP leader, Nichola Sturgeon, who announced her intention to hold another independence referendum next year. With the Scots' oil pump to the south turned off, the UK, as an entity, will crumble before our very eyes.

That Boris Johnson decided to callously sacrifice the DUP to secure a deal with Europe shocked Arlene, Sammy and crew. Having already been shafted by Boris’s predecessor, Theresa May, their reaction is indicative of a political party suffering from a psychological malady similar to Stockholm Syndrome. 

If Boris manages to get his deal through it will result, for the first time, in a distinction between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. The psychological impact of this on unionism will be profound and its ramifications invariably negative, though not as disastrous as some were quick to predict.

Jamie Bryson’s meeting of ‘loyalists and unionists’ at the Con Club on Belfast’s Newtownards Road was called before the DUP plane had landed back home. 

After the meeting, Jamie gave a statement to the world’s media – in reality, camera crews from UTV, BBC Northern Ireland and a few local newspapers. Doing his usual impersonation of an Old Testament prophet predicting the end of days, Jamie intimated all manner of biblical disasters, from falling meteors to plagues of locusts.

Jamie clearly saw the greedy green hands of the Irish Republic behind all his woes, with ‘republicans’ and ‘republicanism’ the constant refrain throughout his speech. But Jamie has a problem – in this instance, the enemy is neither Sinn Fein nor the Irish government, rather it’s the British government – and a Tory one at that – who’ve perpetrated the great betrayal.

Another problem for Jamie is he’s been down this road before with the ‘fleg’ protest – and despite his cataclysmic predictions then, the world didn’t end. Instead, a generation of young Protestants received convictions for riotous behaviour and a lifetime ban from travelling to the US – a whole generation, barred from visiting Disneyland.

It was a week for pompous pronouncements of imminent disaster, as Channel Four News ran an interview with a spokesman from the New IRA – and very strange it was too. The NIRA spokesperson sported a new look of balaclava over tights, while being voiced-over by what sounded like a Scot – Northern Ireland actors will undoubtedly complain to Equity, ‘coming over here, taking our jobs’.

Filmed in his kitchen, I imagine the subsequent conversation with a very irate wife. “For God’s sake, Sean, I would’ve cleaned up if you’d told me a film crew were coming. What will people think of us?”

Bringing up the rear in the land of the deluded is Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, who believes Brexit will catapult us into a border poll within five years. Using the reunification of Germany as an example, Michelle believes Irish reunification could happen just as suddenly, maybe even in a year. Personally, I’ll wait till I see a loyalist atop a peace wall with sledgehammer before I believe that prediction.