Opinion

Is this as good as it gets for north?

OVER the past few months we have witnessed an incredible rise in job creation by Invest NI. Capita announced 400 new jobs in May and was surpassed last week by the announcement from Newry-based First Derivatives that it too was to create nearly 500 jobs over the next three years. This announcement is largely due to the entrepreneurial zeal of its founder, Brian Conlan, but credit too must go to the head of Invest NI, Alasdair Hamilton and to the minister for enterprise,trade and investment Arlene Foster. Success it seems has many fathers and at the First Derivatives photo-call a clutch of ministers set aside their all too obvious differences to make the cameraman's cut. One could forgive the ministers their ego-driven moments if they were to apply themselves to the day job every day instead of pandering to their respective partisan interests.

Politicians are prickly when they are told they are dysfunctional in government but they seem all to oblivious to the reputational damage created by their schoolyard antics to the perceptions of would-be international investors. Last week both our universities honoured two of the giants from the world of finance - Dermot Desmond, the legendary powerhouse behind the financial services sector in Dublin and owner of Celtic FC, and Christopher Moran, London-based financier, philanthropist and chairman of Cooperation Ireland. Both men came from relatively humble backgrounds and both rose through the world of corporate finance. People like Moran and Desmond are doers in a world of talkers. They are result not process driven and that of course is alien to many in the political classes.

We don't expect our politicians to be businessmen and we certainly don't want businessmen to be running the country but we should have an expectation that our politicians should be business-like. There was nothing business-like about the decision of the unionist parties to withdraw from the talk's process last week. As a public we witness these processes with little interest and even lower expectations. The decision to hold talks in the lead up to the Twelfth demonstrations was not only naive but it was foolhardy. A 10-year-old child could have forecast the forthcoming tantrums. To the outside world Northern Ireland, despite its pretensions to modernity, looks and behaves like some kind of medieval, feudal theocratic principality, led by barking mad princes, shadowy wizards and secret covens.

All too obvious is the basic lack of trust between the mainstream parties. The thought that they could successfully host talks without some kind of facilitation was completely absurd.

Even more hilarious is the degree of seriousness with which some of the protagonists are trying to market themselves as peacemakers to the international community. Northern Ireland remains at best an unsettled place. None of the main players are actually content in their own identities. Sinn Féin is so haunted by the spectre of its own grisly past that it is spending a fortune trying to re-write the narrative and spin away the blood that was spilt in the name of militant republicanism. Unionism is politically schizophrenic and anchored to a vision of Northern Ireland that no longer exists. Mainstream unionism continually fails ordinary unionist voters and yet they wonder why so many fail to vote. The aspirations and ambitions of the economically literate unionist community seem to play second fiddle to the beat of the lambeg.

It is time to ask some tough questions. Do we really want to make this place we share a better place or is this as good as it gets? Often it looks like this is as good as it gets because our horizons are continually blinkered by the politically short-sighted.

Yes it could be worse - we could still be killing each other - but are our standards for a shared future to be based on a threshold so low that most tin-pot African basket-case countries could pass?

Part of our problem stems from the political architecture of an agreement that rewards and institutionalises sectarianism. It is simply not sustainable. We have enough custodians and ombudsmen of rights to allow us to create a form of government that permits for accountability, transparency and challenge. The Good Friday Agreement was of its time but it should not now be held up as some kind of untouchable shibboleth. Even Linus van Pelt in Peanuts finally stopped sucking his thumb by saying: "It's a good thumb but not a great thumb." Which of our politicians will say the same?