AS you read this article you may be grabbing a cup of coffee in a café or sitting in the staff canteen, either way it’s unlikely that you will worry much about the faith or the nationality of the person serving you, or those you are talking to or sitting beside.
You may grab an after-work pint with a colleague and chat about the Premier league or your favourite soap character.
When taking your children to nursery you are probably not too pre-occupied about whether their friends are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim.
When you go to a clinic or a hospital your mind is probably focused on your condition and not the background of the doctor or nurse treating you.
If a man gets up and gives you his seat on a crowded train or a young person offers to give you a helping hand, it’s fair to say that you may be surprised but mostly you will accept the kindness behind the act.
That’s because when we get up and go about our day, we don’t define ourselves and others by differences. And for the most part we rub along together, quite normally.
Yet the politics of Northern Ireland is anything but normal. It is frighteningly and depressingly tribal.
That said not all politicians are the same. The broad brushes that paint us into one tribe or another are quite incompatible. Our experiences have been moulded by warped narratives and we have for the most part lost the ability to write our own story.
The recent fiasco over the ‘cash for ash’ scheme has predictably divided down tribal lines with both Sinn Féin and the DUP trying to out macho the other.
But the reality about this debacle is far from tribal. It’s a monumental cock up at several levels of government from the ministerial team, to the civil service and to the oversight bodies. It’s about overwhelming levels of incompetence and it would seem in part a story about greed.
The response of both governing parties to dealing with the matter is immature, ill-conceived and ill deserving of public support.
As embarrassing as the RHI scheme is from a governance point of view, that it happened is normal within administrations which get lazy, arrogant and complacent. Following the assembly elections in May 2016, both the DUP and Sinn Féin felt they were unassailable from a political point of view. The opposition had failed to mobilise the public’s imagination. Unfortunately, both parties also seemed to think they should be unaccountable too.
The Opposition parties, the UUP and SDLP, along with Alliance, initially wobbled but soon started to land a few body blows. The two main parties were sneering of their efforts and the DUP revelled in belittling and mocking them at every opportunity.
Sinn Féin always seemed slightly more ill at ease without the cover of the SDLP and Alliance. Implementing cuts in health, education and social services and raising income from unpopular traffic measures are not exactly the type of populist polices that Sinn Féin are used to.
Ironically from May 2016 to November 2016, the first and deputy first ministers waxed lyrical about their shared objectives and their close personal relationships. No talk then about ten years of gradual erosion of respect for the equality agenda or the Irish identity.
Certainly, to some commentators there seemed no slight or humiliation that Sinn Féin wouldn’t accept to hold onto the offices of government. ‘Marlene’ seemed like marital bliss, albeit a one-sided relationship.
Even the early revelations about the RHI scheme didn’t seem to upset the loved-up Stormont couple or their closest family and friends.
Unfortunately for both the DUP and Sinn Féin, the watching public were getting angrier and angrier and the hitherto timid Opposition finally found a voice and a velvet glove for their iron fists.
Sinn Féin’s faux outrage has been a long time coming and it’s not hugely convincing.
Just why did they stay in an executive for ten years that wasn’t delivering to their community? Why were they still lauding that same executive that was slighting nationalism a mere six weeks ago?
The DUP is now trying desperately to portray the forthcoming election as a challenge to unionism but with Foster and McGuinness having played the globe trotting double act as Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, Sinn Féin makes for a poor bogey man.
RHI is a normal political scandal and the public should respond normally by ignoring tribal calls.
