Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Barry McElduff resigned too late to soften his offence

Barry McElduff has resigned as West Tyrone MP 
Barry McElduff has resigned as West Tyrone MP  Barry McElduff has resigned as West Tyrone MP 

Social media instant comment and a 24 hour news cycle on top of his own lack of judgment have ended – probably - the Barry McElduff career, though almost certainly not a long tail of condemnation.

He resigned too late to soften his offence but he owed Sinn Féin, on the back foot and stumbling north and south. Whether his exit will help ‘reconciliation’ as he appeared to hope is something else.

The DUP leader meanwhile wins easy praise for a speech in Killarney that pleased a southern audience but does nothing to soften northern nationalist opinion of her. Policy makers in the Republic need to pause and consider that.

Arlene Foster won applause and requests for ‘selfies’ at the outset by turning up in Killarney and by talking about her baby son’s heart murmur and her grandmother cycling to Clones to sell the lace she made. All good moves, playing to strengths too often masked by short temper and the struggle with her own instincts.

She gave Micheál Martin a chance to criticise Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney, though without naming them, via her own crack about people ‘rushing to the microphones’. She also contradicted her own complaint no time ago that Simon Coveney’s qualified and thoughtful remarks on unification had been ‘quite aggressive.’ Now she twinned a reminder of how crucial to the DUP the integral place of Northern Ireland in the UK is, with ‘To think anything else would be as foolish as believing that the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste desired anything other than Irish unity.’

Quite. But nowhere in a speech clearly meant as conciliatory and instantly praised as such, did the DUP leader remember to say that the Northern Ireland vote was for Remain. To dismiss hopes of another referendum she repeatedly emphasised the UK vote to Leave. The vote of ‘the British people’ was all that mattered. Never mind the bigger margin for Remain in her own place. ‘Let’s face it,’ Foster said, in the no-nonsense plain-woman style that is hers for good as well as ill, ‘the British people have always had a far from enthusiastic relationship with Europe and its institutions. The opportunity to have their say on the EU after years and years of feeling that successive governments of varying hues were denying them that chance. And a majority of the British people seized that chance.’

She came to Killarney to express a wish to be neighbourly, to work with the other part of the island, without a single word of recognition for the Irish on the northern side of the border, the others in her part of the island. To judge from reports the audience seemed not to notice.

Reconciliation is a complex business; it will not be simply wished into being. Inevitable discussion has begun on the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, some of it proposing the date as yet another deadline for Stormont talks, some focussing on how far from reconciliation we are despite the lapse of time. It has been twenty years, some cry, as though that is more than time enough to transform into a society unscarred by history, or at least capable of functioning without recrimination.

The more realistic among us – older, you might argue on the edge of desperation – never thought a power-sharing Stormont likely to morph into more than a continuing civics class, but on a more level playing-field than anyone here had ever experienced.

There were bad signs from the outset when the name of the document that wrote up the agreement was contested without explanation. Was it for unionists the idea that a single day signified acceptance of power-sharing with a place for the IRA’s front, Sinn Féin? You could understand the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble flinching from the accolade ‘historic’. After all, after harrying him for the previous three years several younger members of his party walked out as the moment to sign up loomed.

The walkers were led by Jeffrey Donaldson, now Sir Jeffrey. His colleague in rebellion Arlene Foster was the lesser player at the time. They walked directly to the noisiest opponent of the whole business, the Reverend Ian, whose main purpose in political life had always been to destroy Ulster Unionism.

Many are foggy about how we got from there to here. But in that fog there is no longer the horror of wholesale violence. Enough to be going on with – while effort goes into reconciling south with north, as well as British with Irish.