Opinion

Newton Emerson: Arlene Foster has spent the week dropping clangers

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

It has been a spectacular week of clangers from Arlene Foster, even by the DUP leader’s lamentable standards.

Referring to “blood red” lines was dreadful use of language, although hardly the call to arms some have implied. Suggesting she could back Boris Johnson as prime minister was an attempt at hardball that dropped the ball, with Johnson’s mojo fading.

However, Foster’s reference to altering the Good Friday Agreement over Brexit is not so lightly dismissed, despite nationalist over-reaction. Alter it how? The agreement makes no mention of the nature of the border and even the hardest Brexit need not technically breach any of its institutions.

Logically, the only way the agreement could be altered over Brexit would be to reassure nationalist concerns on protecting its ‘spirit’, by beefing up the role of Dublin and Brussels in north-south and east-west bodies, for example.

Perhaps that is why Foster drew a blank when asked what changes she had in mind.

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The Good Friday Agreement would have been in far more trouble if the DUP had taken cabinet seats last year. The claim it was offered seats is made in the latest British General Election book - an authoritative series produced by academics since 1945. It reports the prime minister was “ardent” for the idea but the DUP turned it down, believing a looser arrangement would give it more leverage.

There is no mention of concern about the impact on the agreement. Would it have been breached? While it seems clear a British government including unionists could not be the impartial administrator the agreement requires, it would be an even clearer breach to curtail unionist participation in the full political life of the United Kingdom.

This would have made for the mother of all judicial reviews.

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Sinn Féin has been ridiculed for claiming the British government was “the main conflict protagonist” of the Troubles, during the press launch of its submission to the legacy consultation.

In truth, the party said little new on this specific point - it has always been Sinn Féin’s position that Britain caused the Troubles by creating Northern Ireland in the first place. Gerry Kelly reiterated this at the launch with a glib reference to “partition and all that”. Any allusion to the satirical history book 1066 And All That was presumably unwitting.

The real problem is that Sinn Féin ducked the IRA’s role in the Troubles. Asked about the death toll, for which the IRA bears most responsibility, Kelly and Sinn Féin leaders Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill waved the questions away with deflection and platitudes.

Kelly later clarified the IRA was “a main protagonist” but doubled down on his party’s bluster over every other point.

How can anyone have faith in a legacy process when the republican movement takes such an approach towards it?

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The sheer administrative challenge of dealing with the past has been highlighted by compensation awards over two Bloody Sunday victims.

The combined £700,000 payments to the families of Gerard McKinney and Michael McDaid were test cases for the remaining victims, launched against the Ministry of Defence after it confirmed in 2011 it would pay compensation following the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

Although there was a dispute over how awards should be calculated, there was no question over liability and the judge this week praised all sides for reaching settlements “without the need for any distressing evidence to be given”.

Yet still this took seven years.

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Opinion has split along predictable lines after the PSNI dropped heavy hints for the return of 50/50 police recruitment.

Arlene Foster immediately ruled this out as “discrimination”, her DUP colleague Gregory Campbell called it “institutionalised sectarianism”, while the SDLP and Sinn Féin backed its return.

Perhaps one way to neutralise this argument would be to link it to lifting the fair employment exemption on hiring teachers - the last permissible prejudice under the Good Friday Agreement and an issue that splits opinion in the opposite direction. It would be a worthy trade-off - while 50/50 police recruitment is positive discrimination aimed at ending division, the exemption on teachers is merely to facilitate discrimination and maintain exclusion.

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It has been obvious since the gay cake case, which the Supreme Court will rule on next week, that Northern Ireland’s unique law against political discrimination is an accident waiting to happen.

Originally intended as a shorthand for ‘unionist or nationalist’ in 1970s fair employment legislation, a failure to pin its definition down in all laws since means it can cover just about anything, as courts have been forced to concede.

Far right group Britain First is now suing Facebook in Northern Ireland for taking its page down while leaving left-wing pages up, because our political discrimination laws make such a case possible - and make a win entirely plausible.

Less plausible is that the global technology industry will forsake its editorial freedom due to a daft law in a tiny region. Instead, some way will be found to ignore Northern Ireland altogether, perhaps at high cost to our economy - and if we are fortunate enough to avoid that, our unreformed libel law is an identical accident waiting to happen.

newton@irishnews.com