Opinion

William Scholes: Paisley will fly on but what of unionism's future in civic nationalism's post-Brexit Ireland?

William Scholes

William Scholes

William has worked at The Irish News since 2002. His areas of interest include religion and motoring.

Have passports, will travel... North Antrim DUP MP Ian Paisley has found himself having to explain his travel arrangements - again
Have passports, will travel... North Antrim DUP MP Ian Paisley has found himself having to explain his travel arrangements - again Have passports, will travel... North Antrim DUP MP Ian Paisley has found himself having to explain his travel arrangements - again

EVEN before the latest revelations about his trans-Atlantic travel arrangements, some uncharitable readers will have already formed the view that Ian Paisley is a business class spoofer.

That unfortunate misunderstanding around his Maldives and Sri Lanka holidays hasn't helped Mr Paisley in his valiant attempts to explain the circumstances around his £6,000 flights to a charity peace conference in New York.

According to the version of events with which he regaled readers of the Ballymena Guardian, Mr Paisley manfully agreed to participate in the Cooperation Ireland conference at the last minute when another speaker was unable to attend.

Apart from anything, this requires us to accept that a figure of Mr Paisley's uniquely prominent stature was somehow not already among the ranks of first-choice participants.

More troublingly for Mr Paisley, it also requires us to overlook the inconvenient truth that he was in fact already listed as a speaker weeks before the event took place.

Nor does any of that explain why travelling business class became essential for the North Antrim MP.

Tánaiste Simon Coveney, whose mantle of responsibilities could be considered at least as heavy as Mr Paisley's, was able to slum it in economy.

At a tendon-bursting stretch, I have some sympathy with Mr Paisley's difficulties in remembering every jot and tittle of his various Whicker's World excursions.

After all, who among us engaged on long-haul flights undertaken to fulfil a whirlwind of global engagements hasn't found them blurring into one after a while?

And, believe it or not, the Maldives is actually a pretty forgettable holiday destination, whatever its picture postcard sun-and-sand desert island appearance might suggest.

I have some experience of this. My wife and I went to the Maldives on honeymoon, but apart from the seaplane trip to our 'hotel' - a collection of little chalets on a flat, featureless patch of sand which could be circumnavigated on foot in about 45 minutes - it was rather boring.

This, I hasten to add for the tribunal's official record, is in no way a reflection of our marriage.

The Robinson Crusoe lifestyle, no matter how gilded, didn't agree with us. After a few days we started dreaming of ways to escape the island. Could those sun loungers be lashed together to make a raft?

On the face of it, a more serious difficulty for Mr Paisley is that he has yet to offer a convincing explanation for why he was comfortable lobbying on behalf of the governments of Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

It is bad enough that the regimes in both Muslim-majority countries have poor human rights records, but they also go out of their way to persecute Christians.

Only this week, Open Doors, a charity which raises awareness of Christian persecution around the world and supports those suffering for their faith, published its annual 'watch list'.

This ranks countries according to how hostile they are to Christians. North Korea is number one, with the Maldives at 14 and Sri Lanka at 46.

It is unclear how Mr Paisley intends to reconcile findings like that in a constituency, much less a party, whose grassroots traditionally takes the Christian faith seriously.

At a tendon-bursting stretch, I have some sympathy with Mr Paisley's difficulties in remembering every jot and tittle of his various Whicker's World excursions. The Maldives is actually a pretty forgettable holiday destination

His 'big lad' persona will doubtless see him sail on regardless, as it has in the past.

This, it should be stressed, is less a commentary on Mr Paisley and his current travails than it is on the generally bleak landscape of Northern Ireland politics.

This is a place where almost no-one ever pays the price for their stupidity. Barry McElduff got the heave-ho as a Sinn Féin MP for his Kingsmill antics, but that was an outlier.

Nor has anyone ever been punished at the polls for blowing the sectarian dog whistle or flag-waving.

Indeed, parties who endeavour to take power-sharing seriously receive a kicking; the SDLP and Ulster Unionists did the heavy-lifting for the Good Friday Agreement but are today husks of their former selves.

Even incompetence of the sort which so distinguished the Sinn Féin and DUP carve up in the last late, unlamented executive went unpunished by those who, after it imploded, could be bothered to vote.

Perhaps everything will change after Brexit. Probably not.

The silos appear to be getting not only bigger but further apart. Tomorrow's 'civic nationalism' conference in Belfast, for example, won't include contributions from what might be called 'political unionism'.

That's fair enough, but the conference is called 'Beyond Brexit - The Future of Ireland'. Do unionists, even the jet-setter MPs, have no future in Ireland?