Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Dear Karen Bradley, don't expect an English approach to an Irish situation to work

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Patrick Murphy
Patrick Murphy Patrick Murphy

Dear Karen Bradley,

I write to apologise for the shameful behaviour of our political parties in not accepting your invitation to a drinks reception in Stormont House on Tuesday evening. By suggesting that our MLAs should come together to get to know each other better, you offered a wonderfully English approach to an Irish situation.

But that's the difficulty with the Irish - they never recognise a jolly spiffing idea when they see one. There you were, making a well-meaning attempt to civilise the natives and were they grateful? Not a bit of them.

Recognising that the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements have failed, you were obviously attempting to sign them up to the Social Etiquette Agreement (and you should ignore any whiskey drinker who makes a remark about Powers-sharing.)

The agreement would replace Stormont with various social events, including away days (and they have now been away from work for 886 days), gourmet evenings, soirées on the lawn at Hillsborough Castle and long walks in the country (where I come from the Orangemen already do that, but it would take too long to explain).

You could then teach our politicians to play cricket, bring them to the Henley regatta and finish off with a visit to the last night of the Proms. Now, that's what I call political progress.

Sadly, some of the less cultured in our society might suggest that if you wanted our MLAs to know each other better, you might threaten to stop their wages unless they return to Stormont by Monday morning. This is a typically crude Irish response to Britain's 800-year old campaign to civilise us. It comes from those who have no appreciation of the role of social etiquette in settling political differences.

You have received significant criticism for attempting to socialise politics here and some suggest that you are the worst secretary of state we ever had. This column refutes that on the basis that it can remember Labour's Roy Mason (1976-79), who set politics here back a hundred years. (I seem to remember footage of him sitting on a horse at a military parade, like Barnsley's answer to Genghis Khan, while a Guards band played the British national anthem.)

In fairness though, you have made a teeny weeny mistake recently. You bought into Simon Coveney's theory that public revulsion at the murder of Lyra McKee in Derry would force the political parties back to Stormont. While the public's horror and disgust at Lyra's death was genuine, Simon did not recognise the huge disconnect here between politics and the real world.

Northern politics is just perpetual grand opera, far removed from distractions like people and poverty and failing public services and murder on the streets. Stormont, as Shakespeare might have said, is a stage, where all the men and women are merely players.

The tánaiste's northern foray was also an attempt to boost his party's flagging fortunes in the south, as one of a number of pre-election initiatives by Leo Varadkar. These include proposed tax cuts which may have to be abandoned, rural broadband which turned out not to be worth its €3 billion cost and a farmers' aid package which will be undercut by his proposals this week to counter climate change.

In hoping for a northern victory, Simon was out of his depth. He received a better press than you, because he spoke to journalists. But he said nothing. Your reluctance to speak to journalists is understandable, because they insist on asking questions. (Why not follow the PSNI's example and arrest a few of them on a charge of seeking to establish the truth?)

So the talks you helped to start might best be described as non-talks, because neither Sinn Féin nor the DUP want to return to Stormont just yet. But neither wants to be seen to walk away.

SF is waiting on the Dublin general election. The DUP is waiting on the new British prime minister and, of course, the Twelfth. (That's a series of parades, a bit like the Durham Miners' Gala, without the miners and the working class politics. It is where Martin Luther meets King William III. No, not Martin Luther King. He was black. Yes, some Orangemen are Royal Blacks, but that's a different black. Look, why don't we skip this bit?)

So here's what you might do until the parties are ready to talk. Hold a drinks reception and invite no one but yourself. Sit down, open a bottle of wine and put your feet up. It will not progress normal politics here, but then nothing Britain suggests ever does. Sláinte!