Only a few years back, or so it seems, the cheering sight was of young boys with hurleys on their way to or from games, blithe, unaware that things might ever have been different. And this was the Lisburn Road, once the entirely Protestant route of the Twelfth’s main parade.
Last weekend on the same road, under lamp-posts bedecked with the Twelfth’s flags, at least two female couples holding hands strolled cheerfully and teenage girls dandered up and down wrapped in the flags of the Rainbow.
And down the town people cheered Leo Varadkar at the Pride parade. Those first visits north by taoisigh a long time ago were marked by the Reverend Ian’s snowballs at Jack Lynch, unionist outrage even then fomented by Paisley as well as best expressed by him. Is there a danger of making too much of the change? For a stretch of ridiculously expensive shopping the Lisburn Road is affluent, cushioned, an untypical northern urban setting. The direction of travel is unmistakeable, all the same.
Varadkar’s welcome was noted by none other than Lord Kilclooney, John Taylor, one of the hardest hardliners inside Stormont of the Sixties watching Paisley stoking fires outside. ‘How times are changed!’, he tweeted on Saturday, ‘60 years ago Catholic FF Lynch was received in Belfast with snow balls. Today Gay FG Varadkar is welcomed on the streets of Belfast. Makes everyone think!’
A whimsical chap, Lord K, well able to turn on a sixpence and delighted to wrong-foot the media’s scribbling rodents. ‘Catholic’ Lynch and ‘Gay’ Varadkar are characteristic, perhaps necessary reminders that any seeming Taylor liberalism may be fleeting.
But if there was Taylor bile at ‘Gay’ Varadkar’s welcome it was undetectable, and there is surely only one way to interpret ‘Makes everyone think.’ Viewed from afar, this is still a place frozen in old attitudes. For young people who see no hope of directing their own lives, adult control like a weight on their heads, for women and some men trapped in unhappy marriages by religious scruples and/or the sheer pressure of family expectation, life probably still feels frozen.
Change in individual lives can be as patchy as in whole communities. ‘What did you say?!? You can’t do THAT!!’
Some of the nearest comfort, when people manage to lift their heads, is to look for like minds. Some older gay people might not fancy dressing up as racy nuns but more than a few watching Prides here as elsewhere must have pleasure and pride in their hearts. As for the DUP, and the kind of unionists who grasp any minor issue as distraction from their own backward leadership, fury mixed with envy must have fizzed in at least a few as they watched the Gay Varadkar show. How dare he line up with people whose rights DUP see as troublesome! Prime minister of a foreign state, cheered to the echo! But, whisper, when and where is any DUP line-up going to get a welcome like that?
Smart DUPpers know how the world turns. Varadkar is as reactionary on economics if not more so than the TUV leader, whose formulaic fury pushed BBC controller Peter Johnston into incoherence, then apology to his own staff. But solidarity brought Leo to Belfast.
Premier Boris may want for now to coddle the DUP, but too many Tories voted for same-sex marriage and abortion reform. Unionists have milked their moment dry. Even during political chaos, social change is unstoppable.
