Perhaps social media is the new TUV.
Where once the DUP looked over its cowardly shoulder at Jim Allister, when the TUV was much closer to being a one-man band, now re-tweeting is a thing. Perfect working from home. Keyboard warriors holed up in airless bedrooms lead the charge and few politicians vigorously denounce their abuse.
The deploring of threats on air satisfied some interviewers. Even when interviewees bumbled into talk of ‘Irish being stuffed down our throats’, which could only have encouraged the haters. Why blur your own condemnation? Minding your back?
Daddy, what did you do in the culture wars? Well sweetheart, it’s a bit hard to explain but ...I tried to stop some small children learning Irish. If ever there was a silly season subject this was it though surely more sad than silly, and above all stupid. Some Irish-lovers took a while to see the need for an Irish Language Act. Other than having the law at your back how to combat obstruction at best and threats to plant and personnel at worst? How other than with legal underpinnings to protect any planned provision, even the most modest schemes. The way the language-foes open new fronts and dig into old ones makes the activist case better than activists.
Because many political unionists seem wedded to self-destruction, their fight will go on - as will resistance to it and determination to support the language. Rather than this being a party political campaign, activists in fact have nagged an uncertain and laggardly Sinn Féin - which is mainly wishful to look positive and respectful, at least to Dublin, about sharing power with a demoralised, directionless DUP.
They might also be embarrassed. After the decades of policy statements headed in the first official language only a handful of elected SFers, shamefully, can manage more than an Irish sentence or two. Well past time for one to one tuition. (Or a subsidised group enrolment in a struggling Gaeltacht scheme? Just a thought.)
Sinn Féin ‘weaponising’ or ‘politicising’ Irish is neither here nor there. The opposite is the case. A nursery school bullied out of its planned site at Braniel has caused anger, disgust, and dread at where this might lead. At least some non-party unionists winced at the memory of how the Holy Cross campaign brought their cause foreign, and British, dislike and disbelief.
Diane Dawson and Linda Ervine made sharp comments to this paper on how Irish belongs to everyone. They emphasised their own identity, Dawson nicely noting that toddlers learning their colours in Irish has no impact on her unionism. Ervine challenged unionist politicians to help the nursery find a permanent site: ‘Once more and more people embrace the language and take jobs in the sector the problem is gone’.
Wanting to know is not an instinct bullies and haters can erase. How they interpret that instinct as a threat to unionism, and/or the Union, is a puzzle. Ervine’s east Belfast organisation, well bedded in, feeds an interest that will not be intimidated out of existence. People start by wanting to know the meaning of place-names, imagine that.
Arlene Foster’s crocodiles, my how that roused objectors across a political, media, social spectrum. The most surprising people took to airwaves and print to say lay off Irish, that’s my language, I love it, me too, it belongs to anyone who wants to know it. Arlene brought them up in hives.
Yet again unionist loathing of Irish has made more friends for the language and made more determined to speak it. No need to politicise what is an element of identity for many people. Has there ever been a time when enemies have reaped a finer un-intended consequence? Irish mustn’t know what’s hit it.
The sight of weeping, frightened children heading towards Holy Cross past howling adults left some unionists lost for words. Keyboard warriors love that stuff. Time for others to speak up.
