Ways to tackle the central problem are vital, that should be admitted, even though the temptation is strong to sweep it to the back of the mind, behind life and death and hospitals on their knees.
But clashing views on the future have to be lived with. Better they are lived with well. The central problem is that unionists, at least as spoken for by the politicians many elect, cannot handle reality. So those who confront reality should do X, Y and Z? Perhaps.
X is to think of ways around the blockage. Whatever you think of their ideas these are what Alliance, Ireland’s Future, People Before Profit, the SDLP and Sinn Féin work at. Y is to find routes out of their disadvantage for the poorest, worst-educated northerners - the bigger number of them Catholic, as ever. Z is to behave better than unionist political spokespeople, who do such a ropey job for their community. It is worth staying well above their cantankerousness and distortion.
Rising above grievance to find new horizons for yourself and your family lifts people. Time enough later to respond to attacks; getting sucked into anger and bitterness is bad for the head. Why recommend that?
Mostly, though, what came off the Kate Hoey efforts last week was defeatism. Circle the ever fewer wagons, came the thin and hopeless cry. ‘We’re surrounded! They’re in all the top jobs!’
And under foot were little pieces of grit purporting to be legal remedy; cleverness of the same kind as the DUP hokey-cokey ministers in-and-out, remember that? Warding off full-scale power-sharing rather than verbalise the Doc’s late life handstand. Remember the admiration for sharp young aides, supposedly running rings around slow-footed republican ex-cons? Turned out those brains all went into the renewable heating scheme and something similar.
Reports have it that former leader Peter Robinson has been guiding ‘strategy’ for a while again now. Weeks of strategising, says a well-informed analyst. More clever plans and cunning tricks. Oh no, please no.
It’s a reminder of the limits of cleverality. ‘An Oxbridge First!’ an overawed chap gasps of someone else, admiration audibly dulling his own intelligence. Hang on. Didn’t Nelson McCausland get a First? I rest my case.
Academic success, the Catholic assertiveness building throughout the Troubles at one end of the selective system that dumps so many at the other end, has transformed society and institutions. Not equally, not all of them, but more than enough to cause clunkily-worded resentment. Academic access industriously worked has inevitably built increasing influence in ‘the professions’, the spine of a class that once dominated Unionist Northern Ireland.
People whose community created the old elite and de-selected others dumped their own people into self-perpetuating disadvantage. Like its smaller ancestor, the newer Catholic middle class loves its grammar schools. But some genuinely want to end selection for the good of all, unlike the Protestant aficionados who white out those with few or no qualifications.
Both main NI communities are orphans after a fashion, regarded with indifference or even hostility by their mother nations. Pre-Troubles that was a bigger problem for nationalists, less so for unionists who so comprehensively controlled the playpen. Now it is a bigger problem for unionists, who having lost control of Northern Ireland and their majority are at the mercy of unsympathetic British governments.
And now it gets worse for them. The Catholic/nationalist/republican orphan is within striking distance of taking a large measure of control, Sinn Féin more likely than not to become the largest party north as well as south. Instead of attempting to woo the undecided, unionism fleers and flounces. Build support for the union? Instead, their crude superiority by numbers gone, they insult and/or cling to obscurantism and denial.
The hardest of the precepts tossed out so blithely above is the injunction to be better, to avoid anger. While unionist politicos work to identify with non-mask-wearers? Masks on when inside crowded places; onward.
