Derry turned out for Martin McGuinness and filled church pews with people from all over Ireland plus big name guests, but Derry is a world of its own.
Crowds watching a hearse through the centre of Belfast, as they did in Dublin for Gay Byrne? It will be a long time or never before a daughter or son of this town has that sort of citywide final salute.
Though Ireland is no longer the country of his prime, Gay Byrne left this life to the acclaim of a nation. As everyone except the most self-deluded unionist knows this is no nation, nor even the slightest of countries. It therefore lacks a home-grown broadcaster that can reach across classes and divides for big ceremonial moments. To produce, for example, the line-up of musicians on-screen to raise the Parting Glass to Gay Byrne.
For all that it is skint and internally-torn at the minute, RTÉ still has some kind of state-wide status and can still measure up. They got very good value out of Gay. As did he from the platforms he crafted in the station, with decades of great researchers, many of them women, assistants and producers.
As has been well said on air and in print, Byrne the talented broadcaster didn’t make the changes in society - which have still only partly happened here – and which produced a flawed though much liberalised republic. But he listened to bright women and men around him, and shook up the complacent with delight and skill, showman that he was.
And conservative Catholic that he was in private, he gave airtime, invited and listened with patience to voices that had been silenced. Apart, perhaps, from that interview with Annie Murphy, early in the saga of revelations, exploited as she was by Bishop Casey. What Gay knew was that Eamonn Casey had worked hard for homeless Irish labourers in England. It warred with sympathy for the woman in front of him, and the bishop won.
But people decided his long career served them well, and showed it.
*****
‘Never been more polarised.’ As this unwanted poll staggers out of the winter dark, the best explanation of some comment is that people probably get tired, stop listening to themselves and just lip-flap. Never more polarised? Come on; hunger strikes, Drumcree blockades, flags protesters blocking roads while Matt Baggott’s PSNI looked on?
‘Pan-republican pacts. Pan-nationalism.’ Unionists have always lobbed this as an accusation across the communal divide, utterly unaware how ridiculous they sound. Presumably what they do themselves is so much a protection of the natural state of affairs, their idea of ‘the norm’, that any opposition is self-evidently bad.
Unionists, where gerrymandering failed to shrink the nationalist vote sufficiently, never ‘split the vote’, as at least some younger observers are registering this time around. As they also register that nationalists and republicans for the most part have traditionally fought each other to a standstill. Electoral history has not discouraged indignation about ‘sectarian headcounts’ that may hurt the DUP.
The SDLP, in the bizarre position of having the classiest media performers with no party to speak of, takes stick from some for breaking with a policy that has cost it dearly. Colum Eastwood, standing in Foyle against abstentionist MP Elisha McCallion, has talked hard to defend the decision not to stand a candidate in North Belfast against equally abstentionist John Finucane. But the recent Spotlight series was strong on unionist links to loyalist paramilitarism and the collusion that killed Finucane’s father. Taking the seat of the DUP’s leader in Westminster is an aim that wins hearts.
The Ulster Unionists under new management bowed to loyalist threat. Alliance cannot bring itself to give up on their ‘surge’. Despite awareness of Sinn Féin self-centredness the other Remainer parties have made common cause, Greens perhaps sacrificing their own surge. Against the stupidity of Brexit plus DUP misrepresentation, Alliance’s stand sounds self-righteous, and deluded.
