The deal that woke Stormont from its sleep didn’t promise a Rose Garden, but then the vast estate might have one of those already.
There was little rhetoric about reconciliation, and a good thing too. We heard that a long time ago, and did any of us believe it then? Recall, if you can bear it, how the more thoughtful and less excitable prophets considered the possibility that through working together unionists and nationalists might learn to respect each other. It could be a continuing civics class; I may have written this myself.
That was when the power-sharers were the Ulster Unionists and SDLP. Some conflict resolvers bewailed our fate when these moderates were supplanted by the ‘extremes’. Which was an implicit slur on the SDLP never the mirror image of the UUP and particularly not during the preliminaries of the ‘peace process’. And then? It has been some time since anyone imagined Stormont might soften old animosity.
Most people know now that the anniversaries coming up over the next couple of years, here and across the border, will not further reconciliation. But then for those of us who can remember before ‘the peace’, indeed with fairly clear recall of before ‘the war’, possible reconciliation between those born Catholic here and those born Protestant has never been much of a belief.
Hospital wards, during chemo in particular where solidarity is stronger than traditional divides, make up a parallel universe. And holidays. ‘Met this great couple last year from Limavady/Ballymena/Bangor in Majorca/Marbella/Morocco.’ Sometimes it continues when people come home.
A big ask, reconciliation. To be real it surely needs apologies for past enmity and agreement to put shoulders to the wheel together, without recrimination, to make the future work. Can’t do that without justice, say any number of wronged individuals, the groups many belong to, and their many lawyers.
Needs mutual respect? Listening to the first responses to the agreed provision for the Irish language was a lowering experience. Last of the Penal Laws, eh; hands up all the unionists who know what the Penal Laws were. Listening to those indefatigable complaints that fewer people speak Irish than speak Chinese brought the wholly unreconciled impulse to point out that centuries back many were effectively driven to the shores of the wild Atlantic for being and speaking Irish. Sure enough, the language is not now a majority pursuit.
There was that lengthy period when speaking Irish overlapped neatly with, ‘mapped on’ as they say these days, to desperate poverty. A long time ago it stopped being just a language.
Southern politics at the minute is again demonstrating its confusion about the evolution of republicanism. Simon Coveney helped, niftily, to re-establish an executive which the DUP would share with Sinn Féin before hotfooting it back home to campaign for a new government in Dublin which must not, should not, have an SF constituent part. Because Stormont is a Mickey Mouse affair, is the explanation, so it really doesn’t matter if SF is joint top cat there.
Outgoing Fine Gael minister for justice Charlie Flanagan displayed his essential lack of cop-on by proposing a commemoration of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the (DMP) Dublin Metropolitan Police, the latter a long-forgotten force. Except it turned out that a major part of the record of both is neither forgotten, nor forgiven. Sinn Féin enjoyed running clips of Black and Tans burning Cork, the Wolfe Tones topped the polls with ‘Come out ye Black and Tans’ and had the good taste to promise the proceeds to the Peter McVerry Trust for its ‘great work to aid the homeless’.
What people remembered burned across the airwaves. A hundred years on, this, not mere decades like our bad memories. A misunderstanding, said Fine Gael. Stormont will be what Stormont will be. Sponsored ‘reconciliation’ is now effectively on a shelf. Individuals and organisations may do the best they can.
