Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Do politicians speak frankly when two or three are gathered?

David Tweed pictured leaving Antrim courthouse in 2012
David Tweed pictured leaving Antrim courthouse in 2012 David Tweed pictured leaving Antrim courthouse in 2012

IF this pained and straitened time is good for anything maybe it’s for thinking, though not for dwelling on regrets that cannot be fixed.

Which is where a thought recurs, as it has over years. Do people who belong to the most closed of political societies in the north talk frankly when there are only two or perhaps at most three of them together? I mean the DUP and Sinn Féin. Politicians of other stripes have always been leakier.

It is also true, of course, that when someone has aired internal SDLP or Ulster Unionist or Alliance rows, the leakers haven’t risked being frozen out of their neighbourhood much less physical injury.

Republicans used to see little difference between leaking and informing. In the DUP world, unmasked leakers have faced cutting social criticism and isolation.

How often now, and in what way, do republicans confront the worst memories of their culture, the deaths for which the IRA were responsible? Maybe only in private and/or when drunk.

I have a vivid memory of a fairly prominent republican – long since returned to private life – fretting about depressed ‘comrades’ who could not bring themselves to talk with psychiatrists, psychoanalyists, therapists. The fear, only hinted at, was that mental health professionals might shop them.

Some would genuinely respect confidentiality but everyone knew the rules, that counsellors have to be supervised. What about the supervisors? How would they regard keeping confidences that involved serious law-breaking, no matter how far in the past? The hope was that some veteran activists would qualify as counsellors. (Did it happen on a big enough scale?)

And DUP internal relations? Jeffrey Donaldson’s ability and willingness to discipline his party on Covid restrictions is one fraught subject. Another is the north Antrim cadre who eventually apologised for eulogising a brutal dead paedophile. How many conversations did it take to squeeze out that retraction? Hard to imagine the exchanges.

‘Ah Ian, Mervyn, what are you at? Davy Tweed was larger than life??’ The initial response seems likely to have been along the lines of ‘Buzz off Jeffrey, what do you know about north Antrim?’ Though DUPpers everywhere share the nightmare of the TUV’s solo star bursting out of a north Antrim phone box, muscles bulging with ex-DUP votes.

Those were probably anxious days between Apology One, signed Ian and Mervyn, and Apology Two, grated out word by grudging word. Would Jim score most by playing the old anti-media card, lamenting how his care for those grieving had been ‘reported’? Would votes stick with the Paisley/Storey two because they’d apologised or would they lose people because they backed down - while the Orange donned collarettes to bury their brother?

Who knows if the standing of the Ulster Unionist MLA for the area has any bearing on this unspoken tussle for minds and hearts. In the last Assembly election traditional local support brought Tweed eulogiser Storey and (now anti-Covid certificater) Paul Frew in ahead of the sole UU candidate, Robin Swann. Now polls say his performance as health minister has made him the most respected northern politician. North Antrim unionist opinion on that is worth watching.

Tackling the pandemic gives politics everywhere grief, not nearly enough pain to chancers and lightweights like Boris Johnson. The currents and counter-currents set up by Covid in hardline unionism must be worth a PhD or two. Sinn Féin has had to pivot and pirouette to keep northern and southern performance aligned.

But republicans are very good, also shameless, at bringing people with them through shifts major and minor. If hospitalisation rates rise and they row in behind the Republic’s restored restrictions they’ll sell it well despite initial grizzling. Michelle O’Neill can probably make similar about-turns.

DUP behaviour in this past year alone provides most of the cover SF needs inside its own community. Anti-unionist sentiment is as sharp and strong as it has ever been. Reservations will stay in-house. In lodge.