Opinion

Mary Kelly: Beattie bounce goes flat

Doug Beattie's mea culpas were a hard listen, though lightened by the stammering of politicians from other parties who came on to criticise him and found themselves confronted by some of their own colleagues' unsavoury antics

UUP leader Doug Beattie's fortunes changed dramatically in just days this week. Picture by Mal McCann.
UUP leader Doug Beattie's fortunes changed dramatically in just days this week. Picture by Mal McCann. UUP leader Doug Beattie's fortunes changed dramatically in just days this week. Picture by Mal McCann.

THE curse of writing a weekly column is that a week is no longer a long time in politics, it can all change overnight - as Doug Beattie has learned.

Just days after basking in the sunlit polls of LucidTalk which crowned him the most popular leader, he was forced to do the modern equivalent of self-flagellation: appearing on The Nolan Show, then Talkback, to repeat his mea culpa like the Ancient Mariner.

It was a hard listen, though on Nolan it was lightened up by the stammering of politicians from other parties who came on to criticise Beattie and found themselves confronted by some of their own colleagues' unsavoury antics.

Diane Dodds was asked about party members who made mooing noises when the Women's Coalition leader, Monica McWilliams was speaking in the Assembly and Clare Bailey was asked about a Green Party councillor tweeting about the cleavage of a Eurovision contestant.

Later, a series of derogatory tweets by three Sinn Féin MLAs were highlighted, with Michelle O'Neill condemning them as "wrong and unacceptable".

Beattie's lame gag was straight out of the Bernard Manning joke book and he rightly apologised.

But to quote another comic... "There's more."

A series of tweets from his past was raked up - one after another they pointed to casual racism, misogyny and a mindset worthy of its own 1970s series.

It was probably a big hit in army circles, but not so funny on civvy street and certainly not when you're promoting the Ulster Unionists as inclusive and welcoming to all.

However, the UUP have for now circled their wagons around their leader.

It's only three months to the election and who else have they got?

"Don't drink and dial" was the advice from one of the characters in the great movie Sideways. A careless tweet is far more dangerous.

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IT'S picked up seven Golden Globe nominations and is likely to see Bafta and Oscar nods too, but I'm afraid Kenneth Branagh's love letter to Belfast left me cold.

I get that it wasn't meant to be a gritty documentary- style retelling of our city's history of violence and sectarian hatred and that it was a child's eye view, seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Buddy.

But did it have to be quite so sentimental? And has anyone heard of a kid from Tigers Bay being called Buddy?

The riot scene at the start was well choreographed and terrifying, though shouts of "Let's burn the Catholics out" were a tad polite. I recall the word was usually "Fenians".

Then there was the cloying crush between Buddy and the girl in his class he wanted to marry "but she's a Catholic". He was reassured by daddy, played by Jamie Dornan, that religion didn't matter.

Though how there was a Catholic in his class, when she was more likely to be in a different school, wasn't explained.

Journalist Max Hastings, drew fire on Twitter after his piece in the Times which contrasted the rose-tinted Buddy's view with the fate of nine-year-old Patrick Rooney who was shot in the head in his Divis Flats bedroom when an RUC armoured car raked the building in 1969.

Hastings helped carry the fatally wounded boy from his home, so he knew what he was talking about.

He praised the film-maker's artistry and insisted he wasn't suggesting Branagh's Belfast was a falsehood, "only that it is a lot less ugly than the city I knew. And back in 1969 his tribe bestrode the dunghill, while Catholics suffered terribly at Protestant hands."

It would be unfair to expect Branagh's film to portray a different truth from the one he knew himself, nor to expect it to be a record of how the Troubles started.

But the clunky dialogue did not do justice to the nuanced performances of the cast from Jude Hill, Jamie Dornan, Caitríona Balfe and Ciarán Hinds. Judi Dench needed more work on her accent which veered south for most of the film.

It did have its moments though and the most moving part came in the final dedication to "those who stayed, those who left, and those who were lost".

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I'M glad the DUP group on Belfast City Council finally saw sense and dropped their opposition to the call for no flag to be flown to celebrate Prince Andrew's birthday.

Not only was he pals with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, we now learn he provided staff with a laminated sheet so that his 72 stuffed toys - mostly dressed as sailors - could be lined up in a specific order on his bed.

He would "shout and scream" if they weren't right.

And people bow to this man?