Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: River of joyful red says sometimes right triumphs

An estimated 17,000 people took part in a protest march in Belfast city centre on May 21 to demand immediate implementation of Irish language legislation.
An estimated 17,000 people took part in a protest march in Belfast city centre on May 21 to demand immediate implementation of Irish language legislation. An estimated 17,000 people took part in a protest march in Belfast city centre on May 21 to demand immediate implementation of Irish language legislation.

What it takes to make a zombie Stormont look comparatively proper is cleaners on £9.50 an hour facing vomit-stained floors in Downing Street, security staff abused for trying to restrain the partying - guards and cleaners predominantly people of colour.

But how to sum up the seeming impossibility of being rid of today’s British government? The priority for a Belfast paper might be to weigh up two major recent gatherings, that celebration of the Irish language officially legitimised after many centuries, and the even bigger marches and rally, also well-behaved if less smiley, to celebrate Northern Ireland’s centenary. I’ll come back to it. The bottomless disgrace of Boris Johnson’s government needs pounding at every possible opportunity because the excuses for ‘moving on’ are so nakedly dishonest.

One of the first stalls is the conscienceless complaint of the guilty and their apologists, that they’ve heard it all before. Sue Gray took a last-minute smearing from the most right-wing papers on that pre-publication meeting, clearly called by the prime minister, to ask her could she just not publish. Did Boris Johnson even say please? His minions briefed that Gray had asked for the meeting, that she was ‘playing politics, enjoyed the limelight too much.’ The rest of us had always supposed she would never find a ‘smoking gun’ smoky enough to galvanise cowardly Tories into rising up.

What more did they need to hear? Talked up in advance as fearless to inflate her ‘investigation’, the brave, independent etc Gray, could have investigated at least one further meeting/party, and did not. Because, she wrote, she did not want to clash with the police, said to be focusing on the same party, in the Johnson’s flat. The Met didn’t do it; Gray decided it would be ‘disproportionate’ for her to. Some always remembered that she is herself a civil servant. There is now to be an investigation of the Met’s non-investigation, with what is said to be internal disquiet among the most senior officers. Holding your breath might damage your health.

Belfast’s big gatherings are easier to contemplate. There was cheer to be found in the Orange day even if the instinct and verbal abilities of leading unionist figures denied it. Maith sibh, An Dream Dearg; The Red Crowd did a fine job. The day said we belong, we’re here, rightfully celebrating and entirely peaceable.

Whereas the Orange-centred day delivered festiveness trimmed with anxieties and demands. Best not to be complacent. Still worth noting that the tone-deaf aggression and fury of Drumcree and Holy Cross seems long gone.

An unparalleled expert easily fielded a TG4 question about the meaning of the day. From the Erris Gaeltacht with decades broadcasting and writing in the north, Póilín Ní Chiaráin said it aimed to restore the legal status of a language first banned in the fourteenth century. She recalled (as recorded in Aodán Mac Póilin’s ‘Our Tangled Speech’) how the Shaw’s Road parents creating Irish-medium education were threatened with prosecution. Almost unbelievable now, grimly predictable then.

Political figures including Sinn Féin were well to the rear, the logistics easily decided, tactful. Republican use and sometimes abuse of Irish can be glossed over now. There is an assured northern community for whom Sinn Féin, riding high in the Republic’s politics, increasingly speaks. The latest Sunday Business Post poll puts them ahead of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael together.

Michelle O’Neill’s ‘Northern Ireland’ cost nothing. The dread of exhausted assimilation belonged to the great-grandparents of today’s young. It will be amazing if the Queen, having done the decent thing at Glasnevin, doesn’t get an SF compliment on her Jubilee.

Unionists, meanwhile, are stuck. Johnson and Liz Truss have their backs; nightmare! Northerners might despair of our politics but then there is the state of Johnson’s administration – and US politics, come to think of it.

It can take what seems like forever but that river of joyful red says sometimes right triumphs, and determination pays.