After today there probably won’t be a politician left in the country. The Dáil is in recess. The whole government seems to have left Dublin, as have most opposition leaders, in an exodus to Washington, with ministers dispatched in a carefully calibrated pecking order to cities across the US and capitals around the world.
The same is true for our local crop who will milk the visit for all its worth, competing for photo-ops with senior American politicians, maybe even the president.
Included in the crowd from here will be party-pooper Jeffrey Donaldson and a couple of DUP colleagues to cover the bare look. He has the quare cheek. What are his aims or objectives? What does he hope to achieve? Surely to be consistent he should boycott the whole shebang? After all he boycotts everything else, achieves nothing.
Don’t be fooled by any claim he achieved anything by boycotting Stormont. The Irish Protocol is still in place, as is the Irish Sea border. British companies have to register as trusted traders to do business here, the European Court of Justice is the final arbiter, and so on.
The reality is Rishi Sunak’s priority is resetting Britain’s international relations and expanding the economy after Johnson’s catastrophic three years. Sunak’s success with the EU converted the Tory Europhobes and swept Donaldson’s objections aside.
So why is Donaldson in America? His record as a politician is appalling. He has failed in the fundamental functions and duties of a politician but worse, of a political leader.
What are those duties and functions? Very simple and straightforward. They are to produce and maintain order and justice in society. One depends on the other. You can’t have justice without order.
That doesn’t mean order as in ‘law and order’. It means political order which enables society to develop and prosper. Donaldson has caused political disorder here and as a result has deprived people of justice.
Again, justice in a society doesn’t just mean justice administered by courts, though of course it means that too. Political order means that people can be treated justly, receive their just deserts which the state has decided they should have, which they’ve paid their taxes for. Without political order that can’t happen.
Donaldson’s destruction of order means for example that children who should be receiving free school meals over the Easter holidays may not, because he collapsed the executive and the funding runs out at the end of the month.
There’s no minister in place to re-allocate funds when European Social Fund money runs out in April so scores of people’s livelihoods are at risk.
There’s no minister to allocate more cash for education and we’ll not even mention the crisis in health.
Donaldson’s in America because he was invited. He hasn’t even the wit to realise that his invitation gives the lie to the status of victim he channels, the default position of unionists.
British and Irish governments bend over backwards to appease them, accommodate them, yet unionists continue to perpetrate disorder and injustice all the while claiming to be victims.
The whole expensive saga of failed court appeals about the protocol was part and parcel of the victimhood myth. It must have cost them an enormous amount with three senior counsel, three juniors and three sets of solicitors to show the Act of Union was superseded.
Wow. Who knew? Did they never hear of the Government of Ireland Act or the Free State?
We know it cost the NIO £200,000 to defend the pointless appeals. Yet how were the ‘victims’ treated? Disgracefully, the NIO is not recouping its costs. The public will pay for unionists’ futile actions.
The fact is that the public have been paying for the consequences of unionists’ destroying political order here for decades. Donaldson insists on taking their traditional route.
