It’s a funny old world. In response to a tweet about my appearance on the panel for Monday’s UTV’s View From Stormont, one person replied, ‘No unionists on tonight’, while another (obviously blissfully unaware that I’m an atheist), wondered if I was ‘the token Prod’. It’s the sort of jibe I’m used to and goes with the territory of sometimes being described as a ‘unionist commentator’.
As it happens, it’s not a description that worries me all that much. I am a unionist (in that I would vote to remain in the UK if a border poll were called) and I am a commentator. But I am not someone who will take the unionist side in every argument and assume, by extension, that every other worldview is wrong.
If I think unionism/loyalism is on the wrong track, I will say so. If I think nationalism/republicanism is on the wrong track, I will say so. If I think Alliance, ‘others’ and the smaller parties are on the wrong track, I will say so. And if I think they are right, I will say so.
I get criticised by all sides. I accept that. But I do have a quiet pride in the fact that most people – including many unionists – believe I take a fairly even-handed approach to my analysis. I could be wrong, but I think I’m the only commentator/columnist who has been asked to speak at conferences and panel events organised by the UUP, DUP, TUV, PUP, SDLP, SF, Alliance, Greens, NI21 and even PBP. I appear regularly on BBC, UTV and RTÉ programmes. I’ve been interviewed by authors and academics writing about NI politics and both sides of the conflict.
I’ve written for the News Letter, Belfast Telegraph, Irish Times, Irish Independent, Times, Guardian, Sunday Life, Sunday World, County Down Spectator, Newtownards Chronicle and many others. And, of course, I write for The Irish News. Indeed, there was a time when, for a number of years, I was writing a weekly political column for both the Irish News and News Letter (and there’s not many columnists can say that...).
Everyone involved in these print, radio and TV platforms is aware of my unionist/pro-union backgrounds. I make no secret of it. All of the political parties and lobby groups who ask me to address them know my background. And anyone who asks me to write or speak will confirm that I don’t write or speak to please a particular audience or readership. I write and say what I believe. It may be nonsense; it may annoy the hell out of you; it may make you turn down the volume or tear up the paper. I don’t care. It’s what I believe. If you want an echo chamber analysis then that is your choice.
In the News Letter, for example, where I was a columnist for 20 years, I regularly challenged the overwhelmingly unionist readership about the strategy and direction of unionism. In many, many columns for this newspaper, with its overwhelmingly nationalist readership, I challenge the SDLP and SF about their strategy and direction of travel. And in both newspapers, and everywhere else I write, I have tried to see the world through the eyes of my political opponents: the Atticus Finch approach – if you want to understand someone then find a way of looking at your world from their point of view.
It's the approach to analysis I have always taken. Explain and defend your beliefs, while trying to understand those who disagree with you. Always keep it civil, because once catcalling replaces civility then neither side is listening.
Be strong enough to challenge your own certainties; and also, strong enough to accept – even take on board – an opinion from your opponent. If we lived in a world where your own side was in permanent control of all it surveyed (which would, I imagine, be a fairly dull place) then you could choose to stop your ears and shut your eyes. But we don’t. So, we see each other and hear each other and must find a way to co-exist.
None of this, of course, is terribly original. But I think it’s worth saying because there are still people who think that I’m not really a proper unionist because I write for The Irish News. I’ve also met people who think that a former director of communications shouldn’t have been offered a column in The Irish News in the first place.
When I criticise SF, people tweet that I’m just ‘letting my unionist slip show’; while criticism of unionism is greeted with, 'well, he’s working for his nationalist paymasters today'. I don’t care. I really, really don’t.
I write and say what I want to write and say. I’ve never once been asked to adjust a column to suit the readership and nor have I ever been asked on to a programme (radio or TV) to espouse a particular opinion. Presenters never know what I’m going to say until I say it; and I don’t know their question until it is asked. That’s as it should be. I work on the assumption that somebody somewhere in each platform and outlet believes its worth asking me to write or say something because their readers, viewers and listeners might (still) be interested.
If that doesn’t make me the ‘right sort’ of unionist, so be it. If it means I annoy unionists, nationalists, ‘others’ and anyone else who might stumble across me, so be it.
Maybe we just need to get away from the notion that it’s the job of a columnist and commentator to take one side and one side only.
My job, as I see it, is to challenge, rattle cages, deconstruct and ask if maybe, just maybe, we can do things better and differently. I may not be the ‘right sort’ of anything, but I can live with that.
