IT is rare nowadays for a public figure to come out with the sort of sectarian garbage that Edwin Poots offered on TV last Friday.
Usually people keep that level of trash for social media and more often than not operate behind a fictional persona.
Obviously Poots feels no necessity to produce any justification for his statement about the relative rates of Covid infection in nationalist and unionist areas.
Evidently he feels there's no need because instinctively that's the way he thinks. Derry and Strabane is the highest, Mid and East Antrim the lowest, so two and two make five or six.
Mind you, the fact that Ballymena was brought into special measures some time ago is conveniently forgotten.
Does he assume no nationalists live in Lisburn and Castlereagh or no unionists live in Derry and Strabane?
Never mind: nuance doesn't fit his worldview.
Some reports on this matter have contrived to tie Poots's shameful outburst into a general picture of a dysfunctional executive and strained to connect it with Carál Ní Chuilín's effort last Friday have a football match played behind closed doors.
There is no comparison or connection whatsoever. Poots's remarks were an unforgivable sectarian slur - full stop.
Ní Chuilín's letter was a sensible interpretation of Covid-19 restrictions: crowds shouldn't gather even if they separate inside a stadium.
Equating the two is whataboutery. Reporters should know better.
In fact, last week demonstrated that the Stormont executive doesn't have to be dysfunctional. All right: it took them three days of arguing before they came up with a compromise in the early hours of Wednesday morning but there was an agreement in the end.
The truth is that's what usually happens and was happening for six years until it all collapsed in 2016.
The disgraceful Poots affair is entirely different. It's mainly but not exclusively a matter for the DUP.
His provocative rejection of a compromise deal he neither spoke against nor voted against as a member of the executive is dishonourable, but his disrespect for his party leader who had just endorsed the compromise in writing with the other four party leaders is shocking.
It is an affront that exposes the weakness of Arlene Foster as party leader because both he and she know she doesn't have the authority to sack him as he unquestionably deserves. Is it not appalling to keep a person like him in the party, let alone as a minister?
The leader of the UUP says he would have sacked him. Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd has called for him to apologise - futile as you would expect.
What's revealing is that no-one in the DUP has uttered a word of condemnation either for his reneging on a deal his party signed up to, or for claiming his party doesn't support it, but most importantly for his sectarian comments.
On the contrary, his fellow DUP dinosaur Peter '11-plus' Weir tried to justify Poots's rejection of the Covid compromise by saying Poots had a right to his opinion.
Actually, as part of a collective decision he doesn't, because he forfeited that right after the deal was struck.
More significantly Weir was not pressed to condemn Poots's sectarian remarks. He didn't even try to distance himself from them.
Now, while Poots would never resign if asked by the UUP, much less Sinn Féin, and Foster can't sack him, she can at least condemn his remarks about sectarian infection rates.
As the UUP leader said, Covid is "an equal opportunities infection".
So, if she won't condemn Poots's remarks does she endorse them? As they say in the Felons Club, "Qui tacet consentire videtur ubi loqui debuit ac potuit" - "Whoever is silent when they ought to have spoken and was able to, is taken to agree."
Or the shorter version for Arlene Foster, "Silence means consent." Well, does she?
The issue to resolve isn't a dysfunctional executive; it's sectarianism. There's no place for any minister guilty of it.
