INSIDE POLITICS - PIER INTO THE FUTURE

A pier is a disappointed bridge, James Joyce once wrote. We’ve seen a lot of disappointed bridges in the past 10 years since the Good Friday Agreement was hailed as having signed, sealed and delivered a future for the North.

Driving on the literary rut for another couple of seconds, we come to Cré na Cille, the majestic novel written by the great Connemara writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain. All of its main characters are dead and are buried in the local graveyard beside the sea. All have carried the petty jealousies, snobberies, prejudices, gossip and tittle-tattle of their lives to the grave, where the sniping continues ad infinitum.

Yesterday we crossed that kind of divide or Rubicon.


And as the results trickled in, we got the accompanying flood of negativity and bickering. Paisley’s bellicose remarks about republicanism, democracy and evil set the tone. Soon doubts were being expressed about the March 26 deadline. The media honed in on other problems. How could Sinn Fein say it was committed to policing and then parlay its way out of its own MP Michelle Gildernew’s comments? (She said she would refuse to contact the PSNI about suspicious dissident republican activity.)
Beyond that, there was the more universal brand of pessimism. The DUP and Sinn Fein had almost wholly emasculated the more moderate SDLP and the Ulster Unionists. Extremism had won out. Tribalism had triumphed. This wasn’t power-sharing. It was cantonisation. It was Balkanisation. Another false dawn.

All those disappointed bridges. The IRA ceasefire in 1994; the Good Friday Agreement; the Weston Park agreement in 2001; Hillsborough in November 2003; The IRA declaration that it was standing down in July 2005; decommissioning that winter: the St Andrews Agreement of last October; Assembly elections; and March 26.

To be sure it was sad to see the SDLP slip down to just 16 seats and have to face the reality of having only one ministry. It wasn't nice to see moderate unionism outflanked, outmanoeuvred and outplayed by the DUP.

I have likened Sinn Féin before to the cuckoo who laid its egg in the SDLP nest. Or as a senior SDLP figure put it this week, SF has stolen the SDLP’s clothes, ill-fitting as they are. And on the other side, the same can be said for the DUP’s stealthy moderation over the past five years.

But there’s another version of history that could be inferred from this week’s events. The DUP and SF were both given thumping mandates. And strangely enough, the mandates were very much pro-devolution, pro-powersharing.

This was clearly demonstrated by the routing of the splinter republican and loyalist parties. The former SF activists who opposed its decision on policing got salamandered at the polls. The handful of other DUP naysayers got trounced – including Paul Berry in Newry-South Armagh. The UK Unionist Party leader Robert McCartney saw his seat disappear and his party reduced to an empty husk.

One of the great paradoxes of this election was that the candidate who actually took Bob McCartney’s seat was Brian Wilson, winning the Green Party its first seat in the Assembly. That was a crucial breakthrough.

This was a small sign of hope, of a society keen to move on, to make a painful transition, to move from crisis to normality, from vetoism to democracy. It was shown too in the relatively stable showing of the SDLP (admittedly with slippage) and by the strong showing of the Alliance Party. They just scraped their six seats in 2003 but comfortably retained and consolidated this time around.

From parsing the results you got a sense that the main political parties are lagging behind their electorate, that they has not quite copped on to the sense of impatience there is for change. There were a couple of neat illustrations of that.

For one, there was the election of the first Assembly member from an ethnic background. Alliance MLA Anna Lo, who took a seat in South Belfast, was born in Hong Kong.

And then there was the eyebrow-raising (if slightly unscientific) text poll run by Stephen Nolan on his show on BBC radio. Some 83% of respondents wanted the principal parties to enter government, without further negotiation. That bears repeating. Without further negotiation.

Of course, the DUP being the DUP, they will do things at their own pace. And that may mean further negotiation, lots of it. At the same time, while the Reverend roared as of old, other figures of the party were making more mollifying sounds. Jeffrey Donaldson volunteered the observation on Morning Ireland yesterday that perhaps Michelle Gildernew had been ‘off message’ in her comments on dissident republicans. Nigel Dodds was also clarifying and softening his ‘not in my lifetime’ stance, saying it related solely to the appointment of a SF justice minister, not to sharing power with republicans.

Granted the DUP will not be rushing to sign their names to devolved government immediately. We are still standing on a pier. But we are so close to the other side that already it’s beginning to feel like a bridge.


This is my column from today's Irish Examiner

Examiner column January 13th

It started life as a once-off musical collaboration, an eclectic group of artists came together to record a legendary concept album.

In a marathon session in an isolated castle they laid down the tracks of a recording that would go down in history, The Long Good Friday: Eternity and a Day. It was an immediate and soaraway success for Northern Shower and was lapped up by millions of fans in Ireland, North and South in the coming months. But like a lot of new bands, the gigs and the touring and lifestyle eventually wore all the hope and optimism down.

Now a decade later, the Northern Shower has returned to try that difficult second album. As it happens, they hope to finish recording it by the end of March, just in time for Easter. And its working title? What else but The Long Good Friday II: From Here to Eternity.

Like the first, it is high risk though somehow in our bones we feel they can pull it off.

There have been some changes in the band’s line-up since then. Creative differences led to David Trimble walking out several years ago and he is now pursuing a solo career. The Clancy Brothers sound of the SDLP sounded a bit dated so they drafted in The Beards, former punk traditionalists who have been experimenting with a more mellow sound over the past few years.

And just to give it a bit of Northern soul fizzle, the producers went looking for the Reverend Righteous, a cult figure who has been doing the rounds of the Northern circuit for decades. His controversial all-action stage show has made him into one of those figures who you either love or hate, but you just can’t ignore him. The producers got very excited when he arrived. Though he can no longer belt them out like he used to, his booming voice, hip-hop lyrics and complete unpredictability gave the Northern Shower the edge the producers were looking for.

But will it work? They’ve certainly come up with a strong list of ditties.

Children of the Devolution. A couple of numbers from the Police. I Fought the Law and the Law won. Power to the People. Stuck in the Middle With You. Come Out Ye Black and Tans. And a reworking of the Beatles LP, Devolver.

Yes, it would be fatuous to suggest there has been no creative tension between the stars, and yes, there have been a few stand-up rows over lyrics.

But at least there has been some links to the past for you nostalgics out there. Unbelievably, the Bert and Mr Tony are still there a decade later and still providing the same chorus line. They may have both lost their youthful boyband vigour since then and we may have all tired of their voices. But there’s no doubting their ability when it comes to a song and dance routine, especially the Bert’s tried and trusted ‘man in the anorak’ cameo which goes down a treat every time.

And now we come to a critical phase of the project. They have been working hard on the choreography aspects, with Mr Tony and Hugh Orde both coming in to do pre-planned star-turns during the week on MI5 and plastic bullets.

But despite the efforts to keep the whole creative project going, it’s sometimes hard when you are dealing with such a collection of massive egos, oh, I’m sorry I lost the run of myself, sensitive souls.

And The Beards meet today to decide whether they’ll continue with the project or call it a day.

“It’s just the chemistry, man,” an insider told us. “These cats. They just ain’t gelling. The vibes are not good.”

But you must remember that The Beards survived the worst excesses that went with their punk traditionalist lifestyle. Unfortunately, a hell of a lot of others weren’t so lucky.

Unlike the Reverend who still has weekly residencies in venues throughout the North, The Beards have sacrificed everything for this one project.

Having taken at least two years longer than they thought, and having gone woefully over budget, they had to take a short break around Christmas 2004.

Then they did a quick money-making album, Beards and Balaclavas: The Greatest Hits, which did wonders for their bank balance (€40 million reputedly) but led to accusations that they had sold out creatively.

Anyway, they are now back on track, and rehearsing furiously to get this project finished on time. Yes, it is difficult when they and the Reverend do separate rehearsals. Nobody is even sure if they’re singing out of the same hymn sheet.

Two minutes of Questions and Answers last night. And it happened to be Ian Paisley junior pontificating (yes, that's a slightly inappropriate verb to use with him) about the death of Saddam Hussein. He was coming to some point about the dictator that I didn't wait around to hear. The bit I heard was his wanting to qualify it by condemning the manner of his death.

The day after the mobile phone footage of Saddam's hanging came available (and we heard for the first time the hoodlum haunts from the goons in that dark dank hanging chamber) Christopher Hitchens wrote an amazing piece in the online magazine, Slate, that was the last word on the hanging.

Hitchens has been way off beam on Iraq and has persisted in the face of the overwhelming evidence against his argument.

But here his account was impeccable, especially the observation that the only person who retained any shred of dignity in that awful place was the tyrant.

Of course, us humans being hard-wired as we are, it is inevitable that others would draw the same conclusions using more or less the same words. But the Hitchens observation gave a neat demonstration of how quickly everything moves nowadays.


Take the phrase: Nobody has a monopoly on suffering. Somebody coined that in the North once upon a time. Freshly minted it was an effective arguing point. But over a period of a year or two, it spread out among the population, and after a while evereybody was using it. By that time, any profundity the phrase had had been hacked out of it.

Paisley junior repeated the Hitchens line on Q and A last night and with faux basso profundo gravity reeled out the "only person with dignity" line. How quickly things move! Hardly a week after Hitchens first wrote the words, they had already become hopelessly cliched.