A FORTNIGHT ago it seemed an idea to look, if only sideways, at how Martin McGuinness as Sinn Féin’s lead northern figure has weathered his job-share with Arlene Foster.
Then at the last minute, when doctors are said to have recommended medical tests, he cancelled an investment trip with Foster to China.
The explanation emerged too late to discourage the guesses that he simply couldn’t face formal dinners stiff with Union Jacks, toasts proposed by the unpopular British minister Jeremy Hunt, touring Chinese cities with Foster, she radiating pride in a UK delegation flying the flag abroad.
Another day might be more appropriate to discuss illness in public figures and the rights and wrongs of demands for openness.
But as to why the first minister and DUP leader shows no inclination to give McGuinness a centimetre of magnanimity, a question routinely pre-empted by insistence that ‘the Fresh Start agreement’ has welded the two together in a non-aggression pact, here goes.
Nationalists see Foster as entirely aggressive. Why does she offer nothing of value to the people McGuinness represents? The puzzlement of innocents is not smart, the answer simple.
Should she be generous and graceful to strengthen Stormont, to maximise unionist votes, win over disheartened Ulster Unionists, maybe even hook in disillusioned liberals?
But Sinn Féin is going nowhere. They will not walk out, therefore they have no leverage. So the answer to the first part of the proposition is that Stormont is safe enough.
And wooing unionist votes? The threat that Mike Nesbitt posed diminished fast. He looked liberal for a while – did that help him? South Antrim and Fermanagh were gains for different reasons.
Has the Opposition ploy worked? Probably not, and he’s out of the executive until the next election.
The arguments all point away from generosity. Looking at McGuinness, even before the health scare, most could see a political figure gritting his teeth, getting nothing, or rather insults, in return for putting a stoical face on a poor show.
But what’s that to Arlene? Makes it tough for the old IRA boss, for Sinn Féin? Good.
Foster has a party and constituency that she now commands. Nobody whose opinion she cares for is likely to tell her the current course is unwise, to call her behaviour calculated to harden bad feelings and further postpone any reconciliation.
Nobody in unionism is calling on Arlene to do anything dramatic. The last Stormont drama was Nesbitt’s walkout, the creation of an opposition.
In the flawed heating scheme dreamed up by officials working to Foster the opposition have a genuine scandal to complain of, but thanks to Stormont’s constraints, and muffled SF responses, small chance of genuine and apt redress.
Respect the Irish language, pleads a weakened, off-balance G Adams. Meant as a dignified demand, it sounds almost piteous. The Foster audience, primed and in turn echoed by Arlene, hears instead the long-running nationalist demand for inquests into deaths caused by security forces, investigation of collusion with loyalists.
Foster enemies – Paisley Junior, David Simpson, Edwin Poots, perhaps Sir Jeffrey? - are disunited, leaderless but mainly silent because she has done nothing they can paint as bad or stupid. Instead the talk in Orange halls must be ‘isn’t she doing well against McGuinness?’
In the early 70’s for unionists it had to be majority rule, but Willie Whitelaw held firm and said ‘nothing without the SDLP’. Know-nothings backed by paramilitaries crashed the first power-sharing experiment.
It took until 1985 for the British government to summon enough gumption to make the Anglo-Irish Agreement, then the brains and guile of John Hume with Dublin and US support to help Adams and McGuinness end their war.
Now Protestants are relaxed, the threat of changing demographics contained. The assembly doesn’t give them majority rule but Arlene has made it more acceptable than Ian and Peter did.
In public together today’s first and deputy first look gnarly, chuckle-free. ‘Partnership’ is a dead parrot. Unionists get to run more of the show than they thought they would. Sinn Féin is at a dead end, up a dark alley.
Arlene appears to regard them as unionists regarded the civil rights movement, as looking for ‘concessions.’ Grants for GAA pitches?
What’s the harm in young Givan getting another photo opp. SF has lost its menace: no percentage now in painting the GAA as the IRA at play.
The enemies gone to ground could yank Arlene’s chains yet, but for the moment she rules.
She will not be resigning, or conceding. Why would she?
