Stop fighting a war that is over, Michelle O’Neill responds to unionist complaint about her commemoration of the eight IRA-men the SAS killed, the Loughgall Martyrs of republican legend.
Everyone, O’Neill says, has a right to ‘remember their dead without being demonised’.
The softly-spoken, current incarnation of Arlene Foster, kicking off encounters with Irish-speakers as O’Neill’s commemoration became news, said her Loughgall pitch was ‘wrong and backward looking’; disappointing when she, Foster, was ‘trying to make this a shared place for everybody in Northern Ireland.’
Hmmm. After a year’s worth of crude ignorance, it is a bit soon to want credit for starting to show civility, a bit rich for Foster to be disappointed by someone else’s behaviour.
Good that she can meet schoolgirls and language activists and say go raibh maith agat without flinching.
A signal of rethinking, if this prefigures acceptance not just of Irish the language but Irish the identity, as cherished by the north’s Irish. Nobody misses the main point, that the DUP leader plus at least some of those around her belatedly recognise how she electrified the Sinn Féin vote by her own bad behaviour.
She won’t be doing that again. But ‘backward looking’, from someone who describes her own culture as ‘British Orange’?
As for O’Neill, thirty years after Loughgall and with ‘the war’ over now for at least twenty years according to republicans, it is past time to make the words real for republicans as well as unionists.
Over should mean over. The SAS opened up as the Loughgall eight crashed through the gates of the barracks with a bomb in a digger, which now makes them the patriot dead to O’Neill. The best republican rewrite-teams can do with that is not mention the bomb.
No matter how many martyrs’ memorials she addresses Michelle won’t look any more like Martin, the human bridge between wartime IRA and peacetime Sinn Féin.
Or is the plan to be still memorialising the republican version of the Troubles 300 years down the line - as Orangemen remember Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne and the humiliation of the Catholic Irish that followed King Billy’s triumph?
Now there would be a fine act of simultaneous reciprocation, and reconciliation. Republicans proclaim an end to commemorations, and the Orange Order declares itself redundant for the good of society.
Foster will not have the Troubles rewritten, no sirree, but with traditional unionist insistence on one law for security forces and another for everyone else she will not stand for prosecution of soldiers and police. Still, there she was at the weekend telling Glaswegians there is a plan to make a plan to ... make the case for the union, in time for the centenary of the state’s foundation.
Starting now, or last week, unionists have to be proactive and positive to ‘make unionism more appealing to everyone within our society.’ The majority has gone. If only across the water and at one remove from her party faithful, Foster faced it, said the words, preached a remedy.
We have been here before. Behold the recurring search for the unicorn, the Catholic unionist, the creature who can make up the numbers. But if the search imposes better manners and makes civility and ‘reaching out’ consistent, won’t that be good?
An essay in the Irish News has had Foster pitching Brexit less as victory, more as challenge to be flexible.
Thanks to that displaced majority in the last election, a DUP leadership – whoever it consists of - is well into presentation of Foster Mark 2. Sir Jeffrey and the Conservative lobby for a security forces amnesty will keep on raising hackles.
But if we’ve heard the last of a rasp-tongued Arlene, if Gregory Campbell can manage to keep on voicing respect for Irish and lets his monoglot parody fade from mind, a better time to ask for reciprocation might still arrive.
And will Sinn Féin begin to make headway meanwhile with the Protestant republican, the mythical individual who in crowd formation will follow up applying for Irish passports by calling for a border poll?
That’s decades away unless Brexit truly does tear up the Union and shake economies apart; though pragmatic, unromantic decisions to go for the full Irish might just come sooner.
At any rate, next month’s first past the post poll won’t reveal shifting allegiances. The two main camps will go out on polling day still clinging to the dream United Ireland or the damaged United Kingdom. Calling the contest sectarian changes neither minds nor hearts.
