LAST Friday morning, in reply to a tweeted photograph of the Holylands the morning after St Patrick’s Day, I responded: “I lived in that area when I was a student in the mid-1970s. It was a wonderful place. That picture depresses me very much.”
And it really was a wonderful place back then. Students and residents mingled nicely together. Landlords tended to live locally and made sure that students didn’t wreck the properties, put party political posters or flags on the windows, dump garbage in the front or back gardens, or behave anti-socially.
We had parties: of course we did. But we respected the rights of our neighbours, particularly because so many of them had young families.
We didn’t jump on cars. We didn’t place record players at the front door and blast music out until the early hours of the morning.
I remember St Patrick’s Day house parties, which usually started in the early evening and ended around 1am: but I never remember the police having to be called to deal with street disturbances.
And I never remember camera crews and local journalists trying to interview students and other young people who were drunk at 10am and queuing outside an off licence.
That’s all my tweet was trying to say. A place that I had very happy memories of had lost something of that charm and character — which saddened me.
I didn’t mention students: and I certainly didn’t mention nationalists. Yet within minutes of my tweet someone had responded with photographs of loyalist bonfires and the aftermath of a parade: “but are these also not depressing and happen on a far larger scale?”
And there you had it, whataboutery in one fell swoop. It was as if I were being blamed for not mentioning or condemning something that ‘the other side’ had done.
Almost as if I were choosing to ignore their bad behaviour while prepared to point out the bad behaviour of people in an area perceived to be nationalist.
A few days later, in response to the attacks in Brussels, I tweeted: “We’ll all be back on trains and planes tomorrow and carrying on with our lives. Good people will still work to protect us. Fear won’t win.”
I tweeted it because it reflected my belief and experience that people do brush themselves down and carry on. Yet someone responded: “And Western imperialism will continue to bomb, murder, main and torture in our name for resource theft. God bless them!”
Again, I was made to feel as though I had taken one side over another, when all I was doing was pointing out the resilience of most people in very difficult circumstances.
Now, as it happens — although my leap-in-as-quickly-as-you-possibly-can critics probably don’t know this — I have been very critical of the damage that unionism/loyalism does to itself with towering infernos and disrespectful parades.
I have been very critical of the West’s interference in the Middle East. But I shouldn’t have to balance every tweet, or comment, or column, or contribution with some sort of wider context.
I shouldn’t have to say at the end of everything, “and, of course, I condemn the other side for doing the same sort of thing.”
Whataboutery is a curse. It is deployed by people who want to distract you or distract others. They make assumptions about what you mean.
They try and steer the debate to somewhere where they feel more comfortable. That’s because whataboutery allows them to gloat — and sometimes there really is no other word to use — about the sins and faults of everyone else.
It means that they don’t have to answer their own difficult questions. It saves them the bother of accepting the possibility that there really are faults on both sides.
It means they can continue with the pretence that all would be well if only the ‘other side’ just faced the unchallengeable fact that everything was their fault.
If Northern Ireland is to move on (although I’m increasingly of the view that most people don’t want to) then it will require the willingness of an awful lot of people to abandon whataboutery as their automatic default position.
It will require them to accept that it is conceivable that criticising one event doesn’t mean that you are either ignoring or defending another event.
In other words, we accept that criticism can be valid and should be listened to. We’re nowhere close to that point, of course.
Nowhere close to it in the assembly, or local council, in radio phone-in programmes or in ordinary cross-community dialogue. So what about a new kind of whataboutery?
What about we begin from the premise that there’s blame on both sides and then work out how to repair lingering hurt and damage?
