Stormont 2020 has surely had one of the shortest ever political honeymoons.
Does it matter that the parties are clearly desperate to pass their embarrassingly-timed pay rise on to charity, that Sinn Féin grabbed the titchy glory from the SDLP of being Mr Speaker, that DUP figures have had a go at the SF finance minister instead of Boris Johnson about the cash promised or not promised?
None of this looks good. And to anyone who believed ‘get Stormont back to cut hospital waiting-times etc etc’ would work, it may bring total disenchantment. Like the constant state of Jim Allister, sole representative of the party he leads at Stormont, although Allister dances on the flaws of everyone else’s policies while gladly dissecting the over-paid, under-employed spadocracy.
Watching him outshine various MLAs performing in ‘the chamber’ and ‘the Great Hall’ as the new show cranks up, the thought occurred that the hall itself has a personality, a wintry humour, somewhat like Allister’s. There was that moment two decades back related by the BBC’s Mark Simpson. Standing there between reports when, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, first minister David Trimble came charging out of the corridor on one side of the hall towards the corridor on the other.
Why so fast? He was racing to the office of the deputy first, Seamus Mallon. (Not Trimble’s deputy, let it be noted yet again to properly honour the man buried yesterday, though that was how both Trimble and Paisley styled as subordinates the holders of a post conceived as equivalent to theirs, but unfortunately titled in a form that inflamed the old yen to be boss.)
As so often with Trimble, the haste came from thoughtlessness, self-absorption. He only had about three minutes to give Mallon notice of his plan, before he announced it in the chamber. Long ago now, all this, a time of several resignations one of them by Mallon who later de-resigned, with a deal of helpful finagling by officials. All of it to ease UUP discomfort at sharing the place with Sinn Féin, and to smooth over the eking out of IRA decommissioning.
Obituaries and recollections have been speckled with references to the Mallon short fuse. Trimble, as many also agreed, would have taken it out of a saint. Unionists who enjoyed listing David’s difficulties in working with Seamus looked forward to his partnership with the next man in Mallon’s post.
Mark Durkan, generally regarded as mild-mannered; weeks later mild Mark was said to be difficult too. Ulster Unionists didn’t take to power-sharing any more happily than the DUP. Outsiders were initially baffled that the anti-violence, wholly-constitutional SDLP seemed little more congenial than the IRA’s political voice and fared little better in off-the-record, behind-the-hand dispatches.
And here we are, in the next century. As this decade’s honeymoon fizzles, Jim Allister has been registering his bottomless scorn for Stormont’s works, if not its pomps. His most sustained recent lament has been against Irish, whose recognition Jim takes as further proof of the conspiracy to ‘de-Britishise’ the north. My, how he maintains his burning grievance, amidst the marble and the pillars, his backdrop the grand staircase at the top of which stands James Craig, Lord Craigavon, first prime minister of the state of Northern Ireland.
Larger than life, the statue, forbidding and dark if not quite the presence of Edward Lord Carson on his pillar. The gall of unionist whingeing in our rampageously British public spaces is a bad joke.
So, not a serious plea for more bronze and granite, plaques and plinths, not even for representation of the women so long invisible. Let’s hear it for leaving Carson be but carting Craig off to a municipal storehouse, if only to foam-fleck hours of Nolan and Talkback. Come to think of it, a likeness of Seamus Mallon with his pipe in his mouth would adorn the top of that staircase.
