IF an election were held tomorrow, I’d put down at least £100 that Sinn Féin would romp home with a whopping majority. Unionist politicians, not surprisingly, are horrified at the thought. Imagine – law-breakers being elected as law-makers. It’s enough to make Jim Allister’s face turn from its habitual red to white or blue.
That’s because somebody in the unionist camp pointed out that the Garvaghy Road had gifted Sinn Féin with an extra 40,000 votes. I don’t know how that figure was arrived at, but the general drift is accurate – Sinn Féin are on the up, the DUP are on the down.
It’s still six months and more until the Stormont election, so there’s plenty of time for unionism to dig itself out of the hole it foolishly dug. But there’s a damned-if-you–do-damned-if-you-don’t dilemma facing DUP politicians right now. Unfortunately, every time the DUP attempt to point out this contradiction – law-breaking/law making – the largest unionist party cracks its shins against several huge obstacles.
For a start, you have to ignore the fact that the Garvaghy Road residents have suffered enormous pain. You don’t have to have lived through it to know that efforts to force an Orange march down the road can result in terrible violence.
Michael McGoldrick, a graduate on the way to a better life, shot dead because he happened to be in his own taxi; the three little Quinn boys burnt to death because they happened to be Catholic in Ballymoney. The suffering of these and so many more back in the 1990s makes the hurt of rebuffed old men in bowler hats look like something from the pages of The Dandy.
Jamie Bryson seems to attract these no-hopers. The last time I was in a radio studio with him, he was election agent for a woman who declared, on air, that St Patrick was a Protestant. Oops.
The louder the DUP shouts about innocent old men walking quietly down the Garvaghy Road, the more it awakens old wounds that drip red.
Many of the people who blocked the marchers at Garvaghy Road weren’t born or were children when the Orange march stand-offs of the 1990s occurred. But they’ll have been told of the savagery that occurred the last time Orangemen insisted they were entitled to walk the King’s highway. That’s what makes them determined there’ll be no going back.
Sinn Féin must find it hard not to whoop and punch the air. You’d think that the DUP, having been half-bitten to death by their own crocodile, would be careful of stumbling into the same kind of craziness a second time. The DUP and unionism generally is in a trap of its own making. Carla Lockhart may be Queen of Ulster but she also is a loose cannon, appalling Gavin Robinson and delighting Jim Allister.
The TUV’s Timothy Gaston has argued that it’s a case of a few harmless old men walking quietly in the early morning darkness down a road while everyone’s asleep. Dream on, Timothy. And please, please don’t claim it’s a tradition reaching back centuries. For decades there was a tradition of sending little boys up industrial chimneys to clear the soot; for centuries there was a tradition of putting African in shackles and taking them to America to be sold to the highest bidder; and don’t get me started on tradition and the treatment of women.
Carla may be Queen of Ulster, but her impact on the DUP will be as beneficial for her party as the plague was for the citizens of London.
