THE DUP have won another battle and lost more ground.
Communities Minister Gordon Lyons has succeeded in convincing Commonwealth Games NI (CGNI) to ditch its plans to ditch the Ulster flag. Gormless Gordon – who has never passed a lamppost without walking into it – wrote a stern two-page letter to the CGNI on Tuesday outlining his strong belief that the Ulster flag should be carried at the summer games in Glasgow. The CGNI board set a new personal best by agreeing that the Minister was right and they had been wrong in 1.798 shakes of a lamb’s tail. This impressive time qualifies the CGNI to represent This Here Pravince in Glasgow in both the 100-metre u-turn and the 200-metre backstroke.
The hunt is now on for an athlete to carry the Ulster flag at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony and it’s expected that CGNI will be particularly pleased to welcome applications from the Catholic community, not to mention pathetically grateful. In a piece of further connected news, CGNI have announced that principal sponsor of the team will be Commercial Union, whose famous motto will adorn all CGNI leisurewear: “We won’t make a drama out of a crisis. Unless we’re told to.”
Back to the DUP, who – with the help of CGNI – have managed to take something that offered a genuine prospect of cross-community advancement and consign it to the ever-bigger box marked ‘Problem Not to be Touched’.
The Commonwealth is as British as warm beer; as British as old maids cycling to church at evensong; as British as the crack of leather on willow on a summer afternoon; as British as travelling long distances to kill and steal from black and brown people.
Sadly, it’s no longer the British Commonwealth because of woke leftard Trans cat people or something, but it’s still genuinely, absolutely a red, white and blue institution in the hearts and minds of a majority of people of the United Kingdom.
But unlike other familiar British institutions – the army and the monarchy, for instance – the vast majority of Catholics here are either indifferent to or don’t mind the Commonwealth while large numbers of them actively like the Common-wealth Games. I’m not going to go over the top and say the very sound of the word warms the cockles of their native peasant hearts. But they rally round their local sportsmen and women with unalloyed enthusiasm, they watch the games with intense interest and they even cheer when their heroes mount the podium to the strains of Danny Boy, an air dismal enough to put Postman Pat on anti-depressants.
Which is to say, for those denizens of Loyal Ulster who are actually serious about making the union more attractive to non-unionists, the Commonwealth Games are something to work with; they are a path towards a community cohesion that doesn’t head directly towards a border poll or Irish unity. And insofar as they are perhaps unique in being an essentially British institution capable of entertaining, enthusing and attracting a Catholic, nationalist and republican audience, the games should be nurtured and treasured by those interested in shifting the direction of the public discourse on the future.
SAME OLD SAME OLD: The NI team with the Ulster flag at the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane (pic Queensland State Archives)
Instead, what we’ve seen is thin-lipped hostility, suspicion and resentment at the very idea of doing something to make young Catholics more comfortable about competing in the Commonwealth Games. The insistence on keeping a flag which not a single Catholic athlete will bring back to their own street raises for me the alarming possibility that perhaps the most vocal unionists aren’t acting out of malice or spite after all when they insist that others live under flags that they put up; perhaps they actually believe that people like me will learn to live surrounded by the unicreed symbols and accoutrements of a polity they had not part in creating. And while it’s relatively easy to work round bad faith and spite because those drivers lack logic and strategy, there’s simply no dealing with that level of delusion.
I recommend the book and movie No Country for Old Men to CGNI CEO Conal Heatley, if he hasn’t already read and seen them. In the badlands of 1980s West Texas, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) is on horseback, morosely surveying the fly-blown, gory aftermath of a drug deal gone bad.
His young deputy Wendell pipes up: “It’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?”
The veteran lawman replies: “If it ain’t, it’ll do till a mess gits here.”
The flag row this week was Ed Tom’s pre-mess, a cack-handed, shabby, needless debacle that has left people angry and disappointed or – worse – victorious and delighted. The real mess doesn’t come until the opening ceremony in Glasgow in July when Catholics who had slowly but surely formed an easy, organic attachment to the Commonwealth Games will be told yet again that the Games are not theirs after all. And that, in the end, nothing here really is.
