I THINK there’s probably more chance of Jon Burrows doing what I’m about to ask him to do than of him passing a camera or a microphone any time soon. But god loves a trier and just because something’s unlikely to happen doesn’t mean to say that we should refrain from trying to help it along.
I speak from personal experience when I ask the UUP leader elect to apologise for the catastrophic 50 years of UUP misrule that brought us – helped bring us if it makes Jon feel better – the conflict and division whose full implications we haven’t yet begun to understand.
People sometimes ask me, particularly on social media, to refer to this benighted little corner of the planet as ‘Northern Ireland’ and not, as is my wont, as ‘Narnia’, ‘Are Wee Country’, ‘This Here Pravince’, ‘Noel ’n’ Alan’, ‘the Wee Six’ or ‘the Occupied Six North-Eastern Counties of Ireland’. (The last is my least popular choice, because while it best describes both the geographical and political reality, as I see it, it’s not what you’d call catchy.) And my answer is that I’m far too alienated from this chronically dysfunctional little statelet to attempt a reset on my choice of nomenclature at my time of day. But there are all kinds of resets, and resets are exactly what Jon claims to be in hot pursuit of. A reset in the UUP’s relationship with women (it hasn’t got one). A reset in its relationship with young people (it would quite like one). A reset in legacy matters and how we deal with the past (it would like a very bespoke one).
Having been vocal about the need to deal with our contested past, Jon will at the very least understand, and perhaps even accept, the role played in it by the party he joined 10 minutes ago and will lead next week. The grimly familiar 1934 words of Prime Minister James Craig – “All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State” – are often held up by partition apologists as a bit of bant and giggles, a nose-thumbing riposte to the grey and joyless Catholic ethos cleaved to by the Irish Free State. But subsequent events proved the UUP leader to have been literally and deadly serious. To the extent that by the time I popped my argumentative head into the world at the dawning of the rebellious Swinging Sixties it was in a badly-sprung bed in one of two tiny bedrooms in a house with the square footage of an MLA’s office.
Before long there were fifteen of us living there, and at five years of age I was one of eight male children of varying ages and sizes in one double bed. The gable wall of the house was slap-bang up against the gates of Roden Street barracks, which had likely crumbled under the assault of a Westlink wrecking ball by the time Jon threw his cap in the air at his passing-out parade.
The nursery rhyme old woman who lived in a shoe had so many children she didn’t know what to do. It’s unlikely, however, that she was under severe housing stress for the same reason as my mother – because she had a Sacred Heart picture glowing redly on the wall of her living room. In keeping with Craig’s boast-cum-promise of reformed faith hegemony, that was the only reason that Stormont – for half a century the UUP’s Mar-a-Lago – used the Housing Trust to keep Catholic families like mine living in conditions that the zookeepers at Bellevue wouldn’t have tolerated for the animals in their care.
I don’t propose to rehearse the vile rhetoric that UUP elected representatives at Stormont routinely used when referring to Catholics in relation to matters of housing, employment, welfare and education. I don’t propose to go over the vilely supremacist and nakedly sectarian language that UUP ministers employed when they stood up in the Stormont chamber, puffed out their chests, thumbed the lapels of their well-tailored suits and went off on another one about bead-rattling Papes. Jon may already be as familiar with the past contempt UUP legends held my family in as I am. If not, it’s all in Hansard and I recommend it as important preparatory reading as he gargles warm water and honey in preparation for his leadership acceptance speech.
I will further refrain from outlining the growing bitterness and anger at the UUP that accelerated through my primary school days into the Civil Rights campaign and subsequent 25 years of violence. Jon will be aware of the UUP’s role in stoking that bitterness and anger, even if he would likely express it in the timid ‘We got things wrong’ language preferred up to now by those members of the UUP at least honest enough to admit that the mid- and late-60s weren’t entirely an IRA plot. And if he and I might politely diverge on the inevitability of what the UUP-dominated Stormont led us into, I’m certain the language would become a little more heated when I tell him that I agree with Michelle O’Neill when she points out that for many there was no alternative to fighting back. The white-hot struggle of the student protesters in Chicago at precisely the same time are remembered now with some pride as the ‘Days of Rage’ and if you’re interested in measuring the temperature of the United States that led to the Weather Underground bombings, I recommend Bryan Burrough’s book of the same name.
But if we’ll quibble on the extent, we’re at least agreed, Jon and me, that the UUP ruling elite bore some responsibility for the 1960s descent into chaos. And to that extent it’s not a massive ask to suggest that at some point a UUP leader should say sorry for it.
If he’s so minded, the good news for Jon is that apologies by rulers and former rulers for past behaviours and failures are so common now that they’re almost trendy. Leaders in Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Belgium and Norway have all been at it. If he knocks one out he’s guaranteed invites to seminars around the world for years to come.
The bad news is that the DUP and TUV will naturally want to burn him at the stake, and since it’s unclear whether Jon is going to concentrate on chasing votes lost to hardliners or chasing votes lost to Alliance, the raucous disapproval of the more thin-lipped brand of unionism may or may not be a problem.
But public service is public service, and if there’s one thing we know about Jon Burrows it’s that he has provided a lot of public service, in and out of uniform. We know because he never stops telling us. An apology from Jon for the UUP’s obvious and multiple failures in the half-century during which it was the de facto northern state would be a remarkable act of public service. And while the union might continue to be a cold house for many, such a gesture would surely get the radiators gurgling.
