I HAVE no idea if the DUP is going to collapse the Stormont Executive over First Minister Michelle O’Neill linking arms with the people of the Garvaghy Road on… the Garvaghy Road. More importantly, I don’t care. At all.
I wish I did. I wish I would miss grammatically-challenged Gen Z-ers reading social media-ready statements in the Assembly with all the charisma and assurance of captured pilots; statements they then immediately whack out on X and Insta with headlines claiming they’ve ‘destroyed’ X or ‘owned’ Y. I wish I could mourn the loss of committee sessions which long ago replaced question-and-answer sessions with personal abuse and invective harvested five minutes earlier from a rushed Google search. But I don’t and I wouldn’t and I couldn’t. Not because I hate the place, because that could possible lead me to enjoying hate-watches of Stormont business the way I hate-watch football matches and clips of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The truth is that I am paralysingly, crushingly indifferent towards Stormont. Whenever the subject comes up I turn into a 6-foot, 14-stone shrug.
On a human level I have sympathy for the MLAs. I don’t think we can be said quite yet to be in the mouth of Christmas, although the mince pies are on the shelves and the Spar 12 Deals of Christmas ads are on the billboards; and in the mouth of Christmas, or perhaps in the mouth of the mouth of Christmas, there will be men and women desperately worried about the sudden and brutal axing of their income. I’m not indifferent enough to Stormont to stop caring about people’s livelihoods, so if the decision was mine I’d be content to push the Continue button if only to give the elected members a chance to plan for other political openings – or different careers. They’ve only got six months until Stormont effectively stops operating to concentrate on the May elections, and anybody who thinks that on being elected next spring they can rely on five years of career stability is either incredibly optimistic or incredibly stupid.
Whether they call it a day at Stormont in the coming days or weeks, or whether they stagger on till next year and wait for another crisis to do the needful, I am not hostile to direct rule, should that arrangement again be our lot. Hell, I’m not even indifferent to it.
I’m not confident that it would lead to either joint authority, effective joint authority, or joint authority lite. But it would remove the disappointment. The disappointment that even when people from backgrounds as modest as mine are in power, even when people from the same streets as me are in power, even when people with the same sense of social justice as me are in power nothing changes.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that things do change – they get worse. Would the summer bonfire, bands and marching madness be deteriorating if we weren’t fed a daily diet of performative tribalism in the Stormont chamber? Might people have more space to give or even compromise if they weren’t permanently showing off to their party peer group on the benches like kids in a lunchtime playground?
And would Drumcree have raised its rancid head again if the DUP, TUV and UUP weren’t daily reprising the Big House unionism of years gone by: Pretending to their constituents that they care a tenth as much about the red, white and blue bread and circuses that they tell working class people is the most important thing in their lives.
The truth is that the Assembly has turned into a Nolan Show clip supply factory, and with Sinn Féin out of the running for spots on the phone-in, when MLAs are not trying to get a mention they’re pitching for a seat in the studio.
But because the chamber is a kind of Lyric Theatre for political am-dram, it becomes almost impossible to establish when somebody’s more angry than usual. So we’re told that the atmosphere at the Assembly is toxic, poisonous, furious, or whatever you’re having yourself. But how do we tell if we’re not there? As the Garvaghy stand-off continues, MLAs and political correspondents may pick up on scowls in the corridors, rejected handshakes or stony silences in the lift. But as we watch the clips or read the reports, a DUP rep calling a Sinn Féin rep a bomber or a gunman seems like nothing out of the ordinary because they used the same language last week when the subject at hand was a school roof or a hospital waiting list. In other words, the Stormont lexicon and rhetoric are at once so extreme and so familiar that they prohibit meter or scan. The record is not only stuck, it’s stuck at the fastest rpm and not only can nobody change it, nobody wants to.
