robin livingstone
• “Asbestos can kill people. It’s a really slow, horrible and lingering death and I don’t think children should be anywhere near it.”
• “I think it’s a bad thing if an electricity substation serving two hospitals on either side of the motorway catches fire because patients could die.”
• “You know what? If you put a bonfire in a soft-surface playground there’s a fair chance that some kids are going to get hurt or killed. Or at least that the playground will be destroyed.”
• “I don’t thing mannequins painted brown to represent ethnic minorities should be put in a boat and burned on top of bonfires because it might lead to even more brown people being targeted.”
IS it just me, or is it pretty uncontroversial to say the above things? Is it just me, or are these things inarguably true?
If we accept – as we surely must – that these things are both uncontroversial and accurate, then we are faced with a simple question: How come no politician in any of the areas where these bonfire atrocities take place has had the courage to say any of the above?
The answer, of course, is that if they did say these things they would be comprehensively Lundied before they’d taken another breath.
The Orange Order would cancel all leave.
The TUV would go to DefCon 1.
Jamie Bryson would ditch the blue bin and denounce them from the top of one of those huge Eurobins you see up the side of restaurants and shops.
I’m not naïve. I know that since Socrates starting sharing ideas in the marketplace of Athens people have refrained from saying things for the sake of a ‘bigger picture’. Sinn Féin won’t ever say the IRA committed atrocities, although they did, and many of them. The DUP won’t ever agree that state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries claimed an unknowable amount of Catholic lives, although it did. Etcetera, as Yul Brynner said in The King and I, etcetera, etcetera…
Elected reps and their parties daily make questionable moral choices of varying magnitude that they can reasonably argue serve a greater good. But a senior Shinner donning the old green-tinted specs when talking at memorials to IRA members, or a familiar DUP face standing under a Para flag isn’t going to hurt anyone or anything victims’ feelings. And while if there was a button I could push to stop politicians from upsetting people I would not only push it but smash it hard with the side of my fist, upset and hurt feelings are the sine qua nons of conflict resolutions, peace processes and détentes.
But while ensuring people not only get with the programme but stay there is an important if often shabby business, there’s nothing in the history of peace-building that says you have to keep quiet about clear and present dangers to small children.
I can fully understand that there’s not a single unionist politician with the ability to speak to a community centre audience in loyalist south Belfast and convince them that it’s time to admit that state forces played a huge part in prolonging and deepening the conflict. Quite simply because the essential benevolence of the armed forces is a foundational aspect of the unionist sense of self. I neither bemoan that fact nor celebrate it – I simply state it as an unchangeable reality. Unchangeable even by a latter-day Paisley, Carson or Craig.
But any unionist politician who is incapable of persuading that community centre audience that it’s time for a rethink on bonfires just doesn’t want to. Because what’s the first chapter in Politics for Dummies? That’s right – ‘Frighten People About Their Kids’. Exploiting the hard-wired human imperative of protecting children has been the go-to gambit of populists for decades, if not centuries.
• Hang the paedos.
• Hands off our kids.
• Let the children play.
• Groomers beware.
And convincing loyalist communities that keeping their kids away from asbestos or that 100-foot-high piles of pallets don’t belong beside the swings and slides doesn’t involve targeting minorities or whipping up racial tensions. It only involves telling people the truth. But larding the truth with a bit of child-shaped passion and pathos.
The bullet points write themselves…
• Yes, there are dark forces who want to destroy our culture, but we won’t have a culture if we don’t put our children first.
• It’s time to show these people that we care about our children more then they do.
• Who’ll join me in making our boneys as safe as they can be for our kids?
• Here’s a list of other, safer sites that statutory agencies are falling over each other to let us have.
The guys behind the bonfires (because it’s always guys) aren’t the bucketmouths and tuppence-ha’penny demagogues who appear magically on the scene whenever the first angry complaints appear in the papers or the first furious radio phone-in takes place. Bonfires are hyper-local and local communities care about their people – about their children – immeasurably more than loudmouth carpetbaggers and opportunists. An elected rep worthy of the name knows this better than I do. An elected rep worthy of the name knows that he or she can move the dial on dangerous bonfires by a local appeal to local sensibilities. But none of them does. None of them will.
Mostly because they are afraid. Afraid that if they do forge a local agreement that child safety is more important than a stiff middle finger to the media, Alliance and the Shinners, the agreement will be immediately put under pressure not only by the aforementioned drive-by loudmouths, but certain media whose currency is conflict, not news. Afraid that while they are able to speak directly and effectively to the people who elect them, they’ll fall apart at the first soft breeze of opposition or pushback.
And so they either do nothing, or more often and immeasurably more damagingly, they end up defending the indefensible.
Where’s the evidence that there’s asbestos on the site?
Where’s the evidence that asbestos is dangerous anyway?
Don’t hospitals have generators to run the incubators if the substation gets burned?
Chances are the bonfire won’t topple on to the swings.
The bonfire’s on the grass, stupid, it’s not on the expensive soft surface.
It’s distressingly clear on listening to these arse-clenchingly mendacious arguments that the elected reps making them are trying to convince themselves.
And failing.
