THERE’S hardly a field of endeavour left in this loyal little corner of Paradise to which Jamie Bryson LLB has not turned his multifarious talents.
With apologies for any gigs that Squinter’s missed, Jamie has as he sits on the cusp of middle age conferred the benefits of his non-profess-ional and semi-professional acumen on taxi-dispatching, doorman-wrangling, tribunal-advising, bonfire-consulting, soccer mascoting, sports-managing, website-editing and flag-protecting.
But all these were merely side-hustles as he pursued the dream he’s had since he first burst on to the scene in a beanie and East 17 white anorak to bewail with helium-toned passion the tearing down of the union jack from City Hall. To wit, Jamie wants to don the wig.
No, that's not a cheap dig at his hairline, which has in the past few years receded faster than his electoral hopes; it is merely to point out that his most devout wish is to be called to the Bar – and not for a WKD and Babycham cocktail. His journey has been a lengthy and meandering one, punctuated by the aforementioned job market merry-go-round kept spinning by his need to earn a crust and keep his Nolan Show sinecure. But in the past year he has reached his first significant milestone, for Master Jamie is now a Legum Baccalaureus, a Bachelor of Laws with the right to put LLB next to his name, which of course he does on his Twitter account alongside a splendid picture of him in his graduation attire which with heartbreaking sweetness he hasn’t quite got round to removing yet.
Since he spent so many of his formative years trying and failing to get the flag back up on City Hall instead of at study, Jamie has obtained his LLB not via Queen’s or Ulster University, but as a mature student with the Open University, whose LLB programme requires no qualifications. Before he dons that wig and thumbs the lapels of his barrister’s gown for the first time, Jamie must secure a two-year traineeship with a Master solicitor before taking the Institute of Professional Legal Studies postgraduate course at Queen’s and thereafter registering with the Law Society. Oh, and then he has to complete the Postgraduate Diploma in Professional Legal Studies, get accepted into one of the Inns of Court and undergo a year of pupillage training.
Squinter has no doubts about Jamie’s determination to achieve his goals; whether the, ah, singular name and reputation he has made for himself in the public square will help or hinder him is not clear at this point. Are there Master solicitors, Inns of Court and pupillage-providers who will be undaunted by Jamie’s colourful career when the Donaghadee dynamo comes knocking? Possibly. And are there then clients who won’t gulp a little when their solicitor introduces them to their barrister and there stands Jamie Bryson KC with his wig under his arm holding up an outstretched palm while he finishes a radio phone-in call about the Ballybeen boney? Perhaps.
Fortified and emboldened by those three letters beside his name, Jamie has been handing out advice to Protestant students at those local universities under whose dreaming spires he never quite managed to secure a place. And what has he learned from his years at the Open University that might prove valuable to the impressionable 18-year-olds he addressed last week? What pearls of wisdom gleaned from his serpentine student life might oil the wheels of academia for the teens sitting in front of him?
Well, if he had picked up anything from the ethos of the Open University, he would have told them that it’s a wonderful but sometimes difficult big world out there and the most wonderful thing about it – a wonderful thing that he learned for himself from the OU – is that there’s always someone, somewhere willing to give you a chance and a hand. He would have told them that no-one’s professional life is predetermined, no-one’s future is limited by fate and there’s a dizzying range of possibilities for achievement and self-improvement. Jamie would have told them that because the Open University just showed him that it’s true.
He would have told those young Protestant students that when you find good people you need to hold them close because the world can be a tough place; and he could have told them that the best thing about good people is not how they help you get through the day when sometimes you think you might not, but how they compel you to try and be a good person too. He would have told them this because people like that turned Jamie Bryson into Jamie Bryson LLB.
But he told them none of this. He told them that if something annoys you then don’t try and find out why or figure out how to make it stop – do something even more annoying. He told them that when the world makes you uncomfortable, don’t ask yourself why you’re uncomfortable and what you can do to find a softer spot – try your damnedest to make other people uncomfortable too. He told the students that their classmates who wear GAA tops aren’t doing so because it’s part of who they are and because it’s as handy and convenient as a can of beans for tea, they do it because they’re bad people and they don’t like you. Solution? Be a bad person too and do whatever it takes to make people dislike you back.
Not a single part of what he told those university students was learned by Jamie at the Open University. It was learned amidst the rancour and the bitterness of the flag protest. It was picked up as he stood in the shadow of bonfires bedecked with other people’s flags, police cars and immigrants in small boats. He soaked it in as he sat alongside older demagogues on the back of union-jacked lorry trailers waiting to tell people things they wanted to hear but he couldn’t deliver.
It's no surprise that Jamie just didn’t get the collegiate, humane, selfless value system of the UK’s biggest university – a university that opened the door to his dream only so he could urge a roomful of students to turn their uni years into a nightmare of spite and division. For others, and for themselves.
Spite and division have been staples of Jamie Bryson’s public career to date and if the Open University has failed to alter that reality, then it will go down as one of its very failures. And one of the least surprising.
