FATHER Dougal went on Talkback on Tuesday to stand up for Loyal Ulster. In particular, Sammy Morrison went on to give the TUV take on the Westlink asbestos boney.
Kudos to him for going on in the first place while reps from other parties ran for cover.
But as soon as you heard his name read out, you knew as surely as the sun rises in the morning that something memorably asinine was on the way, and so you bent towards the radio, turned it up just a bit, sipped your tea and waited.
It wasn’t long coming. Presented with the suggestion by the SDLP’s Seamas de Faoite that asbestos and young children are not a good mix, Sammy narrowed his eyes, stroked his chin and opened his mouth...
“We’ve an MP for South Belfast [Claire Hanna], an MP for that area, who within the last two and a half weeks has been critici... has been defending Kneecap and their glorification of terrorism.”
We didn’t need the various off-mic noises to tell us that Sammy had achieved something remarkable. We didn’t need the harrumphs of disapproval to tell us that here was a man at the top of his loyal game.
“Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a link,” he continued, “between unionism thinking or loyalism thinking that there’s an attack on our culture for every this, that and the other and nationalists and republicans can get away with... [fades out].”
Squinter doesn’t know whether the BBC cut Sammy’s microphone at this point or whether he lost his train of thought. Whatever the case, a nation gasped and shook its head. Here, at last, was a summer soundbite to rival the classic “Stop building houses beside bonfires.”
What exactly it was that Sam was trying to say still isn’t clear. Was he saying that Claire Hanna put ten tons of asbestos tiles on a derelict site off the Donegall Road? Given that the material has been there for years, long before the bonfire, that would have required an extraordinary degree of forward-planning, not to say an extraordinary amount of wheelbarrows and helpers; and while Squinter knows Claire is a woman of many talents, he rather doubts this thesis.
Is Sammy saying that Kneecap are worse than asbestos? That seems more likely, given that Loyal Ulster generally sees the West Belfast/Derry rap trio as third on the list of the worst things to have happened to Are Wee Country after Gerry Adams and Semtex.
But is ‘Get Your Brits Out’ really worse than a slow, lingering death on a ventilator? Is ‘Your Sniffer Dogs are Shite’ more to be feared than a slow loss of lung function and the long, agonising wait for somebody to die so you can get their lungs? Squinter rather doubts it, but he nevertheless can only admire Sammy’s devotion to the cause.
The next question he has to answer is ‘Who’s going to carry the bag if the bonfire destroys the power supply to the RVH and the City?’ Personally, Squinter would plump for the Wolfe Tones as ‘Ooh, ah, up the Ra’ is clearly more egregious than Intensive Care Units shutting down and surgeons being left in the dark with scalpels raised.
