‘SOUTH East Antrim UDA veterans’ boycotted Sunday’s Remembrance Sunday commemoration in Rathcoole, according to the Belfast Telegraph.
The first question that occurs is why that should be. And the answer comes that the UDA veterans stayed away from the annual poppy day event in North Belfast because there were going to be drug dealers there.
And as you know – or you would know if you read the Belfast Telegraph – the UDA doesn’t like drug dealers. Or, to be more accurate, the Good UDA doesn’t like drug dealers in the Bad UDA. Who the Good UDA is or where the Good UDA can be found isn’t entirely clear. Whether there are good drug dealers in the Good UDA who don’t sell to kids or Protestants isn’t clear either.
Whether Bad UDA members have infiltrated the Good UDA is another question to which we have no answer.
You may have been labouring under the mistaken impression that there can be no Good UDA, because the UDA is an illegal organisation up to its neck in all sorts of criminality up to and including murder.
But when we’re told by the BelTel that the Good UDA is willing to give up one of its biggest solemn commemoration and solemn drinking days of the year to make a point, we can see that there’s no excuse for that siMplistic view any more.
And now, not only do we have the Good UDA showing up the Bad UDA, we have UDA veterans in the Good UDA sticking it to the Bad UDA, who presumably have no veterans. Or maybe they do and they’re bad veterans.
The last and most important question is one that Squinter hopes the BelTel will answer soon: What exactly are these UDA men veterans of?
They’re not veterans of the Somme because that would make them at least 125 years old. They’re not veterans of North Africa or Arnhem, because that too would put them in or near the centenarian club. Are they, then, veterans of the Falklands War? The First Iraq War? The Second?
In fact we can scrub all this speculation about age, regiment and battle honours, because the BelTel calls them UDA veterans and not British army veterans. Which leads us to the conclusion that they’re veterans from the War of Murdering Innocent Catholics.
Whether or not it’s fitting to call them veterans on the most sacred day of the year for veterans Squinter couldn’t possibly say.
The mailman cometh, but from whereth?
THE BBCNI aspirational accent has been a source of joy and wonderment to Squinter for as long as he can remember. And while he’ll miss The Traitors and Match of the Day and Newsnight if Donald Trump manages to close the BBC down, it’s the prospect of the disappearance of the unequalled and unknowable received pronunciation of Ormeau Avenue that’s really upsetting Squinter about Auntie’s current travails.
Where else is Squinter going to hear about heavy snoo causing traffic congestion at Sandynools roindaboit? Where’s he going to access a vox pop from the car park of the local shoppang mall? And where else is he going to get three square mails a day?
What’s that? You don’t know what a mail is? Fair enough...
Good Morning Ulster presenter Chris Buckler was doing a piece on the wireless as Squinter drove to work recently about a hike in the price of school meals. Only Chris, whose accent is the BBCNI gold standard, said what was going up in price was a school “mail”. He actually said “skooill mail” but since the BBCNI two-syllable school has been with us for many years, let’s stick to the new one. Well… new to Squinter anyway.
HIKE: School meal prices are going up
Squinter has no idea – even as someone with a lifelong interest in phonetics and language – what wonderful mixture of school, geography, class and attitude combined to turn the word ‘meal’ into ‘mail’. He gets that the narrowing and sharpening of vowels is a flamboyant rejection of the working-class Belfast accent, whose vowels are wider than the Irish Sea.
And he gets that spectacularly over-emphasising the final syllable in one’s present participles serves the same purpose in a city where the final ‘g’ comes and goes according to postcode. But he’s at a loss to know how in the name of great Odin’s beard a school ‘meal’ became a school ‘mail’.
Chris has spent a fair bit of time working for the Beeb in England and the United States, so perhaps it’s a case of Charlie Lawson meets Graeme McDowell.
Squinter will continue to give it a bit of thought with a promise to get back to you should anything occur. In the meantime, let’s hope Tesco doesn’t bump up the price of its Meal Deal.
DUP washing-their-hair excuse is fooling no-one
NOBODY from the DUP was available to attend the inauguration of new Irish President Catherine Connolly on Tuesday. Which came as a surprise to precisely no-one in this little corner of Paradise.
Nil desperandum, though – party leader Gavin Robinson assured us all that there’s nothing to worry about and that Irish passport holders in the North could breathe easy, “It’s not a snub,” he said, adding that the “clash” with Remembrance Day commitments was “unfortunate”.
Which on first blush appears fair enough, but when you stop and think about it you start to see that the argument is as thin as the butter on a miser’s toast. Because if the autumn remembrance period was marked in the calendar with just the one day, then Gavin might have a point. But the poppy season lasts a month. Countless acts of remembrance big and small take place in the weeks spanning October and November.
And the simple truth is that Armistice Day on November 11 – the date of the Connolly inauguration – is a relatively low-key occasion after the pomp and ceremony of Remembrance Sunday. Oh, sure, there’s a minute’s silence at 11am, but Squinter’s heard (or not heard) enough minute’s silences in the past four weeks to make him wonder if he should get his ears checked.
And if senior DUP members know their way around a diary well enough to agree to attend a November 11 Remembrance Day coffee morning in Buckna, surely that same organisational expertise would have led them to an awareness that inauguration day in Dublin was coming up and perhaps it might be a good idea to set somebody aside for it.
The truth is that if the DUP had wanted to be represented at the Connolly inauguration they would have been. But they didn’t and so they weren’t. And as they bowed their heads and listened to the Last Post on Tuesday morning for the 20th time in four short weeks, the trumpet was playing – if only they knew it – not only for the fallen, but for the union.
