JANUARY: The Alliance Party Services to the Services Award.
THE Armed Forces Covenant, which our city has just signed up to via the casting vote of Alliance Lord Mayor Micky Murray, is a short enough document, but for the TL/DR generation it holds that members of the British armed forces should be accorded “special consideration” as and when the occasion demands.
Seo an rud, Naomi Long – here’s the thing: I don’t expect supporters of the British armed forces to do anything than look out for the interests of British armed forces. I’m resolutely unsuprised when UDR benevolent groups display benevolence to the aforementioned Sammy and Stewarty. And my gob remains stubbornly unsmacked when the Police Federation has the backs of the RUC and the PSNI. I’m less sanguine at the idea of unionist politicians telling us that a person deserves more help and support for having taken part in foot patrols in Afghanistan than a firefighter does for putting out fires or a paramedic does for saving lives, but I fully understand that in Loyal Ulster the only thing that’s better than a person waving a union jack is a person waving a union jack in uniform.
But Alliance doing the same? Alliance telling the ratepayers of Belfast that their money will be used to give preferential treatment to British soldiers and former British soldiers? That’s a Household Cavalry horse of a different colour.
It's as clear as day why Alliance have decided that affirmative action is needed in the city of Belfast for people who know how to use weapons but not for people who know how to use, ladders, hoses or medical equipment. The party takes a terrible battering day in and day out from unionists who accuse them of being Sinn Féin with ponies and they clearly think that the occasional bit of parade ground posturing will go some way to alleviating that pressure.
It’s why they also vote to throw large amounts of money at British armed forces events at which schoolchildren are taught how to use heavy weaponry for bants and giggles.
Ten-hut! – here comes a spoiler: There is nothing that the Alliance Party can do to placate those who see them as Lundys and IRA reservists. Not a thing. Justice Minister Naomi could make it legal for a UDR flag to be flown 24/7 over Andytown Leisure Centre and she’d still be a subversive to the usual suspects. Moderate unionists treat the idea of Alliance as rabid republicans with the derision it deserves, while the DUP and TUV will go on attempting to scare the king’s horses with lurid tales of traitors in their midst not because there’s a grain of truth in it, but simply because othering and demonising is learned in their basic training.
FEBRUARY: The BBCNI Winners and Losers Award.
THE rules of the winter/spring awards season have been altered – and it was BBCNI who altered them. Before this week, a quaint and charming custom was unanimously observed by the local media whereby only winners would be congratulated for their wins in press and broadcast reports. The triumph of Kneecap’s movie at the Baftas changed all that. Why things changed for BBCNI when it came to the republican, tricolour balaclava-wearing, Palestine-supporting, Irish-speaking trio from West Belfast, I can’t say.
Things have changed so that uplifting words of congratulation in a celebratory report are no longer enough. What is now required is that winners must also have their losses highlighted. Forget that namby-pampy, woke nonsense about a nomination being a win in itself. BBCNI has manned-up and decided that all things considered it’s good for the winners’ wind and limb if their failures are talked up. Think of it as tough love. And so, while the cheers were still echoing around the Royal Festival Hall in London and An Chultúrlann on the Falls, an Ormeau Avenue button was pushed and the BBCNI headline flashed out to the world: ‘Kneecap wins first Bafta but misses out in five categories’.
It was a tough one for the Gaeilgeoir rappers to take. I mean, who on their night of nights wants their local TV station to point up the negative right next to the positive? But speaking for myself, I have no doubt that BBCNI will in future frankly and fearlessly implement their new rules so that every winner of a gong – regardless of status or station – will be subject to the same rigorous, cruel-to-be-kind treatment. And if you doubt that, then I’m afraid – like Remoaners – you simply don’t believe enough.
The BBCNI participants in the recent RTS NI awards must be breathing a sigh of relief. Another two short months and their newsroom colleagues would have had to write a story and headline that points out that while three awards were indeed scooped, there were 16 categories. And that would have meant changing the opening headline of the report to ‘BBC News NI picks up three RTS NI awards but misses out in 13 categories’.
No, wait. I’ve just pressed an index finger to my ear to hear the news coming through my feed that while there were indeed 16 categories, BBCNI in multiple categories had multiple nominees. And if I hold my pen elegantly and look at the laptop before me, I am further apprised that in fact BBCNI had 35 nominees across those 16 categories. And a beep on my phone alerts me to a text telling me that the only people in the building who weren’t nominated for an award were a work experience kid and chronically shy security guy. And so in the best BBC tradition of sternly unbending Reithian accuracy, I need to amend that putative headline to: ‘BBC News NI picks up three RTS NI awards but misses out in 32’.
Roll on the Oscars.
No Kneecap.
Thank god.
MARCH: The David Trimble Amnesia Award.
DAVID Trimble didn’t like Catholics.
No, wait. The guy is no longer with us and with due regard to the fact that he can’t defend himself it behoves us to be a little more clear and a little more fair. And with due regard also to the fact that Trimble was a lawyer it behoves us further to be cogniscent of the need to give him a fair hearing, even in his absence.
So let me be totally accurate here and restate his case. It is wrong to say that David Trimble didn’t like Catholics. He just didn’t like Catholic lawyers. Or, with another large dollop of caution and a double scoop of reticence, let me say rather that David Trimble didn’t like Catholic lawyers from Lurgan.
Sorry, bear with me. This is getting wearisome, I know, but posterity demands that we get this right. David Trimble didn’t like Catholic lawyers from north Lurgan. That’s it. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as m’learned friends like to say.
We know this because the estimable Sam McBride reported in the Belfast Telegraph on Tuesday that a declassified note had been unearthed in the National Archive at Kew outlining Mr Trimble’s objection to the hearing of a case by a High Court judge who was – altogether now – a Catholic lawyer from north Lurgan. The note – of a meeting between senior UUP figures and Prime Minister Tony Blair in January 2001 – reveals that the then First Minister thought that Mr Justice Kerr was not the right man to hear a Sinn Féin application for a judicial review of his decision not to send ministers to meetings of the North-South Ministerial Council.
Mr Trimble told Mr Blair that he didn’t believe the judge could be impartial in hearing the application because i) Kerr was sympathetic towards Sinn Féin and ii) he was a bead-rattler of some renown.
There are those who will view the news of Trimble’s attitude towards a Papist legal colleague with some disappointment, and perhaps even a measure of surprise. For wasn’t Davy the personification of the liberal Prod? Didn’t he win the Nobel Peace Prize for wading through a cloud of incense and candle smoke to embrace John Hume and Gerry Adams? Didn’t he face down the ultimate enemy of Rome, Ian Paisley, in his determination to strike a historic deal?
Well, yes. But that’s not the whole story. The Davy boy was also a close confidant and colleague of the UVF and the UDA during the UWC strike of 1974, providing them with legal advice and meeting daily with them at strike HQ in Hawthornden Street in East Belfast even while the sons of Ulster were stiffing Taigs and planning and carrying out the Dublin-Monaghan atrocities.
APRIL: The Little Pengelly/Translink Award.
DEPUTY First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly is concerned about the prospect of the new Grand Central Station saying ‘Fáilte’ to its customers. So concerned, indeed, that the DUP Lagan Valley MLA felt it her bounden duty to bring the matter up at the Thursday meeting of the Stormont Executive.
The decision by Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins, said the dFM, did not “constitute value for money or good decision-making”. And on that I’d have to agree. Why Liz’s Sinn Féin colleague and Infrastructure predecessor John O’Dowd let the new station open without a word of the native language on any part of its vast acreage is still not clear to me, but what is clear is that the whingeing we’re seeing from unionists now is a direct result of that, ah… let’s say oversight by the Sinn Féin Keepers of the Language Flame.
What we’re seeing now as Emma takes her place on King Canute’s throne and feels the icy Irish Sea water lap over her Jimmy Choo’s is hubris on a Homeric scale. Because if there’s one thing that Ems shouldn’t go near, if there’s one subject that she should run away from at the speed of Stephen Nolan chasing a bloke round a petrol station forecourt, it’s bus stops.
I hasten to add for the sake of fairness that we’ve all got subjects on which our moral authority is either compromised or liquidated. For my part, I’d think twice about lecturing people on the danger of gambling; I’d think thrice about getting on my high horse about the evils of alcohol. Similarly, Edwin Poots would be well advised not to write a book on ‘My Time at the Top’, Gerry Carroll won’t be writing a letter to this paper on ‘Why I’m Glad I Backed Brexit’ and Doug Beattie would likely turn down an invitation to give a talk on ‘Social Media: Respect and Maturity are Key’.
Ems won’t thank me for saying it, but the truth is that in quiet moments she must reflect on whether being most famous for opposing the name of a bus stop in somebody else’s constituency is what she dreamt of when she first heard the call of politics. It was 2018 when the then South Belfast MP wrote to Translink to express her “serious concern” about a new Glider stop near Short Strand having a sign reading ‘Short Strand’. So incensed was Ems, so afire was she with the flame of righteous indignation, that she included in her letter a short lesson on the geography and nomenclature of East Belfast, knowledge she no doubt picked up as a girl in the teeming terraced streets of Markethill.
MAY: The FIFA James Who? Award.
JAMES McClean has just enjoyed perhaps the greatest moment of his storied career. His team Wrexham claimed their third promotion in a row and this year’s one was a doozie. He’s now captain of a Championship team about to launch an assault on the Premiership summit – and as if that’s not exciting enough for the Derry player, his team is owned by a couple of Hollywood stars.
I’m very pleased for James. Delighted, in fact, after the amount of abuse he has received in the wake of his 2011 decision to play for the Republic. For make no mistake, that was his crime in the eyes of BBC Ulster, the Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter. The burning enmity that his declaration of allegiance provoked was hung on a number of different hooks and dressed in several different outfits – most of them poppy-red – but there’s nothing that Loyal Ulster hates more than a Lundy and the turncoat has spent 14 years now being subjected to two-footed media jump tackles because he walked away from Parc de Windsor.
BBC Ulster, the BelTel and the News Letter will, of course, deny having an agenda on McClean. They will say that they merely report (year after year after year after year) on his poppy travails and that they keep a close eye on him because, despite his rejection of their favourite team, he’s still a big name locally. Hence the balaclava/tattoo/rebel song/GSTQ stories. And the rest.
Except after the weekend that paper-thin excuse was lifted up and blown away by a light breeze of truth. And that truth was that if those three august organs were serious about their reasons for monitoring James McClean so closely they’d have had something to say about his greatest day. Wouldn’t they? They’d have had at least one of those many pictures I’ve seen online of him with a smile the width of the Clywedog being hosed with Champagne by his teammates and cheered to the rafters by his adoring fans (the Wrexham Ultras aren’t too keen on the royal family either). They would even have sent somebody over to interview him during his finest hour surrounded by his wife and children – a family enjoying a moment of love and belonging after so many years of death threats and hatred.
But no. As far as the Twelfth Triumvirate were concerned, one of their favourite subjects progressing to the cusp of the world’s most lucrative league side-by-side with a couple of Hollywood stars wasn’t worth a word. Or a picture.
What was worth a word was Kneecap, who, we’re told, have been called out by people as distant and diverse as spoon-bender Uri Geller, Taoiseach Michéal Martin, celebrity wife Sharon Osbourne, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, TUV leader Jim Allister and tomato-hurdler Jim Rodgers. With the Wrexham captain in the autumn of his career, there’s a James McClean-shaped hole about to appear in the newspapers and on the airwaves that’s got to be filled.
JUNE: The Mr Sheen Spick and Span Award.
‘THAT’S a bit more Protestant.’
I heard that a lot from adults around me as a kid. A newly-tidied room; a freshly-painted wall; the first mown lawn of the spring – and here it came. It was said with a smile and in a jokey tone, but it was so ubiquitous it felt to me even at a young age to be something more than just an odd and funny saying. It felt like somebody was telling me something important. And I learned in time that it was indeed – to use another popular Belfast phrase – a joke with a jag.
I was reminded of this by the traditional announcement of the beginning of the bonfire season proper. Just as the arrival of house martins from Namibia in the eaves of my home herald the arrival of summer, across the city a vile graffito on a rickety pile of wood and tyres always serves the same annual purpose. This year the first message, on a bonfire in Ballybeen, read ‘All Taigs will be crucified.’ It was scrawled on a mattress that had reached the end of its useful life and was thus coloured and scented by the countless intimate emissions – accidental and deliberate – of its years of human contact. I winced when I saw it, not because anybody’s going to crucify one Taig this July, never mind all of us, but out of vicarious embarrassment. And I asked myself why there was not a single unionist or loyalist person – of influence or of none – willing to stride publicly up to that bonfire and drag that obscenity away. Because I know that something like that went up in a non-unionist area it would be gone in 60 seconds, or at least as long as it took for word to get around. It would be gone not just because of the scrawled hate, but as much – if not more – because of the real message sent out by a death threat daubed on a pishy, smelly mattress – a message of despair, of resignation, of hopelessness.
It’s human nature for us to enjoy our traditions and culture, but it’s an indicator of the touching fragility of the human condition that we enjoy watching other people enjoy our traditions and culture even more. But where’s the pride in the tradition of summer bonfires when its public face is allowed year after year to be a grotesque spectacle of hate and division? Where’s the joy in a marching season culture that allows itself to be hijacked by its basest elements?
Concludes next week.
