YOU ask yourself why it was that DUP Minister for Communities Gordon Lyons met with the LCC after Education Minister Paul Givan came under fire just a few days earlier and the answer comes back: Why wouldn’t he?
Because the fire Mr Givan came under for sitting down to chat with representatives of the UVF and UDA about an Irish language school wasn’t exactly withering. In fact, after a few pops at him from a 1972 spud gun, the Loyal Ulster media put it down and got out the howitzers and the bunker busters to go after Michelle O’Neill for a while.
Well, I say a while. I mean two weeks. Two weeks with the story not just being covered, but on the front page and at the top of the news. Two weeks isn’t ‘When did a politician know about a bloke’s resignation’ long. It’s ‘The IRA just called off the ceasefire and blew up Downing Street’ long. It’s ‘The king died’ long. It’s ‘Keir Starmer has appointed Jeremy Corbyn as his Chief of Staff’ long.
Come to think of it, there’s only one of those stories which I can realistically imagine staying slap-bang at the top of the news agenda for two weeks – and it’s not the one about the blowy gear or the one about free gear.
So when the time came for Mr Lyons to decide whether or not to sit down with Uncle Andy and Mervyn to discuss social inequality, he can only have calculated that the downside for him wasn’t massive. After Mr Givan met the pair, the media quickly forgot about it and decided that the biggest threat to child safety that exists at the moment was Ms O’Neill’s failure to… well… pick your own favourite from the smörgåsbord of charges that was laid out before us over the fortnight, none of them sufficiently serious to lose the First Minister a lunchtime nap, never mind a night’s sleep.
The same media, meantime, decided that the threat to child safety posed by the UDA and UVF discussing the education of our young with a government minister was not worthy of a fortnight’s fury; not ten days either; not five days, not three days, not two days. It was sniffed at and passed around for a day before it was quietly set to the side while preparations were made for the the coming fortnight's feast.
Personally speaking, when it comes to child protection I’d rather Michelle O’Neill babysat a child of mine than a UDA Brigadier, although that may draw gasps from newsrooms all over Loyal Ulster, where the McMonagle story outranked the commandants-in-the-classrooms story by four stripes and five stars.
This second DUP meeting in five minutes with the LCC has again attracted a patchy response, and with the weekend upon us, the likelihood of it surviving until Monday morning is remote. Hitch the meeting to the towtruck of the party refusing to meet bona fide education and community stakeholders and what we have from the DUP to those of us who think 30 years of transitioning is too much is a lusty “Up yours!”. Or as they say in Ulster-Scots, “Up yours!”
And if the Loyal Ulster media can’t find it within themselves to make the latest story about representatives of child abusers, drug-dealers and assassins meeting with government stretch over the weekend, what next? Well, we can only brace ourselves for the UDA and the UVF to get so comfortable in our seat of power that they’ll curl their feet up under them, pull a blanket over their legs, pour a glass of wine and whack on Netflix.
