BBC Ulster performed an interesting experiment on Thursday night’s The View in an attempt to test the contention of new Taoiseach Simon Harris that young people in Cork know Berlin and Paris better than they know Belfast and Derry.

They gathered together a group of students in Dublin and invited them to point out Fermanagh, Antrim, Tyrone, Derry, Armagh and Down on a map. And a hilarious time was had by all: 

• You’re telling me Lough Neagh’s not a county?
• Pretttttty sure Fermanagh’s not in the North.
• Belfast? Is that a coffee shop in Montmartre?
• Derry? Oh, yeah – that’s a sex shop near Kurfürstenstrasse.

And after the trial by geography, the jury was unanimous: Those Southies, eh? Haven’t a poxy clue about the North. Don’t want anything to do with Irish unity. Happy in their own wee world. Bad luck, Mary Lou; cry harder, Colum.

Last time I laughed as long and as hard was in 2014 when Stephen Nolan invited his TV audience to guffaw along with him when he kept saying “Curry my yoghurt” in an effort to make Niall Ó Donnghaile laugh.

If the stunt on The View was indeed intended to illuminate the divide between the blue skies of Loyal Ulster and the grey mists of the Irish Republic, I can only urge BBCNI boss Adam Smyth not to get the poll peer-reviewed. For while the segment could conceivably be developed into a solid half-hour set at the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny (left and above Longford), it’s not likely to impress pollsters, behaviourists, or even behaviourist pollsters.

A simple test of the experiment’s efficacy was staring the BBCNI crew in the face,but none of them saw it, or if they did they ignored it. That test being: “Okay, we’ve established that you don’t know where Tyrone is on this map of Ireland; could you now point out Longford to us?”

I can’t say for sure how many would have answered that one correctly, but in a small cohort of  third-level students that included people who think the biggest lake in Ireland is a body of land and Fermanagh’s capital is Fermoy, it’s likely that the question would have proved that the crash-test dummies’ problem was with general knowledge, not unity. 

Caterpillar tracks are so hard to follow 

I'VE only ever spoken to Gerry Carroll once, as far as I can remember. He was campaigning – for the May 2016 Assembly election, I think it was – and called at my door. I asked him about the EU referendum and we chatted for a while about why People Before Profit were in favour of Brexit. 

As we spoke my daughter and her then partner (now my son-in-law) pulled into the drive. I asked Gerry what would happen to the young couple (he’s Portuguese) if People Before Profit got its way and the UK voted to leave Europe. Would Portuguese citizens be forced to leave? What would happen to the couple’s new life together just as it was getting under way?

He was honest in telling me that he didn’t know, and to be fair to Gerry, that was because nobody else knew. But not knowing the answer to such an absolutely fundamental question about the lives of people you want to represent seemed to me to be a fairly compelling argument against wanting Brexit. But sure…

It was the start of what’s been a prickly relationship, the most recent barbs between us being aimed over the vexed issue of Gaza. Gerry takes what I would call an absolutist position on the slaughter being perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people; which is to say that he publicly refuses to have anything to do not just with Israel, but with anyone he considers to be enabling their genocide.

And so it was that he was scathing in his denunciation of Sinn Féin’s decision to attend the White House on St Patrick’s Day. I thought SF going to DC was an ill-judged decision too, and while I was quite happy to state my case, I drew the line at accusing people who have for decades opposed apartheid in Palestine of (big deep breath)  “prostrating themselves in front of the US establishment” by going to the US.

It's fairly simple for me. I believe we’re all together in this fight for justice for Palestine, and the SF White House visit was a difference of strategy; no more. And I consider the imperative to maintain solidarity in the face of deepening barbarity to be more important than the urge to vent theatrically about prostrating Lundys who are in fact on your side.

But Gerry didn’t miss Sinn Féin and hit the wall, and he wasn’t about to cut veteran republicans with long and proud ties to the Palestine resistance any slack for a lifetime of activism lived even before he was born.

Anyway, those differences between Gerry and me were aired online – and then we moved on. For a week or two.

This week Paddy’s Day in the White House raised its head again as Gerry got the answer to a question he asked about who Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly met in Washington. And the answer prompted the Belfast Telegraph headline: ‘PBP’s Gerry Carroll hits out at O’Neill and Little-Pengelly for meeting US firm supplying Israeli military’.

The firm in question is Caterpillar, which has a presence in both West Belfast and Larne, which kinda made it a pretty attractive, hands-across-the-barricades meeting for a republican and unionist First Minister and deputy First Minister. Caterpillar, by the way, are in the business of building earth-moving machines and their diggers are regularly seen being used by the IDF to demolish Palestinian homes.

“When [Michelle] O’Neill and [Emma] Little-Pengelly travelled to Washington, they boasted that the North was open for business,” thundered Gerry, “apparently this includes businesses that support the apartheid Israeli regime.”

What the relationship is between Israel and Caterpillar I have no idea. Do Caterpillar gift their bulldozers to Tel Aviv in the way McDonald's gift hamburgers because they’re big fans of what’s being done in Palestine? I doubt it – I suspect that Israel buys bulldozers in exactly the same way that they buy jeeps and planes and paper clips and fencing and lorries and tents and food and everything else that makes that makes it possible for them to run the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza. And if we spread out the boycott to companies that Israel simply buys stuff from, rather than companies that are active supporters of apartheid, then my fear is that we’ll all have to move to those caves in the Belfast Hills.

Put the uncertainty to the side. Let’s assume that Gerry’s right and Caterpillar is playing a direct deadly role in the Gaza genocide. Shouldn’t that mean that he and his comrades should be occupying the company’s factories in Belfast and Larne in the way that Gerry’s PBP colleagues Eamonn McCann et al so triumphantly occupied the offices of the weapons guidance systems manufacturer Raytheon in Derry in 2006? Perhaps. But PBP have not only decided against direct action in the case of Caterpillar – they’ve urged the company to give their workers more money for building the bulldozers.

Nope, I don't get it either.

During their 2022 industrial action, a large delegation of Caterpillar workers was welcomed to the PBP offices to hear Gerry pay tribute to their “inspiring” fight for better pay. And I was foursquare behind Gerry in being foursquare behind the Caterpillar workers, a good few of whom are my friends and neighbours.

But how can that PBP circle be squared? How is it possible to berate Michelle and Emma for meeting the bosses of a firm that makes bulldozers used by Israel while campaigning for the same firm to spend more on paying those who build the bulldozers?

If you’re on your high horse and shouting about the need for the First and deputy First Minister to have nothing to do with Caterpillar, I’d say if you’re then going to call with a straight face for more pay for the bulldozer builders, it's probably best to climb down,  unsaddle your mount and stop shouting.