IF YOU thought that new Taoiseach Simon Harris was finished with us Nordies for a while when he said on taking over the top job that the unity of the island would not be on his list of priorities then think again. One insult to the people that his predecessor Leo Varadkar vowed never to leave behind again might have been put down to a rookie error – a second in a matter of days suggests that he may think there’s political mileage in it.
Mr Harris said that people from Cork are more likely to be familiar with Paris and Berlin than they are with Belfast and Derry. It wasn’t an ill-advised answer to a difficult question, the new Taoiseach didn’t inadvertently put his shiny English brogue in it. A week after promising the people of the North that he is indifferent to their hopes and needs, he added that his generation – or at least people from his generation living in the extreme western corner of the island – don’t have much interest in the North.
It was an extraordinarily nasty and thoroughly cynical thing to say, not least because his assertion that there’s a chasm between North and South comes apart at the lightest of interrogation. Does he believe, for instance, the people of Dundalk and Newry are similarly estranged? Lifford and Strabane. Blacklion and Belcoo? Let’s even stretch it out a bit and ask whether he believes that the people of Sligo and Enniskillen are strangers to each other?
The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t believe that there is a chasm between geographical extremes in Ireland that is any deeper than that between London and Newcastle; Paris and Toulouse; Madrid and Málaga. In any country in the world, the more the kilometres are counted in hundreds, the wider the gap between local cultures and the smaller the likelihood of family and friendship bonds. Which is precisely why Mr Harris’s carefull chosen example didn’t involve border or midland counties.
And with the high likelihood in the wake of two deliberate outbursts that the Taoiseach is being deliberately provocative about the North comes the question: Why? What at the tail-end of the coalition mandate would possess a man faced by so many pressing challenges in such a short time to cast a jaundiced eye on North-South relations?
There’s no way of knowing, but the only explanation that bears any scrutiny is that he’s trying to poke the Sinn Féin bear. What’s the one thing that the newly-minted Fine Gael leader would like to be talking about as he plans to turn the polls around? It’s not housing, it’s not health, it’s not the environment and it’s not the rise of the far-right. He will be most comfortable debating Sinn Féin about the past – and winding up republicans about their place on this island is a pretty good way of achieving just.
Thankfully Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald didn’t rist to the bait, preferring to emphasise that the Taoiseach didn’t turn up for questions in his first day in the job. That’s pretty shocking – whether you’re from Cork or Belfast.
