THE war of words over the axing of funding for an English-Irish placename project is another depressing example of the determination of unionism to keep scoring petty points that delight their staunchest followers but mean a drearily familiar round of division and anger that exhausts and dispirits the rest of us.
The full picture of what lay behind the withdrawal of the measly 90k is still emerging, but what seems clear is that Communities Minister Gordon Lyons was way off the mark when he told BBC Radio Ulster that the funding was the responsibility not of his Department, but of the Department of Finance. The technicalities of when responsibility switched in practice from Department to Department are still being debated with considerably more heat than light, but what’s indisputable is that the Stormont institutions are once again thrust into a bleakly enervating round of cultural cat-calling.
If the finger of blame has not yet come to a complete rest in this latest mess, it will in coming days, and when it does what we know for certain is that the DUP has been far from the blameless onlooker it pretends to be. But whatever the jot and tittle of the placename furore, it is clear from the increasingly febrile political and social atmosphere that we are in for a summer which is even longer and hotter than those we’ve been used to in this place for over a century.
The spectacularly hypocritical unionist fixation on the Bobby Sands statue in Twinbrook has precisely nothing to do with any pressing concern for the integrity of the planning process and everything to do with increasing sectarian tensions to the rising background noise of the marching seasons drums and flutes. The fact that those complaining most loudly and passionately about the Sands statue represent consituencies where memorials that have never bothered the planners are to be found in rich abundance has been repeatedly aired, but the neck of the complainers is much too thick to be marked much less penetrated by mere facts.
And with clanging inevitability, Alliance DAERA Minister Andrew Muir has once again appealed to the people of the Village area of South Belfast to refrain from building another bonfire on an asbestos-tainted site off the Donegall Road. And he’s asked unionist reps to intervene to ensure that there’s no repeat of last summer’s bitter row over the illegal erection of a bonfire on the still-contaminated land.
Let us save him the trouble of expending more energy and breath on this issue by telling him with little fear of contradiction that the bonfire will continue to be built and that local unionist reps will say and do precisely nothing to stop another mass act of illegality and profound stupidity. For while unionists perform a panto of concern over the importance of process in relation to the law and to planning in a corner of an estate in West Belfast, in the areas of this city over which they have dominion anything goes – and will continue to go.
