THE vacuous debate involving the Communities Minister over the flag to be used to represent these benighted six counties in the Commonwealth Games speaks to a wider problem: the nationalist community of the North is simply still not seen by our former masters.
How else can we explain the fact that the BBC spent more money last year on libelling Gerry Adams than on its Irish language TV and radio services?
How else can we explain that the fact that the Butcher's Apron — unfurled once more to fly spy planes over the Gaza wastelands — flies from the Clare house headquarters of the Sinn Féin Finance Minister 17 days a year while the flag he salutes flies nary the once?
How else can we explain the fact that our biggest industrial employer, now known as 'Short Brothers, A Boeing Company', flies the union flag from its headquarters 365 days a year in direct contravention of Fair Employment guidelines?
All the above and more — did we mention God Save the Queen at Windsor Park, home of the 'Football for All' IFA? — can only occur because the normally gimlet-eyed unionists simply don't wish to see the heaving, seething mass of natives at the gate.
Tumultuous changes in the demographic and political landscape are ignored. Typical unionist responses might be summarised pithily thus: Catholic majority in the North – "Sun's in my eyes, can't see that upsurge." Nationalist plurality at Stormont, Westminster and, for a generation now, on Belfast City Council – "My myopia's playing up today." Students from the nationalist community outnumbering their counterparts from the unionist community almost two-to-one: "Where did I leave my bi-focals?"
In Canada, no meeting of government or civic society starts without a 'Land Acknowledgement' recognising the fact that there were 10,000 years of civilisation before the white man arrived. These 'Opening Words' are to remind all Canadians that "each of the 634 different First Nations communities, 53 Inuit communities and eight Métis settlements have a unique historical, cultural, spiritual and environmentally sustainable connection to the land that their people and ancestors have inhabited since time immemorial."
And yet for the BBC, when history doesn't begin with Partition in 1921, it begins with the Plantation in the 1600s.
When's the last time we heard any acknowledgment from the NIO or its unionist surrogates that Ulster was not a tabula rasa when the Plantation began?
Over recent weeks, this failure to see the Gaelic tradition has been brought into stark relief by the Communities Minister's failure to embrace both the Gael and the Planter in his US 250 celebrations.
Missing from the suite of activities planned to mark the birth of the wonderful (if imperilled) experiment in republican democracy that is the USA is any acknowledgement of the radical effect of the American Revolution in the North of Ireland. Events in America 250 years ago inspired Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters to come together in the late 1770s and early 1780s to draw a veil of oblivion over past differences and unite under the common name of Irishmen—a clear precursor to the foundation of the United Irishmen in 1791. Yet that glorious chapter in our past will be confined to the margins – if acknowledged at all — in the Ulster-Scots Agency's official USA-NI 250 programme.
Once again, our history, heritage and heroes go unseen.
Nationalist leaders have all but exhausted the gamut of peacemaking gestures in their efforts to promote reconciliation with our unionist neighbours — most recently we witnessed Michelle O'Neill's presence at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Perhaps the best policy is simply to cal in the optometrists.
