Speaking just after last Wednesday's election, Secretary of State Peter Hain expressed his opinion that the people of Northern Ireland had voted for power-sharing, and had, as their priority, bread and butter issues. No disrespect to Mr Hain but the people of Northern Ireland voted as they have always voted. The Secretary of State may have got the result he wanted but there is no call to consider things other than what they actually are, or to engage in faux-naiveté. The two tribes here in the North have never been so polarised and are further apart that in the murderous years of the 1970s. It all seems to bear out the observation of the old Prussian general Von Clausewitz who was of the view that politics is the continuation of war by other means.
The DUP, in their ongoing campaign to chip away at the Good Friday Agreement, secured an amendment to the original Agreement when they persuaded the British (and the Irish) to change the rules so that the First Minister did not require cross-political support, but would be nominated from the ranks of the party with the greatest number of seats in the Assembly. The DUP, after the rout of Mr Empey's Unionists in May 2005, had no doubt but that they would be the biggest party, but this did not prevent them from putting it out on the doorsteps that, unless the DUP got all the first preference votes in the house, Sinn Féin would be the biggest party up there, and that Martin McGuinness would be the First Minister. Crude, but it worked, much to the chagrin of the UUP. Nationalists, seeing this trend, lined up in even greater numbers behind their own dominant party. The electors voted in their hardest of men to protect their own interests, and whatever sort of horse-trading ensues in the weeks and months to come, it will add up to a carving up of the spoils of victory rather than any genuine attempt at trust or sharing of responsibility. Perhaps these factors will begin to develop in the way in which true love can sometimes grow out of a forced, or an arranged marriage. The DUP, however, have made it very clear that they would regard any such power-sharing administration as an unnatural and temporary arrangement, to be tolerated for want of better but fated to be scuppered if the DUP ever got the chance to, say, hold the balance of power in the next Westminster parliament, due to be elected in 2009 or 2010 at the latest.
Speaking of which, Mr Blair is expected to cash in his cards sometime this summer, and will be anxious to point to some sort of settlement as at least one triumph in an otherwise bleak and barren political legacy. Mr Ahern will announce the date of the Irish election very shortly, and will be anxious to focus his energies upon achieving a third successive term as Taoiseach, without the distractions and diversions of the North.
The general consensus is that Dr Paisley will do the deal before, on, or after the March 26 deadline. He is playing hard to get, and is not going to sell his hen on a wet day, as the old Tyrone expression has it. He has a shopping list to present to the British government: abolition of water rates, a new look at local government, the retention of the 11-plus and, er, a billion pounds by way of a dividend, to encourage the politicians here to make a semblance of what they should be doing anyway. The Doc may make some ground on the non-monetary items on his list but, when it comes to parting with money, Chancellor Gordon Brown is very far from being a soft touch, a point made by Gerry Adams. As against that, those with long memories recall that the Act of Union in 1800 was put through with wholesale bribery – the fledgling Orange Order opposed it. The British hold to the precept that anything (or anyone) can be bought, if the price is right. It could well be that the British may consider bribing their way out of Ireland, just as they bribed their way to Parliamentary control of it after 1800.
Those who count heads have discovered that a mere 32,500 votes separate the tribes here, and last Wednesday the DUP, Ulster Unionist, PUP and UK Unionist Party secured 325,140 votes, 47% of those who voted. Sinn Féin, SDLP and independent republicans ran up a total of 325,637 votes, 42.5% of those who voted. Too much should not be read into those figures. There were hundreds of thousands who did not vote at all, including some 250,000 'soft' Unionist voters, or more precisely, non-voters. They despair of Mr Empey, as they did of Mr Trimble before him. They are the so-called 'garden shed' Unionists. There is some indication that this calculated apathy is creeping into sections of the Nationalist community as well.
In evidence, the court heard that the proprietors of a local restaurant had been becoming very concerned about the amount of silverware which was disappearing from their dining-rooms. The cutlery was of high quality and was expensive to replace. Suspicion fell upon a group of young professionals who shared a flat nearby, patronised the premises regularly and were not particularly generous when it came to tipping staff. A metal detector was borrowed from the airport and when the suspects were leaving one evening, the scanners set off the alarm. A subsequent search of their accommodation uncovered quite a lot of the restaurant's branded cutlery. "What you might call," said the RM, "a stainless steal."
Helen Mirren, who pocketed her Oscar last month for her performance in 'The Queen,' told the Academy that if it hadn't been for Queen Elizabeth she would not be up there to collect her award. This went down very well in the British red-tops. Wonder what would have been the reaction if Forest Whitaker, on receiving his Oscar for 'The Last King of Scotland' had said that if it had not been for Idi Amin he wouldn't be up there either.
Helen's achievement got a rather lukewarm reaction in the 'East London Advertiser' which headlined the story, "Wapping Pensioner Wins Hollywood Oscar." Then again, when St Thomas More was canonised in 1935, a London evening paper ran the headline: "Honour for Chelsea man."
British Airways, tackled about the piles of baggage that were piling up at Heathrow during a recent security tightening-up, explained, "Each case is treated on its merits."
The lady Camilla is reported to have dispatched an aircraft to bring out a pair of shoes from London to the Middle East, during a recent royal tour. When the shoes arrived, she changed her mind about wearing them. Gives a new dimension to the term "carbon footprint".
President Bush is getting a pretty tepid reception during his current tour of Latin America. He should recall Groucho Marx's line, from 'Animal Crackers': "You go Uruguay, I'll go mine."
