From urban war zone to Brazilian soap opera

There is an untold glee in finding out about the private life of an outwardly puritan couple

SURELY AT this point we are entitled to ask what the flip is going on in Northern Ireland? No, no, on second thoughts we don’t want to know – we’ve had enough revelations. One small island can only take so much. When we ask what the flip is going on in Northern Ireland we do not want yet another jaw-dropping story of domestic misery – although hearing about inappropriate adult sex is always cheering in these circumstances. Rather, we wish to establish when exactly the switch between urban war zone and Brazilian soap opera took place.

Like the children of a broken marriage, like the neighbours of a murder victim, people in the Republic are looking at the private turmoil of public figures in Northern Ireland and saying: “What about us?” People from Northern Ireland are going to have to forgive us on this one. We’ve only watched Northern Ireland on television, but in a way we grew up with these people. Gerry Adams and the Robinsons have been round for lifetimes – and it certainly feels like it.

No one is more comfortable with the stereotypes of Northern Ireland than people in the South. Sexless, non-drinking, low church Protestants; literary, ruthless Provo types – it has all worked terribly well for us.

So, Iris Robinson – what a shocker, eh? Forty years of bombing, maiming and terror; but Iris Robinson? Now there’s a surprise.

Iris and Peter the conspicuous consumers we had no problems with. Their multiple lovely homes were paid for, presumably, by the British taxpayer. Swish Family Robinson is one of the great nicknames. Even Iris the local authority fixer we could live with – cash gifts from developers are an ecumenical matter, a cross-Border pursuit. But Iris the 59-year-old with a sex life is something else again.

And then there is the alleged failure of the extended Adams family to report alleged child abuse. The revelation that child abuse occurred one generation earlier in the same family, perpetrated by a veteran republican whose coffin was draped in the Tricolour. This from a movement which struggled with the distasteful subject of abortion as it blew shoppers to smithereens.

In the South we’ve watched our political rulers trailing into one tribunal after another. We’ve seen the Catholic Church dragging itself through the crimes of child rape and torture, fighting disclosure at every step. But Iris Robinson? Now there is a scandal, enjoyable precisely because it is a relief, involving as it does sex between people who were over the age of consent. And partly because of Iris Robinson’s own loathsome remarks about homosexuals, which were never apologised for, even by her husband. There is an untold glee in finding out about the private life of an outwardly puritan couple. As one respectable resident of the Republic put it last week: “This is what happens when you don’t drink. It has to come out somewhere.”

But why are we being treated to all these revelations now? What could possibly have motivated Peter Robinson to talk about his wife attempting suicide? Or made it worth Gerry Adams’s while to reveal his dead father as a child abuser? At the time that the two men made these extraordinary disclosures they were both being pursued by one of the most powerful players in the Northern drama – television.

It would be interesting to see some sort of computer hypothesis which projected what the Troubles would have been like without the presence of television. Would the colour parties still have turned up at funerals; would the little boys still have built the bonfires; would the rioters still have thrown all those stones if the television cameras had not been there?

And now television is turning its dead eye on to the behaviour of the main actors in Northern Ireland’s drama. It is a formidable enemy. Northern Ireland is not lacking in terrific investigative television programmes – if only we could say the same down here. The sight of Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson rolling great barrels of personal scandal off their endangered bandwagons is almost frightening, because it makes you wonder what greater controversy they are trying to avoid. In their desperation they have made Northern Ireland into a new television programme, the Brazilian soap opera.

It does seem strange that after all those years of violence and calumny the politicians have run out of ideas and it is left to television to set the agenda. And it does seem strange that, after all the defensiveness and paranoia from politicians and churches North and South, so many of our institutions now appear to be destroying themselves, one by one, from the inside. And it seems strangest of all that a mature wife who is beautiful, healthy and prosperous should be painted as the weapon of her husband’s destruction: her passions revealed and dismissed, in a most distasteful way, as the result of mental illness.

Sometimes, while enjoying a particularly eventful soap opera, it is worth wondering what is happening on the news channel.