The gulf between Peter Robinson and his deputy reflects current opinion on how the two men are performing, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
INGREDIENTS FOR a crisis have stacked up, though the word crisis could be doing too much honour to the continued stand-off at Stormont. There are the increasingly frequent trips to Downing Street by Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness: supposedly partners, they travel separately, go into the building separately and later hold separate press conferences. Then there’s a meeting between Brian Cowen and Gordon Brown supposedly to tackle the problem – two men swamped by their own concerns and neither, on their best days, ever personally invested in a Belfast settlement.
The deal was done long ago with flattery and three-ring circuses: the wretches should make it stick. Brown will not be flying into Hillsborough to spend nights cajoling the nervous and irritable DUP leader, as Tony Blair did with the previous leader of unionism, David Trimble. Nor will he spend time in solemn conclave with Gerry Adams and McGuinness, hearing their pain.
Brown in persuasive mode is not easy to imagine, and one of the differences he faces is that Adams has stepped back. In the run-up to crisis, or pseudo-crisis, Deputy First Minister McGuinness has made the running, warning that republican patience is running out, calling Robinson to account and, in the past few weeks, beginning a countdown. To date, McGuinness may even have stage-managed a pre-crisis without losing status in the public eye. In the past it did Trimble’s image little good to insist that Stormont could not be sustained because republicans showed bad faith. He had a point: the IRA did keep on robbing banks, until they were finally told ending violence had to mean the end of all criminality. Unionists should have looked good by contrast, but their front line has never convinced as standard-bearers for a new deal.
Robinson has fallen into the same trap as Trimble, spooked by the chill breath of anti-deal Jim Allister and the weight of dislike among his own activists for the entire enterprise of powersharing. Inheritor of Ian Paisley’s party after the last ebb of the Paisley magic, a man who waited his turn through decades, his is not a happy lot. As First Minister he rarely rises above the preoccupation of being DUP leader. He has wound up looking shaky in both jobs.
By contrast, the one clear gain for republicans over two years of stalemate in Stormont is in the public estimate of McGuinness, the former IRA leader. It could not have improved the Robinson mood that a poll on November 30th commissioned by the Belfast Telegraph, the North’s avowedly cross-community newspaper, deemed the Sinn Féin man by far the most impressive minister, by Protestants as well as Catholics. (The McGuinness score was 27 per cent to Robinson’s 7 per cent, the republican rating as well with the Protestants polled [on 11 per cent] was Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey. Robinson by contrast scored zero with Catholics)
Last March, Robinson and McGuinness signed a joint letter to Sir Tony O’Reilly as owner of the Belfast Telegraph complaining that coverage of Stormont’s performance was “relentlessly negative”.
But the Sinn Féin man stepped away from complaining about the messenger as the list of stalemated issues lengthened. Plans to rationalise local government and education and library boards are expensively stalled, the furore over replacing selection for secondary schools still going nowhere. Sinn Féin Minister for Education Caitríona Ruane’s hamfistedness helped bog down the education debate – yet McGuinness has managed to sound above the fray, genuinely concerned for powersharing.
In May, the Telegraph’s investigator David Gordon (author of a new book on the Paisley decline) examined Northern MPs’ expenses, with damaging focus on the Robinsons, Peter and Iris. It seemed to further rattle Robinson’s nerve.
A McGuinness speech this week was adroit by comparison. He sounded relaxed on his own turf in Derry, despite the constant attempts by anti-deal dissidents to kill local Catholic police recruits, and knowledge that dissidents delight in the failings of powersharing in Stormont. He recalled that 13 months ago – after the last stand-off – Robinson and he had agreed moves towards devolving policing and justice, including “achieving community confidence”. Yet now the First Minister was writing solo to Downing Street, his letter “neither seen nor agreed by me: the entire community is entitled to know what is in that letter”.
Robinson says McGuinness’s attempts to call time on the stand-off are “bullying”. There may be a glimmer of popular awareness, on the contrary, that unlike the DUP man’s timidity in the face of his own party’s unreadiness to clinch the deal, the Sinn Féin man has tried to transcend his past and speak to, if not for, “the entire community”.