Robinson must turn from personal to political crisis

ANALYSIS:Revelations may help to explain First Minister's disengaged and dysfunctional year but North needs new focus

SINCE Christmas, Northern Ireland has been awash with rumours about Peter and Iris Robinson. There was an expectation that the BBC's Spotlightcurrent affairs programme was about to run with a special programme about the affair that Iris Robinson admitted yesterday, as well as about the financial affairs of the Robinsons.

By breaking his silence, Robinson obviously hoped to limit some of the damage such a programme would cause him. Get it out and deal with it was his approach. That seemed a wise move, even a brave one. As also said of Gerry Adams and his alleged paedophile brother Liam, who wants to wash their dirty linen in public? This is a tale where – again rather like the Adams issue – the personal impinges hugely on the political. It tells us that politicians aren’t just robotic creatures whose lives and powers of judgment can be above the personal and emotional turbulence shaking them to their core. The Peter Robinson we saw yesterday was not the cold, dispassionate Peter Robinson we generally know, it was a hurt man with a suffering wife.

The tremor in his voice, the breaks in his delivery, the emotional distress the personal revelations about Iris’s affair and subsequent suicide attempt were causing him, his comments about his love of his wife, his desire to save his marriage, the picture behind his chair with “Dad” embroidered on it, all told how personally devastating this experience was for Robinson and his family. It was excruciating and it somehow almost felt voyeuristic to be watching.

But in the North, the personal impinges on the political and there is an issue here of critical public interest – the very future of the Stormont institutions – that must be addressed. For the past year Robinson has seemed in a strange place.

He is noted as the arch-strategist, the man who persuaded the Rev Ian Paisley over the line to engage in powersharing with Adams and open up Stormont to devolved government.

That’s what he wanted, but at times over the past 10 months, notwithstanding his comments about meeting his political duties, he seemed somewhat disengaged from the whole enterprise.

Some reliable people at Stormont before Christmas suggested that such was his unexplained disenchantment that he could be prepared to walk away from his First Ministry and from politics.

How could that make sense after he achieved his great ambition?

Equally, he appeared to have lost his touch in dealing with the policing and justice issue. He also appeared to be playing into the hands of his internal DUP opponents by not robustly standing up to them and was providing ammunition for the Traditional Unionist Voice to fire right back at him and his party.

He appeared to be dithering, caught in the headlights, incapable of making decisions that were crying out to be made. He should have moved on policing and justice some months ago for strategic reasons, if for nothing else, to get it out of the way and to exclude the possibility of political crisis and collapse that now exists.

However the revelations yesterday appear to mostly explain that dysfunction. Iris Robinson has been ill on and off for more than a year now. She pulled out of politics at Christmas citing physical ill-health and depression. That was not a total surprise. Some of her actions over that period were strange.

She seemed a woman on the edge, as evidenced by her comments describing homosexuality as an abomination and suggesting that gays could be “turned round” by psychiatric treatment. On one occasion in the Assembly chamber she turned on the Ulster Unionist health minister Michael McGimpsey after he welcomed her back to politics after one particular bout of illness. For some reason she had a particular and angry set against McGimpsey.

It was disturbing to observe. We could all tell something was amiss but generally people kept clear of the deeper story because it was a matter personal to the Robinsons.

The issue of financial matters also arose yesterday but Robinson was insistent that he had always acted in the “most professional and ethical way”.

People like Martin McGuinness and others could have made mischief over the trauma affecting the Robinsons but they didn’t.

On that point some Sinn Féin sources complained that while McGuinness was mindful of the Robinsons’ difficulties there was no reciprocation. They said that if Robinson had confidentially looked for some time and space to address his personal problems McGuinness would have facilitated him but that the Deputy First Minister was kept out of the loop.

In normal circumstances it would all be none of McGuinness’s business but what was afflicting the Robinsons also was affecting the political process, as is evident by the current potential for political meltdown.

On Saturday McGuinness is due to put proposals to Sinn Féin’s ruling ardchomhairle on how to respond to the DUP’s refusal to meet Sinn Féin’s Christmas deadline for a move on policing and justice. McGuinness has warned of the unsustainability of the Northern Executive and Assembly if there was no DUP commitment to sign up speedily to the transfer of policing powers.

Saturday could see Sinn Féin beginning in a graduated way to walk away from Stormont.

If it does it, it will cause political damage to the DUP, to Sinn Féin and to the political edifice that was so painstakingly constructed and in which Robinson, McGuinness and the people of Northern Ireland have a personal and political stake: they hardly want the North to start slipping back to political paralysis because that will only serve the interests of the republican dissidents and unionist rejectionists.

It’s important that Robinson regains his focus and hold to his sense of political duty. The hope last night was that he has.

“It is my intention to be at my desk tomorrow morning to continue the work that the people of Northern Ireland have entrusted to me,” Robinson said, closing his statement. “I will be meeting with Martin McGuinness to discuss how we might make real progress. I want 2010 to be a better year for all of us.”

The broad hope is that their talks are productive and that at least out of common humanity – think here of the Adams family as well as the Robinson family – both sides will pull back from the precipice, calm down and mutually find a route to political as well as personal recovery.

Gerry Moriarty is Northern Editor