Political figures behaving decently over the personal troubles of the DUP and SF leaders is a new phenomenon
AT THE moment, it takes hints of advance and glimpses of decency to sustain a breath of cheer. With pressure landing in rapid succession on several sectors of opinion and awareness of more to come, every little helps. After years of complaint that politics had got stuck people have begun to reel away from too much news. Revelation of horror and real pain in lives knocked sideways by abuse, plus sensation piled upon sensation, make it hard to keep a steady head. There is a touch of vertigo in the Northern body politic.
No wonder, with the leaders of the two biggest parties at more or less the same time stricken by ordeals in their personal lives – or which at least began as personal affairs. Beyond the over-heated confines of Stormont and broadcasting studios life goes on. But there is still a need for a shared and voiced sense of proportion about the scale of local disaster and for the sight and sound of public figures behaving well.
Soon after the BBC Northern Ireland Spotlightbroadcast, Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey managed in a brief live broadcast to note that the Robinson story involved more than one family, avoided the sensational aspects and still insisted that more disclosures would be necessary.
As a humane performance it was only bettered by P A MagLochlainn, Gay Rights association spokesman, who said, in the voice of a gentle elder statesman, that he would not add to the pain the Robinson scandal had caused since Mrs Robinson must now know the pain of condemnatory words. Perfection.
When someone coins the perfect description of a political organism in the throes of crisis, it melts hearts. Mark Durkan in his last weeks as SDLP leader is maybe more relaxed, the end in sight. Durkan’s incessant phrase-making became one of the habits that helped undermine him, but when he said that perhaps the possibility of change had opened up now that the DUP was “a humbler party”, he spoke for more than his own ranks.
When he declined to make political points out of the trouble Gerry Adams keeps stumbling into, he behaved like the decent person he is. No doubt he also disappointed those in his party who hate Adams more than is good for them, or the SDLP.
Some failed to rise above custom and practice. Martin McGuinness stretched out a hand to Peter Robinson but nobody in the DUP had a similar impulse towards Adams. A punitive and unforgiving party at its best, from a culture which absolves itself from blame while insisting on punishment to the letter for opponents, the DUP at Stormont level is struggling to keep up.
Below that, like the self-righteous republicans who in some ways are their mirror image, DUP sympathisers must be wondering who to trust, who to ask for answers. Many, again like a swathe of republican opinion, flinch away from the media whom they have blamed for so much down the years. Yet what they watched on television could not be gainsaid. The first splutters of outrage have died away: what was the point of complaining about “the motivation” of the whistleblower, “the agenda” of the broadcaster.
Sinn Féin sympathisers have gone through a different phase. Early satisfaction with their leader’s performance and heartfelt pity for him and his family blurred a bit as questions and answers descended into unsatisfactory evasion.
The republican world is bigger now than in wartime, its outer circle less biddable. When the second wave of allegations surfaced to set up more questions for Adams and the party leadership, anxiety started to grow. What holds it in check, at least for the moment, is today’s version of the old hostility towards much of the media.
There is a fair degree of awareness that some parts of the media will always delight in blackening the Adams-McGuinness leadership, and that distaste for the peace that brought Sinn Féin into politics remains strong.
A determined attempt to tie an already off-balance Adams into blame for inaction in several shocking cases, the number threatening to grow by the day, might just rebound and help the Sinn Féin leader.
Much of what has tumbled out of cupboards has been empty of humour. But jokes get made, and grabbed like lifelines. Not great jokes, mostly: tasteless, often with an anti-woman bias. A quantity has been cross-community though, Protestants laughing as much as Catholics at the same cracks and in a similar spirit of irreverent mockery. That happens rarely enough to be worth mentioning.
Then there are the Catholics who prefer to spin out the Mrs Robinson riffs – rather than talk about how Sinn Féin is likely to have handled negotiations, with their leader under siege.