THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
“Every day here is Drumcree Day. Has been for decades. People ask ‘why dredge up all these old conflicts?’. But they have always been here. It has never stopped,” I am told by Gail Walker, former Editor of the Belfast Telegraph, now its Editor-at-Large.
I first met Gail when, in 2007, I headed up to Belfast City to join the Tele as a management consultant where I was to live, work and play in one of Europe’s last great drinking cities.
Belfast became my second home and I grew to love the North for myriad reasons: its overwhelming sense, sometimes against the odds, of belief in a peaceful and prosperous future; its rebuilding of bombed-out Belfast from the artistic bustle of the Cathedral Quarter to the shop-till-you-drop ambience of Victoria Square; its pubs and inviting restaurants; the leafy suburbs of south Belfast; and the city’s many festivals.
But most of all it was its people I found intoxicating, with their colloquialisms, a wit that leaves us Southerners in the shade, and a willingness to oblige, evident in the helpful smiles of shop attendants and the wee banter, the howz-bout-ya of those who drive the city’s buses and command its taxis.
Northern Ireland is at the epicentre of yet another political storm with the ‘rí-rá’ and ‘ruaille buaille’ over a Protestant parade down the nationalist Garvaghy Road in Drumcree, the once-annual march not having taken place since 1998 – its legacy a bloody reminder of the dark days that were the Troubles.
Amid the intransigence of it all are the accusations of damage to the Good Friday Agreement, that Northern Ireland has come nowhere since 1998; of the inaction of the PSNI and the back and forth to the High Court challenging Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant’s ban, the failure of the Assembly to act, and the “blatant bias” of First Minister Michelle O’Neill.
Northern Ireland, the Six Counties, Ulster, the North — call it what you will — is only 100 miles or so up the road from this newspaper’s office, yet only one in 13 of us ‘down here’ has ever bothered to visit Nord Iron, as its 1.87 million inhabitants affectionately call it.
Gail Walker tells me: “Every day is Drumcree. Every day is Enniskillen. And Loughinisland. And the Shankill. And Omagh, its horrors playing out at the public inquiry this week. And every squalid terrorist murder at a lonely country road or church or doorstep.
“It’s pointless asking why things that are unresolved keep recurring. It’s because they’re unresolved.
“The one we were told would resolve them — the Assembly and Executive arising out of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement — has quite obviously failed,” she says.
“The supposed shared office of First and Deputy First Minister has also failed. The personal relations between the two current occupants have clearly broken down. The political and strategic direction they are supposed to provide is non-existent.”
A no clearer picture.
Sadly, if you want to see sectarianism in action, look no further than the obstinate 35 Orangemen who want to march the Garvaghy Road and the Republican residents who oppose them. It’s an insidious ‘them and us’ which can affect everything from failure to provide effective government to personal consequences.
The Northern Ireland that became my second home today seems almost uninhabitable, with huge health issues, educational underachievement, crumbling roads, rail and utilities infrastructure, chronic neglect of the natural environment, and imploding fiscal debt with no budget. On top of all that, ‘peace’ is an MI5 terrorism threat level standing at ‘substantial’.
Arguably, not much of a win for the Good Friday Agreement.
And now, decades on, back to square one – with the Garvaghy impasse. There, more than €3m worth of police presence has kept massed illegal protesters – egged on by Michelle O’Neill and SF leader Mary Lou McDonald – and the Orange parade marchers apart. It’s a reminder of how much needs to be done in the North to cast off the past.
Upon leaving Belfast for good in 2013, one of my neighbours, young Evangelical twin Jessica, knocked on my door, proffering a bag. “A wee something from Louise and I to mark your going,” she said, declining to come in.
A bottle of wine maybe, I thought, as I opened the bag on closing the door. Inside was a packet of chocolate biscuits … and a Bible. Only in Belfast, I mused, as I balanced a mug of tea on the Bible and tore open the biscuits.
Only in Belfast…
