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The
run-up to election day in this place is a source of
much entertainment for those like me who use our vote
intelligently by spoiling it. Although if I were in
Derry I would cast it for Eamon McCann. A vote thrown
his way is like putting a few litres of fuel into
a good engine that is going to keep firmly to the
left side of the road. Not many in this election we
can say that about. One of the most amusing aspects
of pre-polling day hype is the extent to which the
administration, through its new voter registration
process is determined to deny the dead their long
established right to vote. It always rang intemperate
to hear oleaginous politicians complain about the
lack of democracy here when even the dead, for long
enough, could have a say in the affairs of the living.
Come
out ye dead of Sleepy Milltown
Vote for me - your local clown
It
doesn’t do to be too cynical: given that some
of those elected would have little difficulty persuading
many of us that they are in fact dead, perhaps extending
proportional representation to the cemeteries had
some democratic merit. Take Maurice Morrow of the
DUP for example. He is one of those characters who,
after you have met him, you always come away thinking
you were at his funeral. And the event is so uneventful
and Maurice so dull that the next time you meet him
you will swear it is the first. Suzanne Breen wrote
of how, when she was in the supermarket queue after
a demanding day, she learned that Maurice Morrow had
put out a statement. But what could it possibly be?
The most original idea to afflict Maurice in years
is 'bring back the B-Specials'. But Maurice has God
on his side. Most of the big man’s supporter’s
do. Maurice, however, must challenge even the die-hard
Ballymena bible thumper’s faith: as Friedrich
von Schiller felt, 'against stupidity the very gods
fight in vain.'
Election
coverage is great for another reason, because it is
the one time when the liars have to out-lie themselves
and make greater promises than they made last time
round as they strive to convince us that this is the
most important election ever – and they, needless
to say, the most important candidates. In doing so
they provide the hardware with which we can nail their
feet to the floor between this election and the next
one, as they skip and hop through the debris of their
discarded undertakings, all the time squealing about
how ungrateful we are. They sat up the best part of
a night manufacturing some lie for our consumption,
and then, selfish swine that we are, we refuse to
believe it.
Election
seasons, apart from guaranteeing reduced ratings for
those who actually earn their living honestly performing
as comedians, underscore the fact that politicians
will say the silliest of things yet expect to be taken
seriously by the electorate. Maybe they feel that
if they repeat the ‘no alternative to us’
mantra often enough we might believe it and vote for
them. Gerry Kelly of Sinn Fein, tongue in cheek surely,
claimed his party did a good job in the health ministry.
Yet on its watch the joke was that a pizza gets to
your house quicker than an emergency ambulance. But
Gerry is at least consistent in his efforts to sustain
the widespread belief that Sinn Fein only have three
constantly good media performers - Adams, McGuinness
and McLaughlin.
Apparently
this was no where more evident than on a recent BBC
Hearts & Minds broadcast. I missed the show but
according to some of Gerry’s own colleagues,
the Sinn Fein spokesperson on justice put in yet another
dazzlingly inept television performance. Confronting
Eddie McGrady of the SDLP he resorted to what the
more politically correct types would call ageism.
Whatever Joe Cahill thought of Gerry telling Eddie
he was maybe too old has not yet made its way into
the public discourse. But it is slowly dawning on
an increasing number of Sinn Fein members that if
the party is ever to mount a serious challenge to
take the North Belfast Westminster seat from the DUP’s
Nigel Dodds, then someone of the calibre of Eoin O
Broin will need to step in and replace the 'ageing'
and increasingly lacklustre Gerry.
Not
to be outdone in the ‘trying it on’ stakes,
Gerry’s leader - the Gerry that counts - called
on the DUP to tell the truth. Now if the British National
Party were to call on its opponents not to be racist,
it would be laughed out of the television studios.
Here, it is all part of the norm. And they claim we
are the most politicised people in Western Europe.
If we are it is because we turn the TV off each time
that the wah wah men and women come on. Quentin Davis
told the House of Commons that he could only think
of two occasions in which it was alleged that ministers
had lied to the same House. Apart from demonstrating
that Quentin either does not think at all, doesn’t
attend parliament, or does not read Hansard - this
is one British record that will be broken every day
if Sinn Fein abandon abstentionism. But that will
hardly happen given that Sinn Fein are not known for
abandoning core principles and beliefs.
Perhaps
the greatest missed irony of all was reserved for
the Workers’ Party. With absolutely no sense
of self-application, John Lowry told his listeners
that ‘a growing number of people in Northern
Ireland are refusing to be labelled as either unionist
or nationalist, Protestant or Catholic.’ A much
larger number have demonstrated for years that they
are not willing to be labelled as Workers’ Party.
But the vanguard of the non-sectarian and class conscious
proletariat doesn’t see it that way, just as
it never saw its own armed wing.
Just to cap matters off, Gavin Esler provides us with
a momentary lack of insight:
The
idea that Gerry Kelly and Reg Empey would ever sit
in a TV studio engaging in a tough but polite and
civilised political debate never entered my head
at the time. Nor did it enter theirs, I suspect
… when I first came across Gerry Kelly he was
not in a TV studio wearing a smart suit. He was
in jail. He escaped from the IRA blocks in the Maze
prison and was arrested by the Dutch authorities.
The
reason it never entered Gavin’s head is that
it was impossible to conceive that the man who started
a major hunger strike thirty years ago this month
and almost died as a result of it would come to embrace
the British state’s alternative to republicanism.
Gerry is the only element in Gavin’s troika that
has changed. The TV studio is still there; Reg Empey
always sat in it engaging in a debate while sporting
a suit. And he always defended the consent principle
and criticised acts of armed struggle designed to
subvert it. Now he has Gerry Kelly sitting alongside
him to support these points. Which brings us back
to the issue of age and those perceptive words of
Watterson Lowe: 'nobody grows old by merely living
a number of years. People grow old only by deserting
their ideals. Years wrinkle the face, but to give
up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.'
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