There’s a belief in certain quarters that the south is a more corrupt place than the north. That there’s something greasy about the way somebody’s hand is forever fumbling in the till, seeing what’s in it for them while spouting high-minded concern for the electorate. It’s a view unionist politicians don’t mind latching on to: they made a mistake leaving the United Kingdom, what do you expect from a society that was priest-ridden for so long, evasive parcel of rogues unlike our blunt good selves in Ulster. And there are nationalists who’ll sing the same song.
I’ve always tried to resist, not because I’d feel any inclination to defend the chicanery that permeates much of the south’s politics, but because I think northern politicians have a capacity for double-dealing every bit is two-faced as our fellow-countrymen and women south of the border.
We’ve had a fine example of it in the news about the use of constituency offices. Arlene Foster was on the BBC’s Newsline 630 yesterday and she was calling the BBC for all the names she could think of and a few others that somebody else had probably whittled and polished up for her use. “The parasitical nature of the BBC” and “Always looking for stories of negativity to do down Northern Ireland.” Arlene hasn’t broken any law, but the allegations are that she used offices rent-free from a business-man from whom she also bought property. Arlene denies all wrong-doing: ““A derelict house for £75,000 on the main street of a provincial town – what’s the story? There is no story and yet the BBC feel that its necessary to have a story,” She didn’t register the property with the Assembly until contacted by the BBC; she says she wasn’t required to register it and the standards and privileges people agreed with her, but she then put the property on the record in the interests of openness and transparency. So no story, except that Arlene was acting like someone intent on bull-dozing her way out of an embarrassing situation.
The BBC, ever alert to being balanced, also sprung a similar story about Sinn Féin, saying that the Shinners paid office rent to three different cultural societies, although what the societies were wasn’t clear. I didn’t see Francie Molloy’s response but he dismissed the Spotlight programme in which the allegations were made as “a rubbish of a programme”. He says that Sinn Féin are “renting accommodation for offices within a building that also serves the local community and provides resources for the local community”.
Whether Arlene or Francie are as driven-snow pure on this matter as they’d have us believe remains vague. But the story will provide ammunition for those who think that one lot’s as bad as the other, we were far better off with direct rule, we’re not capable of governing ourselves. That’s unfortunate for two reasons. One is that it encourages some of us to adopt the hopelessly-inept native pose of a people who need the firm hand of the disinterested colonial master, otherwise our elected politicians will rob the public blind. The other is that we’ll get excited about office use and forget the big picture, which is that fifteen years after the Good Friday Agreement, we still haven’t responded with mutual respect for all the victims of our conflict, nor agreed to conduct ourselves in a way that isn’t intent on humiliating those who see differently from us.
Cutting corners and sharp practice will probably always be a part of politics, here and elsewhere. Anything the south can do in that respect, we can do better and just as frequently. The difference is, we’re less often caught. Pace Arlene, there probably is a story or two or ten here; but the pity is that they take our attention off the big picture, which is learning to work together with mutual respect – and yes, I’m talking about things like the surreal Twaddell situation, which is bleeding the public purse of more money on a weekly basis than Arlene or the Shinners or any other sleight of office could ever do. Of course our politicians have a capacity for cutting corners every bit as efficiently as those south of the border. The question is, are we as inept at governing ourselves as the water charges scandal has shown the southern coalition to be?
Put down that stone, Virginia. Remember the see-through structure we live in.
Jude
These stories are an indication of the contempt the electorate is held in by our two main parties. They clearly display a sense of entitlement to get away with as much as possible as long as they are seen to be working together (sort of).
It is complacent to dismiss such stories in favour of the bigger picture.
We need transparency in these dealings in our glass house. Lets see the accounts.
Gio
Good luck with your desire for transparency.A sentence from the T V review in the Irish News today seems apposite ” Of course,falsely claiming expenses is wrong and in any normal democracy there would be a price to pay for it but in Northern Ireland cute-hoorism has been sanctioned in the same way it was legitimised by Fianna Fáil in the 70s and 80s”.
and our ‘colonial masters’ are masters of the slight of hand
“If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.”
Please BBC, tell us something we do not know. Some people here have been playing Monopoly for real all along. Get out of jail free cards are nothing new. Most people accept the Assembly is dysfunctional and that the current incumbents are treading water prior to the next election. The debate about Welfare Reform and the need to borrow money simply confirms that wealth and power remain concentrated in Westminster.
As some people wait with baited breath for the next gripping episode of ‘Spotlight’, politicians will roll the dice, content that they do not have to worry about their salaries, property portfolios or pensions. Neither do they have to create, cost or implement policies. Mr Cameron et al will make all the difficult decisions and anyway, who wants to watch programmes about migration, unemployment, homelessness, problems in prisons, poverty, repossessions or crime, let alone do anything about such issues?
Corruption is indeed Enda-emic (oops, meant to tap ‘endemic’ out) on both sides of the Black Pig’s Dyke though in fairness, it must be pointed out in the ratio: 3 to 1, if one is provincially minded, or else, 26 to 6 if it is counties which count with one. Both ratios are acceptable, depending on whichever one floats one’s boat.
Fitting indeed, in a lordly kind of manor, if one may keep the cross-border element to the fore, both on the gerrymandered side and the backhandered side as well, Esteemed Blogmeister, that you should choose to write: ‘there’s something greasy about the way somebody’s hand is forever fumbling in the greasy till’.
It was a Sligo-man after all, one who was (allegedly) a Lord of the Q’s English, indeed, who first came up with that apt formula of words. One uses the a-word in parenthises there because the whistle-clean Prime Minister of the Free Southern Stateen, Endemic, oops, Enda K had a dam-awful moment on the road to Sligo the other day. Dam as in Damascus.
Which compelled him to come clean in that unique hiss-prissy whistly mode of verbal delivery of his: ‘For far too long I was fooled by the claptrap stuffed down our throats during my schooldays, but tonight was a real eyeopener for me here in Yeats County. I now realise what that unleasher of the doggerels of war was really about when he rhapodised re. the ‘the birth of beautiful terrorists’, so called. And I’d like now to put this rhetorical question to him: Just exactly where are YOU going Mr. Yeats with No Bell on YOUR bike?’
Enda wasn’t ended yet: ‘ All this stuff about arising and going now and going to Inisfree has been exposed for the sinister signposting that it always was, before the scales fell from my eyes here in Sligo tonight. All this horse manure about passing by the churchyard and heading along the roadway and the pavements grey in the direction of where you can hear the lake water lapping are exposed for what they are. So, that’s what you were up to all along, Mr. W.B. Yeats. Well, as the Prime Minister of this Half-sovereign stateen I’m calling your bluff now and telling you that you can jolly well stuff your guff up your bee-loud glade, Mr. Water Baloon Yeats’.
Paranoia for the Free Southern Stateen course, you may say. Enda of storied Kenny.
Now, ‘truailliu’ is the leprechaun for ‘corruption’ as the calebs on the streets of the Waterside can tell you so Perkie’s innner truaillu-seeking troll went nose-poking a little further and came up with this other example of the S.F. (Sinister Forces) at work behind the watershed of the Water Protests.
This one indeed is worthy of a doctorate (honorary) in the Faculty of Spin Fein: the ‘timely’ announcement of the nuptials from the Napa Valley of Cathal Manson (80) himself and a young female admirer of the cult guru – and this is the juicy bit – name of ….Afton Elaine Burton.
Well, curry one’s yoghurt. Another Diva ex Machina. Give the woman in the increasinlgy crowded divan-sized water bed more porter – anything but water !
And if this in itself wasn’t enough to get the anti-christians of anarchy humming the tune of ‘Flow gently, Sweet Afton, among thy green braes’ the Sinister Forces had the gall and audactiy (g.a.a.) to print the young lady’s (alleged) age: 26.
The endlessly outraged Prime Minister (60) pounced on this ‘announcement’ as ‘ another follow-throw example of the eggs and other expletives in the sedentary and somnolent d. of the Yawnaiste (65) of this 26-county three province creation. Hissy-prissed he: ‘What sort of message are they trying to send to the plenty 6-county province? Well, whatever it is, let me tell these Sinister Forces in words unminced and in no u. terms that there is nothing at all untoward in my playing Ronny Drew to Sligo’s Eleanor Shanley and whether ‘she’s got a couple more years on me babe’ or not makes no difference at all in a marriage of true-blue mindsets.
Indeed, (Enda’s particularly fond of his Indeeds) as the Yawnaiste (65) is fond of braying in that unassuming way of her’s: ‘Erin go braeless !’ To which I, as Primary School Teaching Prime Minister, reply with a resounding nod in the direction of the Napa Valley Nuptials: ‘Let Californicaiton thrive !’.
It is vital, therefore, Esteemed Blogmeister, in the interests of good neighbourly relationships between the Fianna Failed entity (almost tapped out ‘enda-ty’) side of the Black Pig’s Dyke and the Failed Entity side of the BPD, that a balance of corruption is maintained at all costs, particularly to the texting tax-payer.
Therefore Perkie’s inner smoke-detecting alarm system is happy to report on the restoration of the controversial Cross-Border Interconnector. This is a Chubb system, and is named in honour of the great Basil Chubb, politcal analyst par excellence.
It has enabled Perkie not only to detect the latest smoke signals being exchanged between Big Chief Crooked Mouth n. of the Black Hog’s Dyke (BHD) and Big Chief Crooked Glen on the s. side but also to decode them. Crooked Glen of course in the leprechaun for Crumlin – happily on both sides, and Hog of course is the preferred North American word for Pig by both Big Chiefs. Pig being too redolent of the Parlour Game ‘Pig in the Parlour’ which both are, erm,prigishily keen to bury at Wounded Ni-hea ! along with the tomahawk of ancient enmities.
NI-hea, of course, being the forked tongue of the leprechaun for ‘No, actually’.
Both Big Chiefs have a BHD in Sitting Bull Manure from where they sit: Crooked Mouth in Stormont and Crooked Glen in the cathedra of The Unionist Times from which he expels gaseous amounts of Gregorian Chant every Tuesday.
In the latter case, Fintan O’Toole ( for it is he ! -in his previous existence as a mere brave of the Black FOT tribe) found it possible to conjure a high-minded tome called ‘Ireland in a Hundred Objects’ without once having to consult a single, s. book in the low brow lingo of the leprechaun.
This little bit of linguistic legerdemain appealed in no small way to Big Chief Crooked Mouth of the Hopi Tribe (so called because of his habit of hopping to this wee black feet in a hissy-fit of Endalike indignaiton and bellowing the warcry of the tribe across the benches at squaws or wenches of the opposite tribe: ‘Curry my Yoghurt !’).
So taken was Big Chief Crooked Glen with this reposte that he posted the following smoke signal back from the high moral ground of Carauntool in the Black Hills of Southern Bloomsday Boater, on the basis that one good curried y. deserved another:
-‘Shovin Connie around the green’.
While making due allowance for what gets lost in the translaiton from Black FOT to Hopi, this may be decoded as the right and proper way to pronounce the last exhortation of the blood thirsty national tantrum of the Free Southern Stateen:
‘So libh canaigi Amhran na bhFiann’.
And, to concude, in a further bout of decoding or Buffalo Bill Coding indeed, Perkie’s inner pyromaniac decodes it as follows: given Big Chief Crooked Glen’s recent oracular announcement on the death of Gaelic (his garlic-tasting take on the lingua franca of the leprechaun) this can only indicate one thing.
The imminent burning on the pyre of postmodernism all books in said language, if any should still be extanct, and there is no sign that this is so, as a glance at the Index of ‘Ireland in a Hundred Objects’ will suggest.
Perkie mehinks: we are all but one short moccasin step or hop closer on the road to a United Pyreland.
Let our revels round the campfire now commence.
There’s no doubt in my mind that something very radical will have to happen within our political experiment before we collectively lose faith in the process and simply abandon it en masse. Can there be as complacent a bunch of political figures as the politicians of Norneverland .Their complacency in facing the future is matched only by Putin’s Kremlin. As the years peel by the arrogance of entitlement grows too . As they fatten and the suits get tighter we can watch as a political system bloats and bastes in front of our very eyes.
Now they want the Aunty Beeb to become a propaganda machine for only Jolly Japes…..No bad news ! No dodgy deals reported ! Next thing they’ll want the weather girls to report only sunshine and sunny days.This is truly how it creeps up on a community until it hangs like a sated tick . There is an argument for some kind of opposition there. These buggers have roots growing out of their collective arse..
Name a government that ISNT corrupt? I certainly cant. As for those advocating a return to direct rule in order to “escape corruption”? That’s like jumping from the frying pan into the fire because one thing I think we can all agree on is that Westminister is no corruption free haven.
As for the spotlight programme…..did it really tell us something that we didn’t already know? One thing that DID stand out was the “keep property in Orange hands” part, there are people who refuse to sell their property to Catholics, solely because their Catholics. Wonder what would happen if all Catholics decided to boycott Orange owned businesses?
The so called “story ” was based on the ramblings of a member of RSF who left SF 30 years ago, never set foot in Gulladuff since and lives in Dungiven 20 miles away.The standard of journalism has’nt improved much since I heard journalists described as “curs and dogs ” by Bernadette Devlin at a funeral 20 years ago.
if anyone is interested here’s a little more historical and contemporary background to “keeping property in Orange hands”
http://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/no-pope-here-never-ever-ever/
The first line of this article is interesting
”There’s a belief in certain quarters that the south is a more corrupt place than the north”
would these certain quarters include those who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago by the big G over a 6 day period??’ 😉
And there Ryan, without too much deliberation, lies the much awaited solution…you either play ball when you’re in the pairc or you leave…..you either implement ALL that was agreed …,, agree with your adversaries , make it work or if you believe that you are subservient then let the “colonial masters ” play mind games ad infinitum