THE PRICE OF THE ORANGE AND GREEN

ripe orange with leaves on white background

“As sure as apples is apples and oranges is oranges”
It is laughably ridiculous. Sammy Wilson of the DUP is on the radio now talking about anything but the real reason the Executive had to be closed down and why his party colleague Arlene Foster had to be made step down. Let’s make no bones about that “made” .She had to be removed from her position.There wasn’t a choice.She had gone “rogue” and assumed a few super -powers that she really didn’t have in her gift.
To Mr Wilson it was all about the” Orange and the Green” and it was very obvious that he was much more comfortable dealing with life under those simple terms. Nothing mattered more to him .He didn’t care about DUP scandals ; they were somethin that everyone else had invented to do him down.All he worried about was keeping unionism ahead of the pack at whatever cost and to hell with incompetence….to hell with chicanery ….to hell with criminality.if you wanted a unionist leader in government , anything is a price worth paying as far as Sammy is concerned.
He seemed to have no conception that his party leader, Arlene Foster as the First Minister with specific responsibilities to everyone ,alongside the Deputy First Minister, had actually lost the run of herself.It is really as simple as that .She had finally lost the plot.
She had “forgotten” ,or more likely never wanted to accept the simple little fact that she was part of a Joint Ministry, but thought she was somehow also above the law of the land.She refused to countenance stepping aside while an investigation took place into her awful retrospective antics in office, so there was no alternative but to remove her; the only way to remove her was to remove the office itself. That was what her Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness was forced to do, to get the message through her skull.Sammy ‘s skull was equally as wooden.He saw no problem in keeping this wayward minister in office.Had it been a Sinn Fein minister or indeed an Alliance or a UUP minister going off on a unilateral rant , while dragging the Speaker in her or his slipstream , would he have thought the same? Somehow , I do not think so .
In his version of reality , she was above the law and certainly would not and should not take advice from her own office.Mad or what?, you might ask. In what other reality would this be possible? In retrospect, this behaviour was symptomatic of her style right through her political career; she seems to have been led by the hand by Peter Robinson and he had only disengaged when everything fell apart, but like some unwholesome boil , this was the moment when the puss had finally popped.
She refused to take advice from her very own office to step aside while investigations into the “Loot for Soot” RHI scandal took place and acted like a prima donna when she should have attempted to disport herself with just a little grace .There was no other way to describe her silly behaviour. The fact that the advice came from her partner and that he happened to be a member of Sinn Fein should have been of no consequence; the advice in the end ,had been sound as it was to subsequently be proven.
Sammy Wilson then almost went apoplectic on radio with Steven Nolan. In a purposely convoluted diatribe he attempted to explain and/or possibly avoid explaining his recent radio interview with the already, unusually , badly -informed and ill-prepared broadcaster ,John Humpries on BBC radio 4 .Although we, here, in our political isolation , already know every small detail of a succession of nepotistic DUP scandals prior to this scheme , the public and commentators futher afield have no such interest or knowledge , having long-since taken their collective eyes from the ball and long considered that Norneverland had been politically “fixed” already .Little did they know of the struggles we’ve had with racism, hatred and finances.
Sammy had told Mr Humphries the lie that the RHI scheme was the exact same scheme that had been used in the UK ,when in fact, this was a blatant and very transparent untruth. That untruth took to the airwaves across Middle England where it might have been given a cursory listen at best .It meant that Humphries would have no ammunition to probe any further , so he had been essentially fobbed off. The £490 billion DUP RHI scandal was covered-up one more time
Wilson’s response to Steven Nolan’s probings was his usual shtick of throwing in a series of ever more convoluted distractions to lead the questioner astray. This kind of nonsense is what amounts to politics for the DUP and it obviously finds much favour with their followers. Nolan was like a terrier chasing a rat as he attempted to bring it all back to the fact that Arlene Foster’s office ,at the time ,had actually introduced the scheme and that she encouraged it, but also tweaked it in such a way that the Norneverland lunatic version of it had no cap on it so that money could be burnt at random with no censure.We’ve come to regard such absurdist behaviour as the normal stuff of life here .Some think of it as some mad fairy tale and you can easily see why.
None of this mattered to Sammy .To him it’s all about” the Orange and the Green ” and the price of this kind of nonsense is of no consequence whatsoever. Other DUP ministers are promoting this same line .To them it is not about the misuse of office , the long list of scandals, the incompetence of their ministers, the possible criminality of the First Minister or at best her stupidity, the hatred in their hearts for muslims, gays, anything Irish and  so ,and so ,and so on , and on and on and so on and so on and so on ……
“Orange and Green” has always worked before in their minds and that is the election road they will take again.They look to the past mistakes for sustenance and that seems to suit those who vote for them too .No Surrender!!!….backs to the walls boyos!!!….circle thewagons!!! …prepare for boarders!!! That same old nonsense was beginning again as each one of the political team stepped up to once again to stand together and re-write plain truths to suit their own narrow narrative that they were the only victims and everyone else was out to do them down for no good reason.
I think it will be a long time before they will ever develop any newer vision that looks to a much more complex future. It’s looking like they’ll never be actually capable of sharing power with anyone .I think Sinn Fein have just spent ten years in proving that very point .

10 Responses to THE PRICE OF THE ORANGE AND GREEN

  1. Mark January 16, 2017 at 3:01 pm #

    I had mentioned before that, once it all goes belly up, at 17.00 hrs today, election to come, the unionists will do what they have always done best, blame it all on the fenian’s, like children in, once, Sammy’s school yard, they’ll do all they might to shift blame to the other side and, despite clear evidence of corrupting, try to get themselves re-elected as the larger party based wholly on the orange and green argument.
    For poor Master Wilson, again, those who can do, those who can’t teach, those who can’t teach go into politics.
    An Irish solution to an Irish problem.

  2. fiosrach January 16, 2017 at 3:34 pm #

    You don’t understand,harry. The possible outcomes are that usuns come out on top. Just imagine. Fenians,terrorists,taigs,rogues and renegades at the tiller of the province. Talk about a recipe for disaster. Or imagine the UUP or Alliance or the SDLP or a melange of all three (all closet republicans) in charge. Rainbow perverts speaking Irish everywhere. Book me a passage to Canada or New Zealand. No decent party could allow this to happen.

    • paddykool January 16, 2017 at 3:55 pm #

      Well fiosrach…I would say there’ll be little change but then there’s that little question of the DUP not understanding how politics can possibly work at all with the attitude they have anyway. Their version of reality is one from the madhouse so how would anyone work with them ? Indeed who indeed would want to work with them? They are spectacularly unfit for politics in a divided society .and who would trust them with finances again? This latest scandal has exposed much more than they would ever care to have been seen. They have no respect for the office and that is going to be a major stumbling block. Arlene took the head-staggers and thought she was the boss for Chrissakes! That’s a huge problem right there.
      i know that our elections are seasonal farces but this fiasco has stretched all credibility for the DUP. If they are voted back in …..in huge numbers ,we will know that they are supported by a huge number of very unstable and unknowledgeable people who really do not want good governance to work and have a preference for lunatics and criminals running the place.What other way could you interpret any of it?

  3. fiosrach January 16, 2017 at 4:25 pm #

    Seven weeks is a long time in politics,harry. Long enough for enough horse shit to be scattered so that the poor people don’t know or forget what they are actually voting for.

  4. paddykool January 16, 2017 at 5:56 pm #

    An election will only be the start of it ,fiosrach.Then ther’ll be that shopping list to complete before letting them back into government …Then how to go about policing all those promises that will be made to get their hands back into the trough…. and who to trust to do that policing .I fear we’ll need a representative from the United Nations or somesuch on a rotating basis to oversee their every future move move. Arlene didn’t trust nationalists with the money when Peter stood aside a year ago …well who now trusts Arlene,Sammy and her various buddies(those she hasn’t already knifed in the back!)… to even understand what the truth is anymore?

  5. Randall Stephen Hall January 16, 2017 at 6:03 pm #

    Hi Harry.

    “No-Neverland” is as big a mouthful as Northern Ireland while “Nornia” is simple, direct and could actually be used, while helping C.S. Lewis tourism in East Belfast.

    I imagine that your “No-Neverland” only grows out of seeing the likes of the DUP as the only party in the north with any sectarian issues . . . (I don’t think so.) Republicanism has as much “no” and “never” in it as anything the unionists have to offer.

    When will we just “Get over ourselves” ?

    Other than that Harry, well done ye boy ye and keep cracking away with the axe. One day we’ll pull down the telegraph poles to power.

    Stiofán.

    • paddykool January 16, 2017 at 6:47 pm #

      Hiya RSH…I’ve always thought “Norneverland” had a ring to it since I first stumbled across this magical kingdom several years back and began sending reports by trained ravens to our Mighty Blogmeister , Jude the Munificent One . As you no doubt have gathered by now , this beautiful land lies west of Alice’s Wonderland, south-east of Gulliver’s Lilliput and slightly south of Narnia. Some of those same tribes have colonised this place ,in part. There is much insanity evident in the mixing of the now-native races of folks living here , many who do not believe that a greater world of even more complexity actually exists beyond well -tested boundaries . Most of the outgoing messages must be smuggled out surreptitiously through a convoluted network of trained monkeys before the ravens are actually released through a hidden slot in the plexiglass dome .Many are shot from the skies by hunters supplimenting their meagre diet of gruel and do not make it through, so the news is intermittent.

  6. billy January 16, 2017 at 6:33 pm #

    peoples fed up already with all the oul balls outta them trying to get their snouts back in the trough if social media is anything to go by.it didnt even reach the headlines on the main news lol.a few good sleet showers on election day should finish the job.

  7. Freddie mallins January 16, 2017 at 9:01 pm #

    I’m all for improving the tourist trail to east Belfast and encouraging people to acquaint themselves with the great man’s homestead, just a pity Sammy Wilson was happy to see the destruction of Seamus Heaney’s student house in Belfast when he might have lobbied for its protection. But sure ones as bad as the other, isn’t that what’s being argued.

  8. Mark January 18, 2017 at 8:53 pm #

    Harry, just came to me, having listened to Jonathan Bell state two DUP advisers have extensive interests in the poultry industry, an industry which has benefited from the RHI scam, the price of orange and green is c. £490,000,000/