What is it with middle-class unionists? Or at least with two prominent middle-class unionists?
Recently Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd tweeted about “a shire of bastards” in London (I’m pretty sure he meant “shower” but shire is good too) who were talking about “herd immunity” over the coronavirus, aka survival of the fittest. He was quickly knuckle-wrapped by middle-class unionist pundit Alex Kane who urged him to moderate his language in the interests of civilized debate. As I said at the time, Kane might have been reprimanding a west of Ireland victim of an Gorta Mór for his poor table manners.
And inside the last twenty-four hours or so, Justice Minister Naomi Long has taken Joe Brolly to task. Joe was giving out stink on Twitter about the proximity of witnesses, jurors, lawyers and the general public at court cases, all of which clearly put public health at serious risk. Naomi Long tweeted that all precautionary steps were being taken, blah blah blah and Joe was creating paper tigers. Joe responded by asking the Justice Minister if she’d recently been in Laganside, that legal social distancing was non-existent and that with all due respect, she was talking “bollocks”.
Well. Naomi called on Joe not to use “hyperbolic” language, that this was far from helpful. (No, Virginia, I don’t know if she was doing a verbal riff between “hyperbolic” and “bollocks”.)
You see the link between the two spats? In both cases a nationalist/republican is in a state of high anxiety over a public health matter, and in both cases a middle-class unionist responds with calls for people not to be rude.
I’m going to put my head back and shout words beginning with b and f and c and several other letters, with an exclamation mark after each, so I’ll stop writing in case it offends your fucking ears.
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