Big Merv and Emma Little send a message

You don’t have to open your mouth or tap computer keys to send a message.  If the next-door neighbours are claiming we’re rowdy and it’s agreed to meet and talk  things over,  I could skip the first meeting and send in my place my big  cousin with the boxer’s nose and the bulging biceps.  No words, you see, but the next-door neighbours would get a clear message for sure. 

I have no way of knowing if that was DUP thinking the other day but according to John Manley in the VO, “As the four other parities wheeled out their big guns – including leaders and MPs -the DUP was represented at the talks table in the morning by special adviser Emma Little and Orange Order chaplain Mervyn Gibson, who it is understood is not a member of the party”.

The talks were to tackle flags, parades and the past; the presence of big Merv and Emma Little made it clear that (i) the DUP had contempt for these talks; and (ii) they’d be focusing on the marches leading up to and including  this Twelfth. Meanwhile  a message has come from the far-off  planet inhabited by the TUV. Its vice-chairman and Orangeman Richard Cairns has declared that “while there was once a cry of ‘No talk, no walk’ the Unionist response to today’s outcome should be ‘No walk, no talk’.”

Yes, Richard,  we hear you loud and clear. This is a part of the United Kingdom. This is a state ruled by Unionism/Orangeism. Anybody who thinks that gathering round a table is going to stop the Orange Order from marching where and when it wants has another thing coming. And for good measure, we’re giving no guarantees about statues of the Virgin Mary appearing on top of any of our bonfires this year, and the same goes to the power of ten for the Irish tricolour and effigies of the Pope. I

Yes, Virginia: depressing is the word for it. One wonders:   is this the DUP whipping up tensions in the community by sending big Merv instead of one of their top guns, or is it the the community, as the TUV claims, which is filled with “enormous anger and resentment” and the DUP is just responding to that? The answer is both. Just as with the now-historic Belfast-City-Hall-Union-flag-tearing-down, which started with those DUP leaflets and in no time turned into rocks and petrol bombs and anything else handy flying through the air,  so the run-up to the Twelfth is a kind of dynamism between the DUP and the unionist community. We tell you your culture’s at stake, you tell us you don’t like that much, we tell you it’s an outrage, you tell us you’re seething, we tell you this will not stand, you reach for a rock…And so it goes. 

There are two things that unionist politicians will not allow to enter their heads, on the grounds that it’d involve fresh thinking and  of that they are in mortal fear.  The first is that walking/parading/marching/doing the restless legs thing is unnecessary. Not just  unnecessary in contested areas but anywhere. It’d be fair to say that republicans feel pretty strongly about political and cultural matters; but the number of parades they hold are as a pimple on the arse of the world compared to the number –  4,000 a year and counting – which the Orange and related Loyal Orders feel they must mount, preferably through a nationalist district and failing that, as near to a nationalist district as possible. On what grounds? On the grounds of tradition, on the grounds that we’ve always done this. Oh come on, guys. It was traditional for my children, in the first two years of their lives,  to poo at will, regardless of company or circumstances. When they got to about three years of age they began to see that  this was an activity better done in private. The childish tradition was left behind.

The second is the necessity of all those mountainous bonfires.  Filling the air with their fumes, facilitating midnight piss-ups and Pope-burning, gobbling up Irish tricolours and heathen (i.e. Catholic) statues. Are these flaming mountains really the construction of forward-thinking, rational people? Is it not possible to celebrate whatever you believe without engaging in primeval practices that’d put, as one British Secretary of State said, a Hottentot tribe to shame?

But DUP and Orange thinking is that they’re under threat and it’s important to send a message to the ranks of feniandom that enough is enough, not one more inch. What they forget or choose to ignore is that their frozen-in-time paralysis leaves them more open by the year to the contempt, not just of their nationalist fellow-countrymen, but of the world.

In the name of decent living and moral hygiene, guys: get down from that high white horse and start acting like adults. The world is watching.