A dialogue with a deaf man

It doesn’t happen often but when it does, let’s fling our caps at the moon. The Health minister here, Jim Wells of the DUP, today told MLAs he was recommending a cross-border model of co-operation that would “deliver safe and effective cardiac care to children in Northern Ireland”. In short, sick children would be treated in Dublin, not Belfast. Good man, Jim. It makes economic sense and it makes medical sense. Maith thú! Apparently a while back Jim had an elaborate metaphor for cross-border contact. Jim apparently said that if a burly next-door neighbour was in contact with his wife, he’d be concerned. But if he found that the contact was merely to have the hedge between their two properties properly trimmed, that would be fine with Jim. Other jiggery-pokery (of course Jim didn’t say “jiggery-pokery”, Virginia) would be an entirely different matter. There’s no word, apparently, as to Mrs Wells’s views on the matter.

But of course what you gain on the swings, they hit you over the head with on the roundabouts. I did a recorded interview today for the Nolan radio show about Kate Hoey’s latest pronouncement. Apparently Kate has taken umbrage to the downplaying of the north by Tourism Ireland. She thinks it’s ridiculous, and even if it’s in the Good Friday Agreement that Ireland be marketed as a thirty-two county country, she wants the north to pull out and be marketed as part of the UK. My sparring partner on the interview was David Vance, who of course wrote the lyrics for that classic Bob Dylan song “Tangled Up In Blue”. David said really what Kate had said; and even though I pointed out that visitors here quite like taking in Dublin as well as Belfast, or Bundoran as well as Belleek, or Inishowen and maybe Sligo as well as Derry, David remained adamant. Only – brace yourself, Virginia – only “economic illiterates” would think of marketing the north any other way than as part of the UK, he told me. Even when I described how my Spanish house-swap family last summer had travelled to places like Dublin and beyond, David remained impenetrable.

I don’t know. Maybe David crossed over the border at some point in his childhood and had some kind of unhappy experience, like being dropped on his head up some boreen.  As the psychiatrists in Fawlty Towers said after listening to Basil for a few minutes: “There’s enough there for a whole conference”.