Are the talks over already? i think the Prime Minister has left the building holding his tattered chequebook tightly to his breast. Nine weeks of “talking” they said . I wonder how many minutes of “talking” there actually were in those nine weeks.Nine weeks is a fairly large wedge of time .You could possibly build a house in that timespan , if you put some effort into it. Whole stretches of motorway have been tarred in that time; crops have been harvested;factories have churned out thousands of products on production lines; men and women have finished hard -working weeks, sore and weary ; seasons have changed .What have our politicians achieved ? How have they earned their wages?
The DUP didn’t want to talk about anything , in the first place , anyway .They don’t really like the way logical discussion pans out ….nor do their followers.So is everything all over ?
Yesterday Theresa Villiers ,our Secretary of State ,looked lovingly up into Prime Minister David Cameron’s eyes as that big glossy, glowing and well-polished face, waffled about his commitment to helping sort out a deal for us wee Norneverlanders . Every rounded honeyed word was met with adoration .She was really glad that her boss had stepped in to take the weight from her narrow shoulders, if only momentarily.It was as if Einstein or Hawking was about to unveil the final Theory of Everything.
Today it’s a different story . Sinn Fein are already extolling noisily about the paltry billion pounds that Mr Cameron had apparently offered if the parties had sorted everything out by Christmas .It was never going to happen anyway .If it could have happened , it would have been Mr Haass making the announcement this time last year. Theresa Villiers has now been left to try and keep the process moving on her own. I’m sure she feels deflated, but she’ll get used to it and the salary will continue to trickle into her bank account anyway.
Peter Robinson is now stepping up to the microphone….hush!…He’s telling us that they want to keep digging in that same lucrative trench they call their ministries; in other words , neither the DUP or Sinn Fein want this gravy train to stop anytime soon. The DUP still believe that they have not actually discussed the Parades and Flags Problem at all …at any time . They’ve told everyone this, so how could that issue be expected to be sorted out? You might ask , what they think they were supposed to be doing in there the first place.
I said it before . It’s the pantomime season and this show looks like running for years to come .It looks like becoming our very own “The Mousetrap”. I could become Norneverland’s longest running Christmas Show .Only the actors will change.
You might know that “the Mousetrap” opened in the West End of London in 1952,the year I was born, and has been running continuously since then. It has by far the longest initial run of any play in history, with its 25,000th performance taking place on 18 November 2012.
I think our politicians simply need to tighten up their dialogue and they’ll have a real long-runner.Come back next year folks!
Jude, Am I reading the entry of your date of birth correctly? How could you and I have been playing juvenile football against each other in Drumquin around about 1953,54.
Very easily, Pat. By kicking a ball very hard (and sometimes opponents). I played before and after I went to St Columb’s as a boarder in 1954. You’re older than you think…
What can I say Jude …this is how those Chinese Whispers start…sometimes i feel like the parrot on your shoulder…or should tat be the monkey on your back? …Ha ha…Still it’s good to know that someone besides yourself and the Might Perk reads my stuff even if they don’t always actually know it!
I wonder if the DUP/UUP were filling in the Jamies and Willies of this world about any proposals or ideas? At least the attacks on Alliance property have stopped, there are very few if any white line pickets, as for sorting out `Parades/Flags/The Past, forget it. Every twelfth we `celebrate` all three, there is no way Unionists are going to compromise on them. As long as people are not being killed well, that is progress.Time travel is a fascinating topic but so far nobody has managed to achieve it, moving from the seventeenth century to the twenty first will not be easy.