Sammy the ambusher – but don’t forget Stephen too…

There have been many who have condemned Sammy Morrison’s anthem ambush at a Remembrance service the other day. On the other hand, there have been those, not inconsiderable in number, who think it was a jolly good idea. It annoyed the Shinners, what’s not to like? Prominent among those hailing Mr Morrison’s vocal initiative was another TUV man, Stephen Cooper, who tweeted:

Cllr Stephen Cooper‏@S_J_Cooper 18h18 hours ago

Only ‘stunt’ yesterday was McLaughlin removing National Anthem from service, without agreement or notification. No respect &against protocol

I didn’t know Stephen existed until a couple of weeks ago, when I was alerted to a blog he had written for Queen’s University’s ‘Political Mind Fields’ blogsite, run by Dr Francis Teeney. If you want to read it, go to http://blogs.qub.ac.uk/politicalmindfields/2015/10/29/a-real-alternative/. Alternatively, you might want to grease the cat’s boil.

What follows is a blog I wrote in response to Stephen.

Stephen Cooper’s recent blog was compelling – its passion alone would have held any reasonable reader. Alas, its logic and name-calling would, I fear, have repulsed the same gentle reader.

Essentially, Stephen disagrees with the Good Friday Agreement, which of course is his right. However, in the first paragraph of his piece, to declare that the GFA outworkings show “the consequences of elevating unrepentant terrorists into executive positions of devolved government” is the point where, saddened, I must part ways with him.

Why? Well, prominent among the “unrepentant terrorists” he speaks of would be Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. Mr McGuinness wasn’t “elevated” – he was elected and then nominated as DFM by his party. That’s democracy for you. As to unrepentant, Mr McGuinness has frequently expressed his regrets for the suffering of all the victims in our recent period of conflict. And did I mention that the people of Ireland, north and south, voted overwhelmingly for the Good Friday Agreement, of which the Assembly is part?

Stephen continues with similar careening logic. He believes republicans have “fallen spectacularly short of convincing anyone…of their credentials and commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means.” Uh-uh, Stephen. Not so. They’ve convinced me. And tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of other Irish people. If you have evidence that republicans are engaging in undemocratic and violent actions, it is your duty to hand such evidence to the police.

The piece’s attention then turns to talk of a shared future and an island of equals. This in Stephen’s book is so much “fluffy dreamt up (sic) claptrap” by people who want “to destroy Northern Ireland”. I’m not sure how fluffy would differ from hard-edged claptrap – in fact I’ll come clean and say I’m not even sure what claptrap is. But if wishing to achieve a re-united Ireland where equality is the norm is claptrap, then every nationalist and republican on the island is guilty of it. Personally, I’d always thought it was a legitimate political objective.

Later in his article Stephen goes after Gerry Adams for having said that equality was the Trojan horse that would “break the bastards”. He’s not the first unionist to have reacted angrily towards Mr Adams’s statement and I’m sure there are quite a number of republicans (maybe including Mr Adams himself) who wish he’d never used such language. But it’s interesting that people like Stephen get annoyed about the language, saying it reveals “the true fascist face of republicans”, and not at all annoyed about the notion that they are being charged with resisting equality. Were I a unionist, that is the charge I would find most challenging. But on that Stephen has nothing to say.

Instead, he continues with sweeping charges against what he calls “IRASF”, declaring they’re “heavily engaged in criminality on a widespread and industrial level”. Again, Stephen owes it to himself as an upright citizen to bring his evidence of this to the attention of the PSNI. In fact he might want to ask why, if his claim is true, the PSNI haven’t charged this massive body of lawbreakers and brought them to court, with or without Stephen’s evidence.

The article then turns down the well-trod TUV path: Stormont-as-Scandalous. The present system, we’re told, is “immoral and institutionalized sectarianism” that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. I would agree with Stephen that it is unusual – but not unique – to have a government without an opposition. However, has he paused to ask himself why we’ve arrived at this point? Could it have anything to do with the fact that when we had ‘democracy’ in the six counties, for fifty years the state was truly sectarian, with discrimination and bigotry rampant? The present Stormont system was devised as a way of not allowing that to happen again. When you have an artificial state – brought into being by the threat of armed action – you can hardly complain if you end up with an artificial form of government. Present artificiality may be bad but it beats state sectarianism.

And then, inevitably, Stephen comes to recent claims of the IRA’s continuing existence. “The fact is we now have the IRA army council dictating policy”. Um, no, not really, Stephen. If you read the document, consider the text, you’ll find it refers to some republicans declaring their belief that the IRA army council is the over-arching body that includes the IRA and Sinn Féin. That’s not quite the same thing as a “fact”. The other, for me more convincing fact is that over the past seventeen years, no one in unionist ranks – not even Stephen’s TUV – has so much as suggested that the IRA or the IRA army council was still in existence. Seventeen years since the GFA and not a peep from within or outside the republican community. Was there ever such thunderous silence on such an important matter? Now we are assured by the PSNI/MI5 that the IRA does exist. In which case, why haven’t the PSNI done something about it long ago? Or at least told us at some point in the past seventeen years? Or better still, produced some evidence to support their claim?

Stephen’s article concludes with a suggestive picture of the DUP climbing “back into the executive bed with a fully armed and active terrorist organization without so much as a whimper”. There’s something slightly, um, steamy about that sex-and-violence metaphor which makes me avert my eyes and pass on.

The truth is, I don’t blame Stephen or his boss Jim Allister for feeling as they do. It must gall to see people who have been engaged in violence now working in the same Assembly chamber as themselves. I’d conclude by pointing out two things. One, would it not be more constructie to welcome this pursuit of a re-united Ireland by peaceful rather than violent means? And two, unionists are proud to speak of their ancestors signing the Ulster Covenant in their own blood. Should the rest of us not recoil from working with people who clearly honour gun-running and the threat of widespread violence? The answer is of course No. So what’s sauce for the nationalist/republican goose should surely be sauce for the unionist/loyalist gander.

Pssst, Stephen and Sammy… I think you’re embarrassing an awful lot of unionists.