Stormont: time to go?

Cheesh. I mean Holy God, cor stone the crows and blimey, guvnor. Watching the DUP at present is like watching an ostrich trying to swallow a piano. To say it’s exerting every fibre of its being would be an understatement. It’s thrashing around  in every direction in its frantic attempt to get off this gawdawful Cash-for-Ash hook on which it’s impaled.

For the benefit of those of you’ve who’ve been living in an underground bomb shelter (not necessarily a bad move, given President Trump), the DUP’s Arlene Foster borrowed a Renewable Heating Initiative from Britain, altered the bits that would have kept it under control, and predictably, it soon had run up a bill of over £1 billion. The good news for us here in this little country/nation/colony, we’ll only have to stump up around £400 million. Give or take £100 million. The Brits are absorbing the rest. The present leader of the DUP brought the scheme in and altered it so a cock-up was possible, a DUP minister took it over from Arlene and is now being hung out to dry by his own party for his pains, and the DUP are suffering the kind of anxiety known only by an ostrich that’s been served a piano for lunch.

Hence the frantic efforts. One strategy is to toss their former Minister Jonathan Bell in the air and hope attackers will expend all their ammo on him. Another is to say “Oh look, isn’t that prosecution of British soldiers scaaaaaandalous!” and draw nationalists/republicans into a fire-fight on that topic. Brexit, of course, is another possibility, except that the DUP are the only party which urged the population here to vote for Brexit, which proved they were out of step with public thinking. So now, Sammy Wilson is doing the rounds indicating that Michelle O’Neill when she was Agriculture Minister was really the person responsible for at least half of the ostrich’s-arse that was and remains the RHI. Oh, and the BBC and Stephen Nolan are in cahoots with the DUP’s enemies. God loves a trier, Sammy.

Fortunately, although we’re …what shall I say…easily fired up over things like flags and anthems (witness James Brokenshire (i) complaining about the persecution of old soldiers and (ii) lying about his reasons for skipping out the national anthem at that game),  cross-community fury with people who pick our pocket for hundreds of millions of pounds and then say it was an honest mistake ooer sorry, it wasn’t me it was him, no it wasn’t me it was her, oh look, there’s an old soldier in a nursing home – most of us can see through such red-eyed flim-flam and are focused on how we’re paying for DUP stupidity at best and corruption at worst. There were simple-minded people who thought the Christmas hols would help us forget the whole thing. Uh-uh. If the DUP think think they’re going to be rewarded for their hubris by being returned on March 2 without blemish, they’d better think again. Some, who have the blind faith of George Orwell’s old nag Boxer will put their DUP candidate top of the poll. Significant numbers will check their wallet and then give the DUP a  kick in the teeth.

But what if they don’t? What if the DUP, despite all their contempt and chicanery – Red Sky, NAMA, funding of Orange halls, Cash-for-Ash – what if they  return to Stormont with more or less the same numbers? And maintain the same attitude? Then let’s bring out the mothballs, put drapes over the furniture and lock the front door of Stormont. It’s over, done, arrivederci Assembly.