Let’s not lose the run of ourselves

I was accused the other day of having lost the run of myself, which I suppose is accurate enough, given that I’ve at present got a broken foot. It’s a good expression, “the run of yourself”. Discussing the phrase a few years’ ago, Frank McNally in The Irish Times gave the following as an example of having lost the run of oneself:

“When he [your neighbour] buys a big new off-road vehicle, for example, even though you know for a fact that he never leaves the city, he is in definite peril of losing the run of himself. When his wife suddenly appears to have much larger breasts than she had the last time you looked, she may be losing the run of herself too. And when the pair of them head off to Marbella for Easter, and they only back from a skiing holiday in Austria, you just know they’ve lost the run of themselves, altogether.”

Frank obviously lives in a more salubrious neighbourhood than most of us.

But back to political porridge. There’s a danger that the dazzling election results by Sinn Féin will lead to some of us losing the run of ourselves. While it is true that Sinn Féin narrowed their margin behind the DUP to less than 2,000 votes, and that the Shinners are now breathing down the DUP’s collar with only one seat separating them, and that people you thought you’d never hear mentioning the words ‘united Ireland’ (like Enda Kenny) have now begun to mention those words regularly – while all these things are true, let’s not lose the run of ourselves.

There may be a minority of MLAs elected who are DUP, UUP or TUV, but that’s not quite the same thing as saying there is now a nationalist/republican majority of MLAs.

The Alliance Party: yes, they embrace some from a nationalist background, but please don’t think they’re a party that would ever press for a border referendum, much less vote YES to a united Ireland. The same applies to the Greens, “independents” like Claire Sugden, and of course to Gerry Carroll of People Before Profit.

So let’s not lose the run of ourselves: Stormont is still an emphatically unionist place.

Things may change, of course. Thanks to Brexit, they must change, and in ways that we might find desirable or not desirable. If, for example, Scotland is able to follow through on its decision that it wants a second independence referendum, and with polls showing Scots split 50-50 on the matter, the future of the UK could begin to look decidedly dubious. And where would that leave devotees of Ulster-Scots like the ex-MLA Nelson McCausland?

There is another factor which people shy away from but it’s there, brooding in the background: what about loyalist/unionist paramilitaries? In the past, they have reacted to anything they see as threatening to the Union by resorting to violence. Professor Peter Gray of Queen’s University puts it tactfully:

“There is a fear too about the rise of militant loyalism should any doubt arise over the continuation of Northern Ireland in the Union. In my view this could bring loyalist paramilitaries out on to the streets.”

Anyone with even the most basic grasp of our history will know that this state came into being for precisely such reasons: unionists felt the Union was under threat and resorted to the threat of violence. It didn’t matter whether a majority of Irish people wanted out of the Union – as was the case in the early part of the last century – or that there might conceivably be a majority voting Yes for Irish reunification now, or that everyone had signed up to the Good Friday Agreement, which clearly laid out that a change in the constitutional position of Northern Ireland could be voted through if there was a majority of people north and south so minded.

None of that may matter to some loyalist/unionist paramilitaries, just as broken promises and broken Agreements seem to matter not a whit to their more respectable fellow-unionists in the DUP.