Sinn Féin’s Megan Fearon has done a very clever thing. I’ve seen the same question posed online but Fearon has laid out clearly the realities.
In normal negotiations, there would be trade-offs – both sides abandoning goals and hoping they’d achieve their objectives at a later date. The difference in the case of the Sinn Féin-DUP talks is that, as John O’Dowd said on The View a week or two back, this is a question of equality and respect.
Fearon puts it bluntly: “Justin McNulty and the SDLP should set out whose rights they want to abandon in order to get a deal at any price? Is it families who have been waiting for inquests for 45 years? The LGBT community or those of us who demand recognition and acceptance of Irish cultural identity?”
If you’ve had a spat with your next-door neighbour because he’s been hurling envelopes of excrement, used contraceptives, dead mice and lumps of rotting meat over the fence onto your back lawn, you don’t have a chat with him and say “OK Jeffrey (or Sammy or whatever his name is), I want to get along with you and I know I can’t have all my demands met. Will you agree to stop lobbing the contraceptives and the mice? I’m happy for you to keep pitching the excrement and the rotting meat because I realize it’d be unreasonable to expect all my demands to be met.”
Apart from the mess the continued pitching of excrement and rotting meat would go on making of your back garden, their continued arrival would make it quite clear that your neighbour still has deep contempt for you and all you stand for. Only when he can be persuaded that this is no way for civilized adults to act – in short, no more dirty stuff, Jeffrey/Sammy/ whatever his name may be – will the problem be resolved. .
So while Megan Fearon’s question is a skillful one since it puts the SDLP on the back foot, it’s also a core one to ask. People either act with integrity and respect or they don’t. There is no half-way house. Time to grow up and join civilized society, guys.
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