So. Arlene has moved from being the crocodile woman to being the neighbourly woman. She’s put aside the iron fist normally used for repelling reptiles and has extended the hand of friendship to her GAA neighbours, even to the point of holding up, while smiling, a Fermanagh shirt with Irish writing on it.
It’s a bit of a metamorphosis, but one that we should receive gratefully. Even though Arlene has been at pains to tell us how neighbourly she’s being, we should still accept it as a goodwill gesture. Or even a gesture of self-preservation. As anyone who isn’t Nigel Dodds or Gregory Campbell knows, unionism is doomed except it can persuade a sizeable number of Catholics/nationalists/republicans that they’d be better off within the UK than in a united Ireland (and, of course, the European Union.)
It’s a big ask and you can sympathis with those unionists like Dodds and Campbell who don’t do the let’s-be-friends thing. What’s the point in living in a unionist state, if you have to suck up to the very people that the state was built to repel? But while it may be counter-intuitive, being nice to taigs is what must happen. Union-loving fenians: that is the only life-line unionism can use to escape from the pit they have dug for themselves.
Can Arlene’s good wishes to the Fermanagh team be built on? She was asked about attending the actual Ulster Final, but she immediately went all coy and hard-to-get, which probably means she’s going to attend. But then Peter Robinson attended a Gaelic game – after, of course, the band had played Amhrán na bhFiann. So were Arlene to attend, she’d only be bringing unionism back to the point it was at in 2012. That’s eight years ago. Will unionism be in a happier place eight years from now? Not if they keep indulging in this rebuff-reconciliation game.
And even if unionism were to embark on a campaign of love-bombing, making nice with nationalists/republicans on every front, would it work? I tend to agree with Joe Brolly on this one:
“There was a time after the GFA, there was a tremendous consensus around it and there was a time that the Catholic middle classes, the really important ones, would have bought into a Northern Ireland society, there was a chance for that. I think – I sincerely believe – that …it is completely gone.”
Maybe Arlene’s hand movement is less reconciliation and more drowning.
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