Sometimes Colum Eastwood reminds me of Billy Bunter, the fat owl of Greyfriars school. You’ll remember Billy’s protestations of innocence – “It wasn’t me that scoffed that cake from your tuck-box which tasted really nice.” So Colum, emerging from the Armagh service, told THE VIEW (BBC ONE): “That was no celebration of partition.” Right, Colum, and those aren’t crumbs you’re removing from your beard.
In THE VIEW studio, Claire Hanna did her level best to verbally machine-gun her way past Mark Carruthers’s questioning. The President of Ireland was very different from a political party, which is why the SDLP in the shape of Colum attended that Armagh thing. “We are the wooers” she added. I think she was talking about wooing unionists.
Looking very neat and tidy, Pearse Doherty was beamed in to point out that Boris Johnson had let the cat out of the bag by referring to the event as a “wonderful celebration”. The Irish government and those northern nationalist politicians attending simply showed how out of touch they were with public opinion.
Jim O’Callaghan, the man who would be Fianna Fáil king, was also beamed in to THE VIEW studio. He rejected the idea that he was trying to ride two horses at once. The Armagh service was a political event and he didn’t see a Fianna Fáil TD in the form of Jack Chambers attending, he saw a government representative in the form of Jack Chambers attending. Which was different. Sort of.
Claire Hanna said if nationalists couldn’t agree among themselves, what hope had they of persuading unionists that a united Ireland made sense?
Both Pearse and Jim agreed that there was an urgent need to establish an all-Ireland civic forum to describe what a new Ireland might look like, and impress on unionists that a new Ireland would not be a take-over by the south. Pearse added that it was now a question of when, not if a border poll would be held.
Claire Hanna has many of the qualities of a top-notch politician. She looks and sounds intelligent, she doesn’t lose her temper, she has a wide vocabulary and uses it. But somehow – and former SDLP leader Mark Durkan had the same problem – she delivers her thinking at such a pace, the listener is left scrambling to catch up.
Archbishop Eamon Martin did his best to show that this was more than a unionist celebration by noting that partition had left his community deeply sad and suffering from a sense of loss. He also told us about going to see his granny in Inishowen, and how it became a journey through a military fortress.
The more we heard from the churchmen, the more obviously the event, whether they liked or not, was a political event.
Maybe if they’d called it that in the first place, skipped the religious service, and engaged in getting-to-know-you dialogue, Armagh might have been a success. But alas, it was set up to ‘mark’ partition and the establishment of our wee stateen, and no self-respecting nationalist should have darkened the Cathedral door.
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