Happy Mondays?

The race is on for the Leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party. I know, isn't it thrilling? There is talk of "going into Opposition", but the root of the problem with the setup in Northern Ireland is that there is no such thing as Opposition with designated benches, time for debates, representation on committees, and so forth. Everyone is supposed to be in Government all the time. In which case, who is asking any questions? Ah, there's the rub.

Even by the standards of these things, the UUP is a loose federation of local franchisees: liberal-Left intellectuals, industrial-municipal machinists, agricultural-municipal machinists, Monday Clubbers, and so on. By all accounts, the Monday Clubbers, in particular, are regrouping, being no longer necessarily anti-Agreement, but having other concerns these days.

It is quite incorrect that Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons are the United Kingdom's first ever Far Right MEPs, since way back in the 1980s a Group at Strasbourg was chaired by Jean-Marie Le Pen, had his party as its core membership, otherwise comprised the avowed heirs of Mussolini and the party founded by Colonel Papadopoulos, and had precisely one other member: the Monday Clubbing John Taylor, now Lord Kilclooney, of the UUP. He went on to become the Deputy Leader who was pivotal to securing the party's acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement. Other concerns, indeed...

But all the while, no party is able, or apparently even willing, to stop Sinn Féin from trial-running its desired banishment of the Catholic Church from the schools throughout Ireland by banishing Northern Ireland's Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their role in the schools that, after all, they set up.

For what are the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland to the DUP? As little as mainstream Irish Catholic culture is to Sinn Féin, so is mainstream Ulster Protestant culture to the DUP; the Orange Order's ban on Free Presbyterian ministers as Chaplains may have been lifted, or it may now be widely ignored (like, lest Paisleyites gloat, the ban on alcohol in Orange Halls, and the ban of attendance at Catholic weddings and funerals because the Mass is celebrated), but it certainly used to be in place and in effect, well into the recent past.

And then there is the fact that the authoritative Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey now shows over half of Catholics to be pro-Union, with only one third in favour of a United Ireland, although that is still a vastly higher proportion than would vote for it in the Republic, where the issue simply no longer exists as a mainstream political concern. Yet who is taking account of these realities?

The carve-up between two lunatic fringes stops bombs from going off in England, though not in Northern Ireland, but who asked them?