Sunday 15 July 2018

King Billy No Mates

Dissident Republicans may have attacked the home of Gerry Adams, but the great majority of the week-long annual riot in Northern Ireland has been the work of the people on whom the Government depends for confidence and supply. Some of those have even opened fire on the Police.

If "they're not the DUP," then for whom else, exactly, do they vote? Nor could the DUP do without their political muscle, which one newly elected MP, from a prominent paramilitary family, thanked explicitly in her acceptance speech last year.

Unrest of the kind that we have seen in Northern Ireland would be the only news if it were happening in England, Scotland or Wales. That it has barely been mentioned is for two reasons.

First, everything to do with "The Twelfth" would come close to bringing down a Government dependent on the DUP if it were shown on national television. It is public holiday for the specific purpose of committing sectarian violence. 

Bonfires are topped with the flag of a friendly neighbouring state, and also feature the pictures of elected local politicians. Confederate flags are routinely and increasingly paraded, and Swastikas are not unheard of.

Yet without this electoral bloc, Theresa May would not be Prime Minister. In which case, people would say, Theresa May does not deserve to be Prime Minister.

And secondly, we are in every sense disengaging from Northern Ireland.

Having the DUP effectively in government for a year has crystallised the sense, which has always been there, that we did not really have anything in common with the place, but had merely inherited it as a kind of unwanted stepchild, troublesome and expensive.

We are rapidly approaching the point of either putting it up for adoption, or just kicking it out without a further thought.

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