Style Sans Substance

By AM Thursday, September 15, 2011

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye  - Miss Piggy

In life it is useful but often difficult to see oneself just quite as others do. What might seem a great initiative to the beholder can at the same time be viewed as sheer folly by those gazing on. These days I no longer follow Sinn Fein ard fheiseanna, long having been bored into intellectual torpor by the vacuity of it all. Drivel, dross, deference do not combine to produce a magnetism that would draw the concentration; especially when something of such quality as The Killing, a twenty part Danish murder mystery, can command an attention it does not have to vie for. Sinn Fein these days wants to put clear blue sea between itself and the killing.

Among matters discussed at the party’s first Belfast conference was ‘practical planning for Irish unity to begin now’. An unconsciousness acknowledgement perhaps of the failure and futility of the Sinn Fein endorsed IRA campaign and an admission that it was never a practical venture. No Sinn Fein leader who sent men and women out in armed pursuit of the Republic ever told the foot soldiers that the exercise lacked practicality. Yet if all that was achieved by armed struggle was a call for Irish unity to be planned only ‘now’, it leaves little room for any alternative interpretation.

Part of the ‘now’, it seems, is having David Latimer address a Sinn Fein ard fheis.  Compared to the serious players in the art of high politics that Sinn Fein have managed to parade over the years, Latimer, a Presbyterian cleric,  doesn’t really cause the political ground to tremble when he steps upon it. In a media malnourished by low calorie news this is one story that had to be well and truly inflated. Likewise with an earlier event when Latimer met with anti Good Friday Agreement republicans. For all its hype, the Latimer experiment pales in comparison to the initiative launched by the Protestant churchmen at Feakle 37 years ago. Protestant clerics and Provos, the T-shirt is a hand-me-down.

Latimer appeared at the Sinn Fein are fheis where he described Martin McGuinness as ‘one of the true great leaders of modern times.’ Not something you would fancy taking the stand in court to defend. Before bedding down as Peter Robinson’s deputy McGuinness led a section of the community to war against the British state in which many lost their lives.  He settled for becoming a cog in the state wheel he swore to derail. He is now in a government, of sorts, that has no opposition. Surely true great leaders manage something better than wasted lives.

Latimer’s presence may have annoyed unionists but in the North’s zero sum game where power is parsimoniously split rather than generously shared, it is to be expected that the boundaries of one’s own sphere of influence shall be vigorously policed. When one tribe registers a plus the other instinctively experiences a minus. This is the seesaw sectarianism that so defines the North. No longer a sectarian state but a state in a sectarian society, it appears to grow more polarised by the year.

Some unionist commentators, the odd bigot in their midst, have taken to criticising Latimer in terms of failing the crucified Christ. Now there is bunkum and there is serious bunkum. Political bunkum is bad enough but religion takes bunkum into a heavenly sphere of its own. 

The theological or evangelical deficiencies of Latimer are unlikely to strike a chord with those who live their lives outside the world of hocus pocus and higglety pigglety. What the fairies at the bottom of the garden might think of Protestant clerics holding hands and praying with Martin McGuinness is of little relevance. Others not enamoured to ghosties, ghouls and goblins make the more telling points.

Alex Kane who does not buy into superstitious bull had a better handle on it all than the bible thumpers. Despite the fawning of clapping seals Latimer was not the harbinger of some radical change within the unionist mindset. Remember all those years ago when Sinn Fein droned on about finding the unionist de Klerk. Is this the best the party can do?  Latimer is not in a position to deliver unionism of any kind other than:

turquoise unionism of the most timid, tepid variety from someone who delivered exactly what the Sinn Fein leadership expected of him. They lapped it up because it was the sort of intellectual Lundyism which makes them think that their unionist outreach strategy is actually a huge success. The Rev Latimer had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a unionist Daniel in a lion’s den of republicanism. That he chose, instead, to be a squeaking, keep-the-audience-happy-at-all-costs mouse, is something that only he will ever understand.

Alex Kane went on to make himself available for the next ard fheis ‘if Sinn Fein really wants to know what unionists think!’

He will hardly get invited. What the unionists think is less important to the party leadership than having the party faithful not think.