Still no sign of any Arlene magnaminity

Fionnuala O Connor. Irish News (Belfast). Tuesday, May 17, 2016

‘I won the election.’ No political leader with a sense of joint enterprise could have said that, surely, only someone with a hefty ego, if not overweening vanity. The late Ian Paisley, always boasting about his vote?

And this: ‘We went round the country with my candidates…’ That combination of ‘we’, the first person plural, and ‘my’. Didn’t Mrs Thatcher have that habit of referring to herself as the royal ‘we’, mixing herself up with the Queen?

But those vainglorious sentiments, as anyone with an ear to the airwaves this past week can testify, came from neither the deceased Tory leader, nor the over-ego-ed DUP founder. A nervous being stumbling on the broadcast clip might have trembled for a second and doubted their own ears: was he back, and this time as a woman?

Do the DUP know what they have done? All-conquering Arlene may be beyond the handlers now, the littler advisers who urged her on to make the campaign particularly her own, who presumably helped draft that Irish News campaign platform piece of hers, with its 24 repetitions of the word ‘I’.

Our small-scale political institutions have had more than their share of media attention so we well know what celebrity does to political figures. The triumphalist DUP leader is young enough to come out of this. Strengthened by a good election against the mini carpers within, with blustering Gregory and Sammy in Westminster ‘retirement’, she could still use her endorsement as a fresh party leader to coax rank and file Unionists out of begrudgery towards the ideal of power-sharing.

She could stop pretending a divided region is a country and talk up the reality of the North of Ireland, a Northern Ireland which is Irish and British because that’s what most of its people are. She has the electoral clout, perhaps the character and personality, to be a First Minister for all. But the signs are not good. It takes every centimetre of cheer from the May 5 election to weigh in the balance.

More women elected; a cap on the nothingist message of Jim Allister; Claire Bailey’s ‘small Green surge’; the different voices of People Before Profit to chime, maybe, with Bailey and Stephen Agnew. As against those crumbs there is a reinforced DUP, an increasingly disengaged nationalist vote, and Arlene’s disposition.

It could be put down to many things; and first the formation of the small child who saw her father crawl into the house bleeding from the head when the IRA shot him; IRA men of whose names Arlene is sure. Perhaps youth should also lessen the offence of that crowd-pleasing speech long ago to an Ulster Unionist conference, in which she dismissed the nationalist demand for recognition of Irish identity as out of the question, because Northern Ireland’s identity was hers, British. Hard to forget the satisfaction, though, in her ‘well, they can’t have it’.

Crisp, capable; she is also a Border Protestant, from a countryside where Protestants are the perpetual minority – and where the IRA killed and was rarely punished.

Daughter of a policeman, married to another; the PSNI makeover may not be able to match old loyalty to the RUC. Arlene may not be up to a new direction.

Queen of the Castle now, she went into the election apparently believing even before her triumph that it is for her to determine who is a victim and who is not, with a swipe at the Lord Chief Justice for his pains on behalf of stalled inquests.

The ‘I won the election’ came out of her merely in response to Mike Nesbitt’s notion of changing the seating in Stormont. We know where this can lead. Today’s Sinn Féin threads between pleasing enemies and protecting themselves in dealing with a president who has lost whatever self-awareness survived decades of being over-praised, and over-blamed. The lure of the spotlight led the aged Paisley and his wife into pique-fuelled denunciation that damaged them more than the successor generation they set out to trash.

It’s perfectly within the DUP’s capacity to keep on deriding Irish, blocking housing for north Belfast Catholics in need, spiting Sinn Féin. It takes no talent to play dog in the manger. What Arlene best represents may turn out to be un-reconstructed Unionism, still convinced it has ‘conceded’ to nationalism.
The deputy first minister may wait awhile for magnanimity. But then he’s a fisherman.