Brian Feeney. Irish News (Belfast).Wednesday, September 16, 2015

You read here last week about the attitude of mind of political Unionists who can’t imagine nationalists and republicans as equals and therefore seek to manage them, control them, police them.

No sooner had you read it than out came Arlene ‘rogues and renegades’ Foster to exemplify the attitude. Republican and nationalist ministers had to be prevented from spending money on schemes she decides are to the detriment of Unionists. As she added so appropriately, ‘anyone who knows me will know I won’t let them.’

Later she rowed back from the most extreme position she had blurted out but she didn’t apologise for the language she used to describe her supposed partners in The North’s toy town administration. Instead, ignoring her insult to the people northern nationalists vote for, she pointed to Martin McGuinness abolishing selection at 11 in his last days as education minister as an example of the sort of move she’d stop even though she must know St Andrews changed the rules and it’s not possible now.

Actually it’s a perfect example which shows how wrong she is. McGuinness’s action was not to the detriment of Unionists. In fact the majority of teachers who vote Unionist support ending selection.

All the teacher unions support it. On the contrary, Unionists insisting on retaining selection have acted to the detriment of all children by forcing them to sit up to five tests. Have a look at the results of selection among the poorest Protestant communities in The North: the worst in the UK. It’s a serious problem ignored by the likes of ‘rogues and renegades’ herself. Only the PUP among Unionists have raised the matter and have been ignored in their turn. In short she was babbling rubbish to excuse her inexcusable remarks.

However the attitude of mind among Unionists presents a more general conundrum than simply blocking proposals by republicans and nationalists. The fundamental problem is Unionist opposition to sharing power with nationalists. After all, if you refuse to consider people equals why must you have to share power with them?

No one can remember a unionist politician making a speech advocating power-sharing. After unionists jointly with loyalist terrorists destroyed power-sharing in 1974 between 1975 and 1998 unionists could have made a deal with the SDLP as both governments required for any settlement here. Out of naked bigotry they wouldn’t until they ended up being compelled to do a deal with Sinn Féin. And wasn’t it so revealing that ‘rogues and renegades’ Foster placed both Sinn Féin and the SDLP in the same untrustworthy category?

As Martin McGuinness has said repeatedly, ‘republicans share power because they want to, unionists because they have to.’ That’s why they keep pulling down the institutions. They don’t want them to work. In the current manufactured crisis unionists know perfectly well Sinn Féin had nothing to do with the killing of Kevin McGuigan but there’s not one of them can rise above the turmoil and say, as very importantly the chief constable has said, ‘I recognise the bona fides of the Sinn Féin ministers’.

You’re probably sick hearing interviewers asking Sinn Féin why they won’t admit the IRA still exists. You’ll never hear any of them asking unionists why they can’t repeat the words of the chief constable or indeed for that matter our proconsul[ Theresa Villiers, Secretary of State].

Trying to avoid sharing power means unionists will keep making impossible demands of Sinn Féin. Suppose Martin McGuinness to placate them said the IRA still exists despite republicans having fulfilled every requirement of the peace process, you know unionists would then ask, ‘How do you know? What are you going to do to disband them? We demand to police their disbandment.’ And so on and so on.

You’ll see from this attitude of mind the real problem at Stormont is not allegations of IRA activity or any other smokescreen, it’s political Unionism. They deny the mandate of nationalist and republicans is equal to their own. They won’t in many cases even speak to their partners in Stormont. They don’t even accept the political construct they’re administering and keep hankering after ‘normal government’, that is unionist majority rule.

Unionism needs a change of attitude but first they have to admit they’re the problem.