UUP’S DOCUMENT SHOWS ANGUISH AND FRUSTRATION
Posted By: March 12, 2014
Nevertheless the UUP proposals are very revealing, exposing as they do the mindset of the people who wrote the document and what a depressing view of the world theirs is.
First, it should be said, it’s not a view of the world at all but a view of a Norn Irn [ Northern Ireland] that doesn’t exist. The 17-page document is rushed, superficial, in some places puerile and simplistic and, in others, laughable. It bears the hallmarks of the party leader with its struggle for soundbites and meaningless assertions. Try this one. ‘Surrender the language and you corrupt history. It’s that simple.’ There seems to have been a strenuous effort not to avoid any cliché about the North.
Some of the proposals fly in the face of Fair employment legislation and equal Opportunities custom and practice. They want to apply the 2000 Terrorism Act retrospectively to events before 1998. They want to change the definition of a victim. They want, wait for it, the Drumcree parade and the parade past Ardoyne to be ‘completed’. The so-called loyal orders are to draft their own voluntary code of conduct. Can you believe that? However, what about Republican parades, trade union parades or gay pride parades? No mention. It’s that kind of introspective, head in the sand document.
An example of the laughable content?
The proposal for a historical Clarification Group. Its task? To create ‘a factual timeline from the early 1960s to the Present Day’. [Their capitals] Oh yeah. Everyone would agree about that timeline. Can you believe the UUP doesn’t believe in competing narratives? There is one truth and it’s theirs.
You could go through the document and tear it to pieces or cast it aside in despair but it’s worth examining as a testament to a certain psyche in Unionism. The people who wrote it and who clearly believe it will be attractive to their own supporters, are people trapped in their own experience, in the words of Gabrielle Rifkind, a specialist in conflict resolution at the Oxford Research Group. She’s the author of several books including ‘Talking to the enemy: Creating New Structures for Negotiations’ and ‘Making Terrorism history’.
The mindset apparent in the UUP document fits every category she describes of people locked in the past. They have no vision of the future. Their identity is fixed in the past, in some respects a past that never existed outside their own minds. They are obsessed with what they perceive to be their own victimhood and what has been done to them. They seek retribution.
They see no other way of analysing the present. Accordingly they are unable to construct a future. They can’t even imagine what it would look like. They demand that the world accept their victimhood as victimhood and what has been done to them. They seek retribution.
They see no other way of analysing the present. Accordingly they are unable to construct a future. They can’t even imagine what it would look like. They demand that the world accept their victimhood as the basis for any movement.
The document is a howl of anguish and frustration. Its authors can’t even see the irony in their own words. For example they deplore ‘the continuing drive to rewrite history and overturn agreements already made’. Amazingly they can’t see that the whole document is a set of proposals to do exactly that. They can’t see it because the only history is the one they believe in. There is no place for an alternative view of the world. They want to force their view on everyone else and will not move until that happens. Hence the tragic demand to re-run Drumcree, a cause lost 15 years ago.
Perhaps what’s most depressing is that the authors know perfectly well that none of their proposals will come to anything. You might even think the paper was devised with derision and rejection in mind. Why would they produce such a document? Exactly because, as Dr Rifkind would point out, its rejection is necessary to maintain their victimhood and the perceived injustices visited upon them by the IRA, the British and the Irish government.
