Language is key to successful fudge on Northern intractability
World of Politics with Harry McGee – [email protected]
Patrick Kavanagh wrote the amazing ‘Epic’ in 1938, three decades before violence erupted – but, for me, the poem has always ‘explained’ the whys and wherefores of the Northern conflict better than anything else.
“I have lived in important places, times when great events were decided: who owned that half a rood of rock, a no-man's land surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.”
What is often striking about the eternal “peace processing” (as some Northern cynics describe it) is how microscopic some of the issues are. The institutions up there have been stalled for thirteen months now and the talks have resolved around the status of the Irish language. For outsiders that wouldn’t strike you as major but for the participants in the talks, it has been huge.
In Kavanagh’s poem, he has a conversation with Homer who tells him: “I made the Iliad from such a local row. Gods make their own importance.”
The row between the DUP and Sinn Féin ostensibly had its beginnings in the Renewable Heath Incentive (RHI) scandal, a botched energy-efficiency scheme that cost millions of pounds to the taxpayer. It was signed off by DUP leader Arlene Foster.
Nowadays, we hear nothing about the RHI controversy. What these talks panned out to be was a mediation process between two ruling parties which detest each other and whose working relationship in government had broken down. If there is a single issue that defines that distrust, it has been the row over the status of the Irish language.
And so over thirteen months, with the Assembly and the Executive shut down, we have had the usual not-an-inch by not-an-inch negotiations.
It is clear, that a fudge was required to overcome the set positions of both parties on the Irish language.
Sinn Féin had been looking for a specific substantial stand-alone act giving status to Irish. But that was never going to happen without some parallel deal (parity of esteem and all that) for Ulster Scots and broader cultural matters.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.