‘We’re not sectarian’: Irish extreme unction

One of the oft repeated tropes in Irish life is that it is such as shame that the North is represented by the ‘extremists’ of the Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

The latest problem is that the Assembly may collapse again of the DUP’s failure to transfer administration of policing and justice. We are told that Sinn Féin is set to walk out of the Assembly unless the DUP agrees but the DUP, under pressure from Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice, won’t budge. The British government appears to attempting to buy-off the DUP with a financial package of over a billion pounds in return for the transfer of policing and justice powers.

If only it wasn’t for those extremists…

It may well be lamentable that Sinn Féin and the DUP are they two biggest parties in the North, but it is also a fact and in no way can either be described as extremist – if they were extremists they would not be the two largest parties in the Assembly. Attacking the parties as extreme not only obscures the fact that both have travelled huge distances in recent years but also invalidates the opinions of the majority of voters in the North.

As usual the press is at the forefront of complaining that the majority of ‘decent folk’ are being squeezed by the twin poles of repugnant unionism and unsanitary republicanism. The regional media in the North isn’t immune to this but it is particularly common in the South as well as in the British press.

Readers of the British papers enjoy a fairly obvious political divide and this is replicated in coverage of Irish affairs: conservative papers like the Daily Mail and the Times thunder against Sinn Féin while liberal outlets, the Guardian and the Independent, tend to equivocate rather more. Even then, as Murray Macdonald points out, the Guardian’s alleged republicanism is a recent phenomenon: “the Guardian’s current, Republican-sympathising line was only adopted after Sinn Fein leaders broached an end to the armed struggle.” (1)

Nevertheless, all of the British newspapers, the Guardian included, have been home to many an opinion piece lamenting the rise of Sinn Féin at the expense of the SDLP. The problem with this idea is that it sanctifies the ‘moderate’ SDLP and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). Perhaps the reason the SDLP lost ground is because it was a weak and contradictory party incapable of delivering what it promised voters? Likewise, the UUP’s moderate stance only makes sense set against the more vociferous unionism of the DUP. The UUP is home to a cacophony of voices including labourists and, now, conservatives who want a direct tie-up with the Tories and the British polity, but these wings of the party were never dominant during the conflict. Former UUP leader David Trimble is today typically viewed as a tragic figure who paid the price for being a moderate. He is nothing of the sort. Undoubtedly Trimble’s position did moderate over the years but to cast him in the role of liberal and peacemaker is bordering on absurd.

In the Irish press, meanwhile, such is the cringe factor and kowtowing to unionism that distaste for the DUP, of which there is no shortage, is glossed over and Sinn Féin are the targets of the majority of the tales of woe. Of course, there is an additional factor at play in that Sinn Féin is a player in the Southern polity and one whose success would upset the applecart of Irish life.

Both parties are deeply problematic but they are generally criticised on the wrong basis. Sinn Féin, for instance, is subject to endless moralising about the actions of the Provisional IRA. Whatever one makes of the Provisional IRA, its most recent action was to disarm and go away – something, incidentally, that the Official IRA is only now getting around to talking about and yet both the Workers’ Party and its successor Democratic Left were in government without any concerns about so-called ‘political hygiene’.

The DUP, meanwhile, is continually lambasted for its conservative stance on social issues. DUP MP Iris Robinson was pilloried for her view that homosexuality was a mental illness that could be cured by psychiatric intervention, but what is most surprising about Robinson’s comments is not that she has a negative view of gays (hardly a surprising view for a right wing politician) but that she framed her argument in the therapeutic terms beloved of the left rather than the expected straightforward Calvinist fire and brimstone.

Robison’s husband, DUP leader and first minister of the Northern Assembly Peter Robinson made the traditional Christian objection to homosexuality speaking about the affair on the BBC’s Hearts and Minds current affairs programme: “It wasn’t Iris Robinson who determined that homosexuality was an abomination, it was The Almighty.” Whatever one thinks of Peter Robinson’s views, it would be a stretch to describe them as unexpected.

More interestingly, Peter Robinson went on to hit out at critics, complaining that for all the talk of tolerance, conservative views inspired by religion weren’t much tolerated: “This is the Scriptures and it is a strange world indeed where somebody on the one hand talks about equality, but won’t allow Christians to have the equality, the right to speak, the right to express their views.” (3)