The Northern Ireland Executive met on Thursday with hints that the coalition between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party might once again be under threat.
While the main item on the agenda was supposed to be the administration’s “anti-poverty strategy” needed to deal with the impact of the central government’s social welfare cuts imposed by Sinn Féin’s pals in Labour, the controversy over the planned use of bilingual signage by Translink has temporarily overridden other considerations.
Following the meeting, while First Minister Michelle O’Neill defended the signage plan, her Deputy Emma Little-Pengelly described the decision making process as “shambolic” and demanded that it be discussed by the whole Executive before going any further.
The amount of money involved is relatively trivial. The total cost of the changeover for Translink has been put at £145,000. You cannot put a price on ethnicity, however, and while DUP leader Gavin Robinson confined himself to accusing his colleague, Sinn Féin Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins, of having decided to “squander” the cash on the signage and vending machines without Executive approval, we all know what he is really getting at.
Good old Jamie Bryson has managed to hold the entire thing up anyway by initiating court proceedings on Tuesday which has forced Translink to temporarily suspend work on both the signage and the delay apparently also means that “options to include Irish language on ticket vending machines would need to be further explored with the supplier.”
All of this comes as another headache for Sinn Fein which is already in the bad books of Conradh na Gaeilge and An Dream Dearg over its failure to protect funding for the Irish language sector despite promises made. Instead of strengthening the sector the new programme for Government as it stands means that it now faces cuts.
Despite their careful cultivation of language activists – and despite An Dream Dearg’s celebration of the “incredibly historic moment” when the British courts allowed the use of Irish in cases – Sinn Féin is under pressure from even their own for whom the penny is eventually dropping that when nationalists allow themselves to become dependent on the British state and its budget, you are in no position to demand anything.
There is no doubt but that Sinn Fein loves being part of even the attenuated local devolved power structure in the north. It was especially pleased when it was to mean that they were to have the plum role of First Minister under the benign overlordship of Comrade Keir Starmer whose landslide victory was celebrated embarrassingly by many Shinners.
Somewhat awkwardly, British Labour has let Sinn Féin down on a whole series of matters including what some might regard as the provocative and even gratuitous extradition proceedings against chaps who could not have been picked more astutely if they were designed to poke the bear. But that teddy bear has been well prodded over the last 30 years and taken in good part. For the Peace Process don’t you know.
So, it is likely that this will all be sorted too. The get out clause for the Sinn Féin leadership judging by the spin over the past few days is that if the DUP take a hardline then they will pay the electoral price of seeing Sinn Féin further extending their electoral lead the next time.
Which of course is grand for Sinn Féin but none of their stated objectives have been brought one inch closer by that success. Is the language to join national unity among the list of things that fall to the bottom of the bucket list so long as the Party gets to do all the things any other middle of the road “left” party does by managing the welfare state and occasionally nodding in the direction of the green or red flag?
There is also the uncomfortable fact that the carry-on of the DUP again proves that despite all the nonsense about diversity and interculturalism, even the descendants of people who came here centuries ago are at best disinterested in anything Irish. That’s something to be considered in the context of contemporary mass immigration,
Why would that be any different for people coming from Africa or Asia or another part of Europe? Indeed, we know that it is not. Most are here because Ireland is an anglicised “cosmopolitan” country. The rising numbers of exemptions from Irish prove that the language is no more likely to be revived by Africans than that socialism is going to be the end product of economic domination by overseas capital. The dialectics of the kindergarten: one to which leftist Gaeilgeoirí subscribe on both counts.
On the other side of the coin the atavistic reaction of Bryson and other loyalists even to a simple thing like a railway station sign makes a nonsense of the claims of those “nationalists” who are happy to consort with them because they both dislike other people.
The truth is that nobody will ever usurp Irish Catholic nationalists at the top of the loyalist bonfire.