While the world waits with bated breath for the bugle call to arms in the Gulf, the Ulster 'Bore War' keeps intruding like a mangy dog looking for a bone. We marvelled that Tony Blair was able to escape from the high tension of a worried House of Commons to fly over to Neverneverland to confront the bewildered Stormont politicians seeking a path through the jungle and mangrove swamps of the last colony. The meeting – the umpteenth meeting, it seemed – took place in Hillsborough Castle behind locked iron gates where some idiot protesters had already gathered.
Against the background of the scare news that an al-Qaida terrorist was on his way to Heathrow to shoot down an airliner with a ground-to-air missile, it was courageous of Tony and Trimble – who earlier faced each other across the Commons floor – to risk their respective necks for such a sleeveless errand. Trimble, who seems to relish masquerading these days as a world statesman rather than in the grotty old job back home of first minister and knee-knocking leader of a befuddled unionist party, need not have bothered coming.
He could have sent a note across the floor to the Prime Minister, a repeat of the old refrain that 'no matter what deal you do with Sinn Féin we are agin it'. Panic stations having set in, there were thousands of troops and police with tanks surrounding Heathrow as they left, while, over at Hillsborough, there was fog outside to match the greater fog inside as Blair, Ahern and Dublin ministers met first to talk about a 'deal' to get the homeless Ulster politicians back in out of the cold by the new deadline of March 3.
Coming out after several hours listening to the same old stories, the two governments looked more confident than the local politicians. Come to think of it, Hillsborough Castle is hardly the setting for a breakthrough anyhow. It must be haunted by the ghost of the gouty old Duke of Abercorn. This was his official residence as first and long-time Northern Ireland governor representing the king of England and cheerfully turning a blind eye to Craigavon's rejection of George V injunction to the new government to hold out the hand of friendship and show fair play to the minority left to his tender mercies.
The impoverished old Duke, glad to hold the job, never lifted a finger to steer Craigavon away from his Orange agenda. It took the minority 50 years to waken up to the realisation that a civil rights campaign could shake the one-party sectarian edifice better than the years of sterile
anti-partition abstentionism.
How the unionists must pine for those lost years when the northern nationalists and republicans played so neatly into their hands at election after election.
How will we know if that 'deal' is really on schedule?
First sign will be when the Crossmaglen watchtowers come tumbling down, then the policing issue and the £3 million cash – thrown mostly to the so-called deprived loyalist ghettos. The idea is to somehow encourage local leaders to galvanise their communities against the gangster warlords who now control them. With the UDA/UVF lifting anything up to £15 million from drugs, extortion and prostitution, this seems like a drop in the ocean. Now that 70 or so of 'Mad Dog' Johnny Adair's 'C company' have fled to Scotland, the problem for the new police service, apart from the Assets Recovery Agency, is how to smash the remaining mafia feifdoms.
Meanwhile, members of the Scottish assembly are seriously concerned that Scotland could become a dumping ground for fleeing sectarian murderers and gangsters from here.
They want the police to come down harder on these thugs than the powers that be here did over the years. With the Scottish authorities making strides to clean up football sectarianism in Glasgow, the last thing they want at this time is an influx of paramilitary feuding gangsters from Northern Ireland.
With apologies to the BBC programme, how about an up-to-date version of this problem entitled Heartless and Mindless?
