A delegation of US congresswomen is currently fact-finding its way around our fair province, checking up on the political progress of the sisterhood – and the best of luck to them.
But it's too bad they didn't come over a week earlier.
Then they could have watched the BBC's superb 'peaceline' programmes, witnessed north Belfast's female finest in full flow and maybe realised that the 'special role' of women in local politics isn't all its cracked up to be.
Because it could be argued that women are – and always have been – the bedrock of bigotry in Northern Ireland and recent attempts to involve more women in the political process here have been based on irresponsible denial.
It is unfortunate that the Troubles broke out at all, but it is doubly unfortunate that they broke out in 1969 as this burdened Northern Ireland with several contemporary feminist misconceptions that have gone unchallenged ever since.
As the 'men of violence' took to the streets, the female eunuchs supposedly watched in maternal horror and huddled around hearth and home to preserve their nurturing nature.
'Women of Belfast unite in the armed struggle!' read a famous graffito on the Falls Road in the early 1970s – it was immediately amended to 'snuggle'.
And so, 30 wasted years later, the Women's Coalition could set up a political party based on the idea of female moral superiority with a completely straight face.
How have we managed to overlook the remarkable and unique contribution women make to sectarianism in this country?
It's not like the ladies in question have been keeping a low profile. Why haven't we noticed the hateful harpies lining the road at every Orange Parade, or the stupid slappers trailing every flute band? What about the scruffy shrews at every republican rent-a-protest,
or the heckling hags who follow David Trimble's every move?
Who do we think raises the rioting kids and lets them run around the streets until 3am or welcomes
the boys home without question after every paramilitary murder?
"At 50", wrote George Orwell, "everyone has the face they deserve".
But you can see those
well-deserved faces on girls of 15
in Northern Ireland.
Perhaps I don't notice it so much
on men, but I can't help noticing it, everywhere, on women – the hardness, etched onto those sullen faces.
Fixing their dead eyes on the past, they push their prams towards the future and another wasted generation, weaned on the sour milk of Ulster motherhood.
We don't just learn to hate all over again from our dads you know.
Half of us have no idea who our dads are.
Men commit almost all the violence in Northern Ireland, but now that I'm in my 30s I've noticed something happening to my contemporaries. Men grow out of sectarianism.
It's a folly of youth.
It's like having a fight with your sworn enemy at school, after which you're the best of friends – while the girls go on pursuing their intense, unspoken vendettas for years and years.
High-profile exceptions are not in short supply, but in general appetites fade.
Men get to see the consequences
of their stupidity in full-colour close-up and pay a sobering price. Meanwhile, shouting encouragement from behind the lines, women take only little sips from the cup of bitterness
and the poison creeps on them. There are nice old ladies wheeling shopping-trolleys around Tesco's right now who'd have you shot
at dawn without a second thought.
Yeats knew this, nearly 90 years ago, when in A Prayer for My Daughter he wrote:
An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Barter... every good
For an old bellows full of angry wind?
He could have been thinking of several hundred thousand women here of every age, class and persuasion.
Unlike Yeats I don't think women should avoid politics – quite the opposite.
But I do think all of us should avoid irresponsible politics... and the idea that women are somehow better than men, gentler and more nurturing, is absurdly irresponsible in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It is true that men and women are different, just as Catholics and Protestants are different.
But in neither case should
this society be divided in half
with one half excused.
Of course there's no mention of any of this from the Women's Coalition, not even the slightest suggestion. But then why would there be? They're a Northern Ireland political party, just like all the others – too busy presenting themselves as the solution to contemplate their constituency's responsibility for the problem.
So if those visiting congresswomen really want to do Northern Ireland a favour, maybe they should ask the sisters to take a long hard look at themselves.
