Congratulations to Martin Morgan. All he has to do now to avoid criticism is to act like a unionist. Let's hope he attracts lots of criticism. According to Alex Maskey a German reporter writing a story on his year as mayor asked him, "When your year is over will you go back to being a republican?" Even to an observer from abroad, it was evident the distance Maskey had travelled to try to accommodate unionists in Belfast city hall. To no avail. The most vociferous unionist councillors remained in denial while the gutless unionist leadership kept stumm.
You would expect nothing else from the most vociferous unionist councillors. They are notorious for bone-headed stupidity. Normally they are quite capable of making eejits of themselves as they blunder ungrammatically through comical interviews on TV or radio, invincibly confident in their own ignorance.
During the last year however they excelled themselves, fairly leppin' with rage as Maskey tripped the light fantastic around the elephant traps dug for him.
There have been some really funny moments as for example when Alex Maskey had the Royal British Legion in the city hall, bringing members into parts of the hall they'd never seen before.
To the astonishment of the Legion, unionists made asses of themselves boycotting the event.
Maskey laid a wreath at the Cenotaph, venerated the Somme memorial at Messines in Belgium, organised a service of remembrance in St Anne's Cathedral and so on. The unionist response? Apoplexy. Why? They demand exclusive, but exclusive, ownership of everything connected with war and remembrance.
They have spent decades contriving all such occasions in such a way as to involve emblems and regalia designed make them objectionable or foreign or unwelcoming, but preferably all three, to nationalists. Now here was a republican who had found a way in.
Not only that – by doing so he'd laid bare their true nature.
King Lear wouldn't be in it. "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!...Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!"
Unionist fury was just as impotent and revealing as Lear's. You could measure Maskey's success by the bile unionists spat out.
They had been exposed. Here were people who'd voted in as mayor and deputy mayor councillors from parties which are fronts for the UVF and UDA – in some cases years before any ceasefire, even the false UDA one. Here were the people who sit in committee rooms with Sinn Féin, cooperate with Sinn Féin chairmen and deputy chairmen of committees, travel on junkets with SF councillors, yet pretend to their electorate they ignore them.
You'd expect all that from the worst thickos among unionist councillors. What about the others? During the year their silence was deafening. They never "lifted a finger", to quote the leader of the UUP, either to silence the boneheads or, unimaginably, to reach out to Maskey.
Another instance of that important missing element, the one that's been missing from unionism for over 30 years – that is any example of leadership, from the few remaining unionist councillors who can produce a complete sentence in English. Given the opportunity to reach an accommodation, instead they sought safety in the mob showing just what weak, petty, political figures they are and demonstrating, at the same time, exactly why the assembly wasn't working. How could they behave any differently at Stormont? Why should any other instincts come into play up there?
The political failure of unionists at Belfast city hall also exposes another aspect of the lack of leadership in unionism, specifically in the UUP, since at least some of them, well three, claim they accept the concept of partnership. Why could no-one in the party leadership point out privately the stupidity of what their councillors were doing in Belfast and tell them to show civic leadership?
Why could no-one in the party leadership point out to their Belfast councillors exactly what was being revealed when UUP assembly members were prepared to sit in an executive and assembly committees with leaders of SF yet the same party's councillors and assembly members wouldn't cooperate with a SF assembly member when he was mayor of Belfast?
The truth is that the treatment meted out to Alex Maskey has shown that unionists prefer what was going on in Belfast last year. It's what they really, really want. Given a choice, they would not share power, they would behave as if the last 35 years were a bad dream.
Even if Alex Maskey had offered his last Rolo they would rather starve. Remember, not one of them voted for Martin Morgan.
