Stormont is a failed political experiment

Posted by Jim on September 13, 2015

By Patrick Murphy (for Irish News)

Dear Sinn Fein,

Since the current Stormont is now more unpopular than the old one, many
might wonder why you are trying to preserve it. Apart from being, in
your own original terms, a partitionist parliament, it is now generally
recognised as a failed political experiment in its present form.

Since Peter Robinson last year described Stormont as unfit for purpose,
you (with the SDLP) are now its most vocal supporter.

Remember how you cheered when the old Stormont collapsed in 1972
following Bloody Sunday? (People arguing for democratising Stormont in
those days were seen as enemies of the war process.)

Forty three years later, many people, Protestant and Catholic, are
cheering the Ulster Unionists’ exit from Stormont government. Like
unionism in 1969, some see you as defending a discredited institution,
insisting that no one will force you out. You should not have to be
forced out. Maybe you should leave now and use this opportunity to build
a reformed Stormont.

The longer you stay, the more credibility you will lose. You will, of
course, disagree. So what are the arguments for and against propping up
Stormont?

One reason for its retention is that it gives you power. Does it?
Thirteen years ago Martin McGuinness abolished academic selection – a
good decision. A few weeks from now over 7,000 children will sit one or
both of two academic selection tests.

Only Sinn Fein has held the education portfolio in new Stormont. So
where is your power? What you have is not power, but limited negative
control to curtail the limited negative control of others. There are
many other examples of blocked progress: an Irish Language Act, the
re-development of Long Kesh and the Education and Skills Authority.

In one of the most shameful episodes in this state’s history, you were
unable to censure Nelson McCausland for his handling of the Red Sky
contract with the Housing Executive or to discipline DUP Special
Adviser, Stephen Brimstone, for his behaviour towards a member of the
Housing Board.

McCausland was protected by a petition of concern. Brimstone was
promoted. So how is the new Stormont different from the old – and why
are you fighting to preserve what is in effect an undemocratic
institution? (Those who advocate the democratisation of Stormont today
tend to be described as enemies of the peace process.)

Yes, you complained, but you failed to acknowledge that you helped to
design McCausland’s escape hatch. Why should we be expected to live
under such conditions?

Another argument is that Stormont represents political progress. This
column has previously argued that Stormont would fail because its
sectarian systems and structures hinder the delivery of social and
economic policies. (It was an unpopular view, but you would be amazed at
the people who now agree with it.)

It recognised that a mandatory, sectarian coalition would steer
ministerial decisions towards party electioneering rather than
collective government responsibility. It also argued that the absence of
social and economic objectives in the Good Friday and St Andrews
agreements, meant that Stormont was more cosmetic than real. (The
failure to include Westminster funding in the agreements allows the
Tories to cut spending here.)

With the exceptions of Michelle Gildernew and Michelle O’Neill,
ministerial ability in new Stormont could best be described as mediocre.
(Maybe government here just needs more Tyrone women.) Administrative
incompetence led to the failures to deliver the new police college, the
A5 road and a redeveloped Casement Park. Meanwhile Stormont slept during
the Nama sell-off.

So if Stormont were suspended, who would notice? Your entry into
government has made little difference to ordinary people. (Do you really
think anyone cares who is principal deputy speaker?) If you disagree,
explain for example, how Stormont has helped to reduce child poverty,
especially in west Belfast.

No one cares any more about talks and deadlines, or who is up for them
in that artificial world of verbal ambiguity and political fudge. One
person in five here is now on a hospital waiting list. Try fudging that
one.

A collapsed Stormont would give you the chance to build a new form of
government – one built on non-sectarianism and normal parliamentary
democracy with a government and opposition debating social and economic
issues. Non-sectarian politics is the only path to a united Ireland.

It would allow the redefinition of the Irish nation as including
unionists, thereby extending your electoral potential beyond Catholics.

Are you up for that – or can we expect the same old self-serving
Stormont? If that is all you are offering, don’t be surprised if no one
cares about Stormont or its eternal talks.

America’s dark and not-very-distant history of hating Catholics

Posted by Jim on

The anti-Catholic ‘Native Americans,’ as they called themselves, provoked a series of riots in Philadelphia in 1844.

Congress and the United Nations rolling out their red carpets, nuns working overtime to bake communion hosts, prison inmates carving a walnut throne, tickets for events snapped up in seconds: America is gearing up for pope-mania.

Pope Francis is expected to be greeted with huge crowds and across-the-board reverence when he tours Washington, New York and Philadelphia during his first visit as pontiff to the United States.

The rapture, however, will not change the awkward – and largely forgotten fact – that for centuries the US discriminated against Catholics.

The land of immigrants enshrined freedom of religion in the constitution yet spent much of its history despising, harassing and marginalising Catholics.

From the first Puritan settlers to televangelists, leading political, business and religious figures lambasted followers of Rome as theological abominations and traitorous fifth columnists.

“When you look back at the true, hidden history of the United States this strand of anti-Catholicism is very powerful,” said Kenneth Davis, a prominent historian and commentator.

“We want to show this patriotic view that we were this melting pot of religious freedom. Nonsense. People wanted their own religious freedom, not freedom for others. There was a very, very deep hatred of Catholics.”

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Thomas Nast’s anti-Catholic cartoon in Harper’s Weekly in 1875. It depicts Roman catholic bishops as crocodiles attacking public schools, with the connivance of Irish catholic politicians. Photograph: Public DomainDiscrimination dwindled in the 20th century, especially after John F Kennedy became the first Catholic president, bequeathing a sort of amnesia, said Davis. “It’s really astonishing how it has been swept under the rug. It’s as if with JFK all the past is forgiven.”

 That history will seem distant indeed if, as expected, progressives and conservatives seek to co-opt the Pope, the former cheering his denunciations ofpoverty, inequality and climate change, the latter hisespousal of family values.

The political establishment no longer frets about the religion. Joe Biden, the vice-president, is Catholic, as are three Republican presidential candidates: Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal.

Yet historians agree discrimination once thrived. “The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham.

Catholics got in an early bit of sectarian homicide in 1556 when Spanish forces slaughtered a colony of French Huguenot Protestants in what is now Florida.

When Pilgrims and Puritans settled in New England half a century later they brought fresh venom from Europe’s religious conflicts, including the idea that the Pope was the “anti-Christ” and the “whore of Babylon”.

At first banned from the colonies, “papists” were grudgingly allowed entry but with severe civic restrictions, including exclusion from political power. Jews and Quakers also suffered discrimination but were seen as a lesser threat.

Justice Hugo Black surrounded by press in Norfolk, Virginia. Photograph: New York Daily News/NY Daily News via Getty ImagesThe establishment of a secular republic which separated church and state did not end prejudice.

 Lurid myths about Catholic sexual slavery and infanticide spread through pamphlets and books such as Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, an 1834 supposed memoir about a Canadian convent.

Demagogues in the nativist movement incited fury and fear about the huge numbers of impoverished German and Irish Catholic immigrants, many barely speaking English, who spilled off ships.

Newspapers and Protestant clergymen, including Lyman Beecher, co-founder of the American Temperance Society, swelled the outcry, warning the influx would take jobs, spread disease and crime and plot a coup to install the Pope in power.

In 1844 mobs burnt Catholic churches and hunted down victims, notably inPhiladelphia where, coincidentally or not, Francis will wrap up his week-long visit.

Abuse from Protestant officers partly drove hundreds of Irish soldiers to defect from the US army to the Mexican side before and during the 1846-48 war with Mexico. The deserters obtained revenge, for a while, by forming the San Patricio battalion and targeting their former superiors in battle, only to wind up jailed, branded and hanged after Mexico surrendered.

The growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century gave a new impetus to attacks – mostly verbal – on Catholics. Hugo Black, a KKK member and US senator, gave fiery anti-Catholic speeches before going on to become a defender of civil liberties on the supreme court bench.

Writers and intellectuals had no hesitation bashing the Catholic church. Mark Twain noted he was “educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic”.

The burgeoning power of Irish and other immigrant Catholic communities paved Al Smith’s election as governor of New York but Lutheran and Baptist opposition helped sink his presidential bid in 1928.

Catholicism remained an obstacle to Kennedy’s White House run in 1960. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex ShutterstockHostility gradually dwindled, especially during the collective bonding of the second world war, but remained an obstacle to Kennedy’s White House run in 1960. He tried to neutralise the issue, telling a group of Protestant ministers: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic party’s candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me.”

 Kennedy’s victory, and the Catholic church’s alliance decades later with Protestant evangelicals on social issues, completed the integration into mainstream public life.

Common ground with evangelicals on abortion and same-sex marriage paved the way for Bush, Jindal and Santorum to court a constituency which once would have reviled them. “They seem to have forgotten this deep, ugly past that they have,” said Davis, the historian.

Sex abuse scandals have in recent years shined a harsh and legitimate spotlight on the church. And the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, an advocacy group, claims Catholic bashing is a staple of US society. But Davis thinks discrimination is in the past. “It’s now largely a non-issue.”

If some religious fanatics greet Francis with posters calling him the anti-Christ and Babylon’s whore they will be on the fringe of the fringe. The US, no longer fearful of a papist coup, seems close to a rare unity in wanting to welcome the Pope.

God Bless our sacred dead.

Posted by Jim on September 10, 2015

Statement on the North of Ireland

Posted by Jim on

Robinson steps aside, puts ‘gatekeeper’ in zombie Executive

Posted by Jim on

In a dramatic day in Belfast, DUP leader Peter Robinson has backed away
from a threat to immediately collapse the Six County Executive, instead
opting to step aside temporarily and withdraw all his Ministers,
leaving one.

The sole DUP Minister in the apparently doomed Executive will now be
his substitute, Arlene Foster, acting as both First Minister and
Finance Minister.

The DUP move will not bring about an immediate collapse of the northern
institutions. Executive departments will still function under the
temporary arrangements, but the Executive will not meet.

Robinson had urged the British government to immediately suspend the
institutions after a Stormont committee refused to adjourn (recess) the
Assembly. However, the British Direct Ruler Theresa Villiers has so far
refused to take that step.

With the exception of Mrs Foster, the DUP’s ministers have all signed
their letters of resignation. It is understood that the resignations
will take at least seven days to come into effect.

According to Robinson, he has “stepped aside but not technically
resigned”. He said Foster will remain as a ‘gatekeeper’ in the
executive until the resignation process is completed — ostensibly to
prevent nationalists from accessing Stormont funds.

“Arlene remaining in post allows us to ensure that no irrational
financial decisions are taken by other parties in what might appear to
be the last number of days of this assembly,” he said.

Robinson’s motivation for sustaining the Executive, even in the short
term, remains unclear. He could have acted to immediately collapse the
institutions by tendering his own resignation, but unexpectedly
declined to do so.

At a press conference this evening, he said he still backed devolution,
but it had been pushed “to the “brink”.

“Local ministers making local decisions is best for Northern Ireland,”
the DUP leader said.

“The failure of the SDLP and Sinn Fein to implement the Stormont House
Agreement, together with the assessment from the Chief Constable of the
involvement of IRA members in murder, the continued existence of the
IRA, and the arrests that followed, has pushed devolution to the
brink.”

Villiers later confirmed that she would not take the decision to move
towards suspension and called for all parties to work together.

She said it had been a “bad day”, but “there has been a number of such
bad days”.

One hopeful sign for the Stormont administration this evening was the
release from PSNI custody this evening of Sinn Fein’s northern
chairman, Bobby Storey, whose arrest helped to fuel the latest cycle in
the crisis.

Mr Storey had been arrested in connection with the death last month of
east Belfast man Kevin McGuigan. Two other senior republicans arrested
with Storey, as well as a 50-year-old woman arrested this morning,
still remain in custody.