When history happens

The parliament building at Stormont was designed so that a day like last Saturday could not happen.

Michelle O’Neill, a republican woman from Tyrone whose father was a POW, gave her opening address as First Minister.

All is changed, changed utterly.

The featured image contains the famous quote from Sir Basil Brooke, which encapsulates the Protestant zeitgeist of the Partition polity.

Nationalists in the Six Counties were causally denigrated and discriminated against, and that was all perfectly normal in the new statelet.

Brooke wasn’t saying anything controversial back then.

Of course, it incubated an uprising that would explode on the street of Derry a generation later.

Brooke made his bigoted appeal to his brethren a decade after the infamous Church and Nation Committee report to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

It was a product of the same mindset with the identical eugenicist view of Michelle O’Neill’s folk, whether in Baillieston or Belfast.

When the Bogside burned and the children of Ballymurphy breathed in CS gas, many in Britain were shocked to learn that Catholics in Northern Ireland suffered structural discrimination.

Very few in my community had to do a double take as it was also their own lived experience at the hands of Brooke’s Caledonian kith and kin.

History forgotten is a betrayal.

Brooke referred to “Ulster” in his famous advocation, but even that was a lie.

The sectarian Volkstaat he was determined to defend was two-thirds of the ancient Cúige Uladh.

These words are being written on a latitude further north than Béal Feirste, and my bi-lingual trio speak the Ulster dialect of Irish.

The border was drawn to ensure there would always be an ethno-religious majority to copper-fasten Britain’s grip on the northeast of this island.

Well, that was then, and history takes a long time.

This part of Ireland is dealing with the fact that due to the realities of geography, 17^th century Scotland’s first stab at colonialism was here.

Those ambitions finally hit the rocks in Central America, and future Scottish imperialism had to be under the Union flag with their cousins in England.

Eminent Scottish historian Professor Tom Devine has stated that  “Ulster was Scotland’s first colony”.

The Plantation created a Nakba in the North Atlantic, ushering in centuries of hurt and enmity.

It is worth remembering that when he was military governor of Jerusalem during and after the First World War, Sir Ronald Henry Amherst Storrs KCMG CBE envisaged a future state of Israel as a “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.

The same supremacist virus of seeing a dispossessed people as lesser is extant in Gaza and the Garvaghy Road.

While Britain still had the Palestine Mandate, Basil Brooke spoke to a set of certainties meant to last forever.

I was up the hill at Stormont during the Belfast Agreement negotiations, and I didn’t hear ANYONE game out the scenario whereby the UK would walk out of the European Union.

The glorious own goal of Brexit is truly a game changer.

For the avoidance of doubt, there IS an Irish sea border, and the face-saving performance art carried out for the benefit of the DUP doesn’t change that reality.

Albion’s ability to deploy perfidy when required is always impressive.

Poor Jeffrey…

There is now, effectively, for goods, an all-island Zollverein, which makes Northern Ireland a semi-detached part of the UK.

Coupled with changes in demographics and generational shifts in attitudes, the trajectory in the Six Counties is only in one direction.

Brooke’s bigoted polity shared this island with De Valera’s theocracy.

Thankfully, the latter has been gone for at least a generation.

In that time, we have had two female presidents and a Taoiseach who is openly gay in this republic.

If Stormont collapses again due to a loyal tantrum, then a quasi-joint authority with Dublin is the only show in town

Moreover, a few on the unionist side can do that joined-up thinking.

Dear reader, history happens every day around us.

Occasionally, on days like Saturday, it is impossible not to notice it.

Not for the first time, Gerry Adams had a sense of the moment.