Ben Lowry: Unionism must improve its tone

The controversy has rumbled on through the weekend.

The Sinn Fein MLA Sean Lynch taunted Mrs Foster as she left her count on Friday by saying “see you later alligator”. Michelle Gildernew stood beaming beside him as republicans cheered in delight.

The BBC website yesterday said Mrs Foster “compared Irish language activists to hungry crocodiles”.

But she did not do this.

What Mrs Foster in fact said was reasonable, and yet she should not have said it.

Mrs Foster said the “characterisation that we should have given [a language act] to Sinn Fein to keep them appeased is not the way I do business. If you feed a crocodile they’re going to keep coming back and looking for more”.

Republicans do tend to bag concessions and then move to the next demand. In a way this is logical, because they see political deals as part of a process rather than a settlement.

But if they don’t get a key demand, they are not shy to cry discrimination. From time to time a refusal to a demand is turned into a crisis.

This means that the frontline between unionism and nationalism is ever moving. How unionists respond to this in the coming decades is the biggest challenge they face.

They are up against some of the most adept PR people in western politics.

Sinn Fein leaders travel the world feted as peacemakers. The chutzpah of some republicans, who manage to be so charming, having been so ruthless, is almost admirable.

The unionist refusal to do this is also almost admirable. But ultimately it is disastrous.

When Tom Elliott referred to “scum of Sinn Fein” at an election count in 2011, he was expressing exasperation at the IRA elements within the party.

Protestants in the border county suffered badly in the Troubles, but barely retaliated (look at the lists of Troubles dead in Fermanagh), but Mr Elliott’s ill-judged, albeit spur-of-the-moment, comments were depicted as an attack on all Sinn Fein voters.

I have done only a small amount of broadcasting but enough to know how hard it is not to blurt something out when under pressure. But many people assume unionist bigotry, so unionists of all people must think about words.

They are pushing at an open door in London, if only they make an effort to charm influential people. MPs, including Jeffrey Donaldson and Danny Kinahan, seem to be doing just that.

They have friends in Washington, given the Scots Irish link, and given America’s new understanding of terrorism, and zero tolerance of it.

Unionists even have many friends in Dublin, if only they would cultivate them.

In all of these places, many – if not most – people in power are receptive to the story of the terror that Northern Ireland experienced, and a calm explanation as to why we cannot accept legacy structures that could make it seem like that violence was necessary.

In this election a serious failure of tone has sent nationalists rushing the polls.

Weeks after Paul Givan looked so generous-spirited, by enthusiastically playing GAA, he axed a £50,000 Irish language bursary. This was particularly bad just before Christmas and after vast sums were squandered on RHI.

On the contrary, unionists could even increase such grants, and say: “Look, we are happy to support such schemes but we have serious problems with how some people will use an act, and here’s why...”

But the problems long pre-date this election and long pre-date any individual politicians.

Unionists will have good reason to say no in the coming years to many of the demands on them.

They should try to learn how to say so with some charm.