Jeremy Burchill: Northern Ireland politics suffers a dose of ‘midsummer madness’

The same might well be said of Northern Ireland politics over this hot summer season.

Michelle O’Neill, I suspect inadvertently, let the Sinn Fein mask slip when she attempted to justify the IRA’s barbaric campaign of wholesale murder on the supposed ground that they saw no alternative.

It is scarcely credible that one who presumably harbours aspirations to political leadership and blessed with even a modicum of intelligence should brazenly assert that any group or individual is justified in killing their fellow citizens if they themselves have concluded that it is the only way they might achieve their own aspirations and impose them on others.

Of course, she didn’t say this in so many words but surely this is the only meaning that her words can conceivably bear.

For those of us who lived through the terrorist years, it is incredibly sad to witness significant numbers of young people who weren’t even born during the IRA campaign of serial killing and mass murder, lauding those indefensible actions, encouraged and egged on by Sinn Fein.

Right thinking people will instead identify with the wisdom of Lord Denning, the one time Master of the Rolls, who observed “to every subject of this land, however powerful, I would use Thomas Fuller’s words over three hundred years ago, ‘be ye ever so high the law is above you’.”

Sadly, the Government’s so-called legacy legislation also works to undermine this pearl of wisdom.

The midsummer madness has also affected other politicians in Northern Ireland. The supporters of the Northern Ireland Protocol lament the absence of devolved government. Their statements amount to mere “crocodile tears” — if I might resort to this reptilian turn of phrase.

An individual with even a remote interest in the restoration of a devolved administration would recognise that they would be better employed in lobbying the EU to bring about a solution to the Protocol crisis.

Currently the professed desire of the EU to “protect” their single market overrides whatever interest that they might ever have had in the Belfast Agreement. The EU fails to recognise that the UK single market means at least as much to the UK.

The DUP and the TUV remain true to the pledges that they gave to the electorate in May’s Assembly election.

They now need to fully utilise the current interregnum to engage in in-depth scenario planning, ideally involving all streams of unionist thought.

Even after the new Prime Minister is appointed by the Queen the work will be far from finished. Government legislation to enable the Protocol to be neutered still requires to be passed without amendment in the House of Lords, and then be promptly invoked.

The position of unionists must remain that nothing less than a full and equal citizenship with our fellow countrymen on the mainland can be accepted. There is no room for second class citizenship. There must be full and unimpeded trade throughout the country. Anything less only leads to the ultimate destruction of our citizenship itself.

If the Conservative Party is to truthfully assert that “Brexit has been delivered” they must remember that no British citizen is free until all are free! They must never allowed to forget this, whoever is appointed leader.

• Jeremy Burchill was an Ulster Unionist Assembly Member 1982-86 for East Belfast and a member of the 1975 Constitutional Convention. He now lives in England