Controversial Alliance comments reveal a mindset

The comments recently made by office holding members of the Alliance Party in which they ascribe signs of Fascism to the Conservatives and to the DUP, and with that the earlier sweepingly lumping together of all people of a unionist mindset as 'having been bred to hate Catholics' (Morning View, April 29) may say something about the Alliance Party but they are not in themselves minor matters.

The two office holding members may apologise for saying what they said (as did Mary McAleese and Fr Alec Reid for earlier saying something similar, but with respect to Protestants) yet the interesting question is why the Alliance Party members, or Mary McAleese or Fr Alec Reid, ever said what they said.

The mindset shown within the Alliance Party is, therefore, not a minor matter but a very serious matter, and it is not only the Alliance Party members that are afflicted by it. It permeates much of the media and the universities.

Morning View recognises this.

But one consequence that Morning View does not draw out is that the group think that flows from this mindset is restrictive of the political imagination.

This restrictiveness is evident throughout much of the media, a consequence of which is that no thought is given by media commentators to the significance of the fact that in the coming election no party - not even the party of Sinn Fein – is contesting for a separatist Ireland. All parties are committed to extolling unionism in one form or other, that is in the sense of Ireland being part of a wider union: either that of a United Kingdom or a European Union or, for many Northern Irish, preferably both.

But as no thought (apart from that of, come what may, how to preserve the common travel and employment area between these geographic Britannic islands) is given to the forms of unionism, questions of the nature of union, and what is involved, are passed over – it is all “save the union” full stop, whether it be the European Union or the United Kingdom or both.

W A Miller, Belfast BT13