Cross-community visits ought to be a non event

During the visit she stood for the Irish national anthem.

The DUP leader and former first minister’s visit was met with cheers from GAA fans, as she arrived to support her county Fermanagh.

Mrs Foster has been subject to more than a year of sustained abuse, and it must have been nerve wracking for her to attend such an occasion, uncertain of how the crowd might respond. In the end, there was nothing to fear on that front.

Her presence was warmly welcomed, as it was when she attended the funeral of the former IRA commander turned deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness.

Such ground-breaking visits as that undertaken by Mrs Foster yesterday, while they might not quite be pointless (as Alex Kane argues in a typically thought-provoking article opposite), should not be over-stated either.

If Northern Ireland is to become a normalised society, a cross community visit would be a non event. There was a time when Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness were in office when it almost seemed the Province was reaching that point.

The mood has soured since then.

A well received visit of Mrs Foster to a GAA might not be the best time to rehearse the sequence which led to the collapse of Stormont (this column has done so before and will do so again) but there is no denying the bitterness there is now.

There is a heavy onus on unionists to prove that they are nice but little on Michelle O’Neill to do the same, even though she praises IRA terrorists steeped in sectarian bloodshed.

Mary Lou McDonald, however, seems to want to make her own overtures. Gestures mean a lot to people, as was apparent when Leo Varadkar visited the Orange Order museum.

It is nonsense, however, to insist that visits be followed by policy change. Being polite does not mean ditching principle.