Ulster-Scots will not disguise a standalone Irish language act

At the weekend Máirtín Ó Muilleoir reiterated that an Irish language act had to be standalone.
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He is a senior member of the Sinn Fein, so it seems unlikely he would be straying from an agreed line. After all, no senior DUP MLA has broken their silence on sensitive talks topics.

Yesterday Michelle O’Neill again implied that a standalone act was essential, but did not in fact explicitly say so.

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The News Letter then asked Simon Coveney, the Irish deputy prime minister, if Dublin still believed that a standalone act was an indispensable outcome of the talks. He got coy and said it would not be helpful to stipulate details at this delicate time.

What a pity he weighed in last year to demand such an act, and so give weight to Sinn Fein’s destabilising conduct (as did the politicians who posed with Gerry Adams demanding a standalone act). Mr Coveney added to the sense of rancour.

The recent comments by Sinn Fein leaders make clear that if they have strayed from a standalone act red line, they have not strayed far. It suggests that a hybrid act will, as reported, be part of a deal, and that the DUP will be able then to claim it is not standalone (when in fact it is as good as standalone).

Perhaps, somehow, in the face of such pressure from a range of standpoints, the party has somehow managed to ensure that the content of what will in effect be a standalone act is actually toothless. That will be quite an achievement if so.

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But no-one should be under illusions that standalone Ulster-Scots laws, for which there is no public demand, will disguise a standalone Irish act.

This newspaper is as Ulster-Scots in heritage as any institution in Northern Ireland, having been founded in 1737, a century after the plantation. We will always be keen supporters of that core part of local culture. But there is, rightly, no appetite in the Ulster-Scots community to fight what the Rev Mervyn Gibson described as the use of Irish “in the SF-IRA culture war”.

That culture war must be resisted, and certainly must not be aided by the state because republicans collapsed Stormont.

The very fact that they were allowed to do that is all the more reason not to reward them.