Stunts and gestures no substitute for working together for common good

I’d just watched the images of David Trimble and John Hume having their arms held aloft by Bono and found myself agreeing with UK Unionist MP Bob McCartney’s assessment: “It is patronising, condescending and, to a degree, insulting to think that by offering a free gig with U2 the votes of young thinking intelligent people can be purchased.”

It was a stunt. It was always intended as a stunt. It had nothing to do with the detail and content of the Good Friday Agreement because Bono wasn’t inviting the handpicked audience of first-time voters to discuss the socio/moral/political/constitutional consequences of the decision they had to make three days later. It was merely a chance for him to do that happy-clappy, photo-opportunity stuff he likes to do while allowing Tony Blair and some self-appointed leaders of the Yes campaign to grab a few headlines.

The following day Blair was in Coleraine to unveil his handwritten ‘five pledges,’ which, like the concert stunt the night before, was a stunt directed mostly at soft, wavering, undecided unionists. The fact that the wording of the pledges wasn’t actually in the Agreement was, it seems, neither here nor there: because this was just one of a number of orchestrated, coordinated stunts in the last few days of the referendum aimed at guaranteeing a majority of unionists would swing into the Yes camp.

Yet my concern was that the Yes campaign was deliberately choosing a soft strategy rather than dealing with the harsh realities of a what a yes vote entailed – let alone getting to grips with what would happen at that moment when unionists would have to sit in government with Sinn Fein.

They took their lead from the 1995 television campaign that featured Van Morrison’s ‘Days Like These’ and the strap line, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?’ But this was an approach that ignored the reality that people don’t just emerge smiling and laughing from a conflict. They emerge with unanswered questions, unhappy memories, scars and lingering hurt. Yes, hope is also there; but hope is never enough.

David Lyle of McCann Erickson noted of the advertisements, “Strip it all away and it’s saying our differences are socially learnt and socially conditioned. Take away the conditioning of tribalism and the education system and you’re left with ordinary people who can get on with each other.” He was right.

Yet 23 years later we still have the tribalism and a divisive education system and the sort of social conditioning that sustains and bolsters us-and-them thinking. And we’re left with it because, like those advertisements, the Yes campaign of 1998 and the ongoing blather of professional Pollyannas, we still find it easier to cope with soft-focus fantasy than with hard-nosed realities.

Actually, what I’d love to do is invite those 2,000 people who attended the U2 concert on April 19, 1998 back to the Waterfront. They’d all be in their early to mid-30s now. I’d like to find out how they voted on April 22 and how they view Northern Ireland today. Most of them would have been in their early teens when the first ceasefire was declared in August 1994, so most of them would have had no direct experience of the worst, bloodiest days of the Troubles. It would be fascinating to discover what they think of NI now and if they are politically engaged. Indeed, it would also be worth discovering how many of them still live here.

On a broader front most of the opinion poll research suggests that an overwhelming majority – including, interestingly, those who still vote – is very dissatisfied with the Executive/Assembly and, worryingly, doesn’t believe that things will change much, let alone improve, anytime soon.

And therein lies the source of my anger and pessimism. Cancer is no respecter of constitutional belief. Educational achievement or underachievement isn’t the prerogative of one side over the other. Unemployment doesn’t restrict itself to unionists only. It isn’t just Catholic teenagers who choose to leave after their A levels. Being saddled with debt doesn’t just happen to republicans. It isn’t just unionist houses that get flooded. It isn’t just loyalists who are unhappy with how the peace/political process has unfolded.

In other words, there is so much that the political parties need to do in the interests of everybody – of every class, religion, background and profession – in Northern Ireland. There is no need to provoke one crisis after another. Sit down together and agree a Programme for Government which sets the constitutional stuff to one side and sets out agreed strategies on health, education, welfare, employment, the economy et al. Honestly, it isn’t rocket science.

And here’s another thing: Arlene Foster turning up at a GAA match, or Martin McGuinness being invited to an Orange Order event isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference to hospital waiting lists, to underachieving schools or to economic black spots. That’s the politics of stunt and gesture and all it does is distract us from the much more important stuff that needs to be dealt with at this point. Progress isn’t built on contrived photo-opportunities: it is built on a government tackling and resolving the issues that matter to all of us every single day. If they really can’t govern together then it would probably be better if they weren’t allowed to govern at all.