« Crusaders Foiled Again in CIS Cup Final | No Room for Britannia in Brown's Britishness » |
Yesterday's Men and How Times Change
A heart-warming act of friendship in Ballymena today as Northern Ireland's First Minister Ian Paisley and the prime minister of the Republic Bertie Ahern got all cozy and loved-up during a visit by the latter to the former's constituency.
Paisley described it as a "Good day for the whole of Ireland" as the two men met at the Galgorm Hotel to discuss the promotion of tourism, an area on which there is a large degree of North-South co-operation.
Former DUP man Roy Gillespie (yes, that Roy Gillespie) wasn't so pleased. He unfurled a Union Jack outside (err.. why?) and sent his wife in apparently to confront Paisley's wife, Eileen.
I'm disappointed in Jim Allister. The man seems to be a useful politician in terms of finding things out and getting things done (or maybe he's just a good opposition politician, he did learn from the best after all). Allister claimed that "spectacle at Galgorm is yet another manifestation of the dramatic intensification in north/southery which is occurring under devolution."
The problem is that the only "spectacle" is the one Roy Gillespie made of himself and, by extension, unionism generally by acting the maggot today. Sometimes co-opertation with the Republic is going to be advantageous. Tourism has the potential (I don't think co-operation here is working at present) to be one area in which this is the case. Simply decrying North-South co-operation in and of itself doesn't help distinguish where it's good and where it's bad, it only serves to allow its proponents to dismiss your criticism even when it's valid.
It also hides the real question raised by today's visit. If Paisley's right to host a visit from the Republic's premier today, why was it appropriate for Paisley to throw snowballs at Sean Lemass's car when then Prime Minister Terence O'Neill invited Lemass to Stormont forty years ago??