Crossposted here at Slugger O'Toole - why not visit Northern Ireland's best political blog?

With most major developed economies struggling badly since 2008, Germany has seemed to be the calm centre of everything. The leader of any other industrialised country would pinch themselves if they had to deal with Angela Merkel’s problems. Germany shrugged off double-dip recession fears in late 2011 as its economy powered ahead again in 2012. Germany’s unemployment rate declined to 7% in May, its lowest level since shortly after reunification. Labour market reforms have fuelled growth in relatively insecure service jobs without denting the standard of living and job security of Germany’s industrial workforce. The East is, ever so slowly and partly by exporting tens of thousands of young workers to Hamburg and Munich every year, catching up with the West. The old western coal and steel heartlands finally seem to be reinventing themselves, with clusters of bleeding edge industrial firms dotting the landscape, from nanotechnology in Saarbrücken to clean energy on the Ruhr. Germany’s social and economic problems are as real as those of any other country; but just for the moment, they seem to be managing them better than any of the other big boys.

The USA, Japan, France, all fear Chinese competition; Germany instead makes the machines that the Chinese need to remain the workshop of the 21st Century world.

In struggling parts of the Eurozone, from Kerry to Crete, Angela Merkel has become a hate figure, the symbol of German callousness while weaker economies burn. Frau Nein orders that the PIGS’ books be balanced, whatever the cost to the people of the Eurozone’s struggling fringe. From afar, she seems to bestride the scene like a colossus, the immovable champion of austerity. For as long as Germany funds the European Union and German financial credibility underpins the Euro, Germany can call the shots, especially when other major net EU contributors like the Netherlands are equally hawkish.

At home, however, Merkel is far from all-powerful. A run of brutal state election results means that her coalition of Christian Democrats and right-wing Liberals is now a long way short of an overall majority in Germany’s indirectly elected Upper House. Getting legislation passed means negotiating with the social democratic SPD. Her personal poll ratings are poor. Although her party is polling at levels comparable with the Union’s indifferent 2009 general election result, and remain well ahead of the SPD’s, support for her FDP coalition partners has collapsed. There seems to be no prospect of a centre-right majority in national parliamentary elections scheduled for the autumn of 2013.

Merkel’s “Frau Nein” stance is not universally popular in Germany. It has its enthusiastic supporters and its detractors, among the punditocracy and among the voters. Germans have no desire to fund Greek civil servants to retire at 60, or Ireland’s relatively generous benefits for the long-term unemployed, when they made difficult decisions on pensions and welfare themselves a decade ago. But Germans are equally aware that their economy is more dependent on exports than any other established major economy. Only China regularly exports more than Germany. Some years the USA pips Germany for second place in the world export league, in recent years usually not. Japan has long since been left for dust in fourth place.

If Italians, Spaniards and Greeks see a collapse in their living standards, that means fewer customers for German exporters and lost jobs at home.

I asked one prominent German election blogger today where he thought domestic opinion lay on Eurozone austerity. He said – look at France. The election there was effectively a referendum on austerity and the country was more or less split 50:50. In Germany, he said, opinion was just as closely divided.

If Angela Merkel wants to remain Chancellor, given the collapse of the FDP, her only hope is probably a ‘grand coalition’ with the SPD. Her first term government was a grand coalition, and it worked surprisingly well, as it often does at state level. The two big parties often find it easier to find common ground around the mushy centre than they do with the more ideological parties of the left and right. The SPD doesn’t like austerity on principle and doesn’t think it will work for the German economy in the medium term; the SPD’s left is currently flexing its muscles inside the party.

The pressures for Merkel to shift on austerity now seem to be on the cusp of irresistibility. As well as needing to rebuild relations with the centre-left at home, Merkel is isolated in Brussels. Sarkozy is gone. Her key allies in the EU now seem to be David Cameron, very much a fringe figure as far the Euro goes, and Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, no more a household name in Germany than he is in Northern Ireland.

Domestically, Merkel’s key strength is the inability of the SPD to produce a candidate for Chancellor who ticks all the boxes. Four names are in the frame. One, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, leader of the opposition in Parliament, led the SPD to its worst election result since 1890 last time round and few expect him to worry the favourites.

Party leader Sigmar Gabriel is parodied by the right as ‘Siggi Pop’ after a period as the SPD’s “Representative for Pop Culture and Pop Discourse” in his younger years (only in Germany). Gabriel is a master at keeping the SPD’s warring factions moving in the same direction, but lacks the common touch and lacks gravitas at the same time.

Peer Steinbrück, a tough and able Finance Minister in Merkel’s first government, is probably the favourite to get the nod. He is highly rated by voters for his undoubted economic competence and ability to communicate difficult issues in layperson’s terms, and often tops popularity ratings among German politicians. He is, however, too centrist for the taste of the SPD’s resurgent left wing, and with the Greens polling at record levels for the past two years, the SPD can afford no complacency on the left.

The SPD left would love to see Hannelore Kraft, the Prime Minister of Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), throw her hat into the ring as a candidate for Chancellor. Sunday before last, she led the SPD together with their Green coalition partners to a sweeping overall majority on the Rhine and Ruhr. NRW, home to 18 million people, is the California of German politics, the biggest electoral prize of them all.

During the previous two years of SPD-Green minority government in NRW, Kraft played The Left party for fools, and then persuaded the electorate to dump them out of the state parliament entirely this month. NRW has more than its fair share of left wing strongholds, especially the ex-coal mining towns along the Ruhr, with over a century of far-left political tradition only strengthened by the large Turkish and Kurdish populations that live there today. If The Left can’t get 5% of the vote here, it will struggle anywhere in the West. If The Left again becomes a regional party of the former East Germany, it becomes a lot easier for the SPD to form stable governments, in the states and at national level.

Kraft made very public promises on the night of her re-election that she would serve a full five year term as state Prime Minister before seeking federal office – perfect timing for a run for Chancellor in 2017. We all know, however, that politicians’ public promises are worth as much as… well, politicians’ public promises. Kraft is currently crushing Merkel in head-to-head polling on preferred Chancellor. She is the SPD left’s dream candidate at this stage – a woman with a proven track record of moving her own party to the left while still winning centrist voters, working well with the Greens without being overshadowed by them, and crushing threats from the far left at the ballot box. She continues to dismiss all overtures to run for the big job, but that hasn’t stopped the overtures from pouring in.

If the clamour for Kraft to run becomes too loud to quieten, we may yet see the first all-female race for the top job in a major industrialised democracy. And on current polling, that would spell deep trouble for Angela Merkel.

For what it’s worth, as someone who has never even been in Greece but loves following post-election coalition negotiations for pleasure: my reading of ND leader Samaras' announcement yesterday that he can't form a coalition is as follows.

ND, being well aware of SYRIZA’s unwillingness to be part of an ND-led coalition and capacity to bring people out on to the streets, is putting the ball back into SYRIZA’s court. SYRIZA will simply not be able to form a coalition (see below) and a few days, weeks or months later, ND’s preferred option of a Government of National Unity led by it, and probably involving all parties except the Nazis and the Communists, suddenly starts to look inevitable again. (This really does have Weimar written all over it, although thankfully the Leninists and the Browns between them are still at 15% and not 50%.)

It’s a clever move; putting an anti-system party in the driving seat means they face a choice between cocking things up badly or no longer being an anti-system party.

The Greek electoral system is list PR with a whopping 50 seat bonus (out of 300) to the party which gets the highest number of votes nationally. In the days when PASOK and ND got about 40% each and everybody else got 20% between them, this was a clever way of favouring single party governments while ensuring everyone else got just a tad short of fair representation. In the current fragmented climate, it means that forming a government without ND is very hard.

If one assumes that a party as overtly neo-Nazi as Golden Dawn is, as our German friends would put it, koalitionsunfähig, then the only mathematically possible coalition not involving ND is one of SYRIZA, PASOK, the Independent Greeks and the Communists. Is that workable? Possibly; but I wouldn’t fancy it if I were Greek. The Independent Greeks come, obviously, from a rather different part of the pitch than the others ideologically, and KKE is still a true believing Marxist-Leninist party. (Like, seriously true believing.)

KKE were briefly in a sort of “interparty government” style arrangement with ND the 1980s when both just wanted rid of PASOK after the Socialists had, quite generously, removed some of the bias in favour of the largest party in the electoral system. The ND-KKE marriage wasn't a particularly happy relationship. The KKE also took part in Georgios Papandreou’s government of national unity in the mid-1990s. But these days they really sound like they’re praying that Athens 2012 will be a repeat of Moscow 1917. Moments of opportunity for orthodox Marxist-Leninists have been in short supply over the past generation and I think they’ll want to play this one for maximum effect.

SYRIZA, PASOK, the Independent Greeks and the Democratic Left could probably come to some sort of accommodation but would be 6 seats short of an overall majority. And it would remain extraordinarily broad ideologically. (Yes, yes, I know I live in Northern Ireland.)

Fresh elections? Does anyone think they are going to solve anything in current circumstances. Remember, Greeks voted against the bailout by 2 to 1 on Sunday. Only the massive seat bonus for ND allowed the ND-PASOK coalition to look like a possibility. As a commenter on my FB page put it, that would be a government of crooks facing an opposition of crazies. Frighteningly Weimar, indeed, so it’s as well it didn’t come about.

PS – I’m not a Greek constitutional lawyer, but in most countries a protracted delay in forming a coalition would lead to technocrats implementing the policies of the last government until the new one is in place. That would mean the longer the delay, the longer the bailout terms continue to be in force. Not sure if that applies in Greece.

The name's Sam! I live in Sibera,Russia.
You wonder where it might be?
Oh c'mon! Everyone knows that Siberia is a snow desert somewhere deep in Russia.
We still got internetbut the rest of the modern stuff is not here.
That being said I created a studio using cardboard boxes, USSR-style keyboards and iMac G4
Besides I borrowed a camera from my next-door buddy.

Wonder what we could make using all these garbage?
Imo tell ya!!
Mate, garbage is the most fashionable thing now! We got lucky with that / The luck itself found us here.
Check out what we pulled off having zero financial support by link in a subject!


It was a bitch to record in a cardboard box size of a jail cell, a beat stuffy. :))
That's why I'm looking forward to fixing the whole ''studio'' situation.

If it blew your head off or at least didn't leave you emotionless I would like to ask for your support.
Use PayPal,Itunes or BandCamp links from video description in Youtube.

I would also be delighted to hear from you in my guestbook or simply buzz my office: +7 926 251 4440

I speak some English and Chinese, besides there are German and French speakersin da house.
That's why I truly believe we can find common language and exchange opinions.
Stay in touch!

"Yesterday saw a vertiable smorgasbord of elections from across Europe, with high profile elections in Greece and France potentially marking a watershed both for those countries and Europe as a whole. Elections in Serbia and Armenia were no less vital for the future of two of the poorest countries in Europe, while voters in the Germany’s far northern state of Schleswig-Holstein had much to say about the future of Angela Merkel and the possible emergence of the Pirate Party as a serious player. Even voters in parts of Italy, like their counterparts in parts of the UK last Thursday, were electing councils and mayors.

"This Super Sunday was democratic politics’ equivalent of the final week of World Cup qualifying. Let’s travel around the continent to survey the results."

By chance, I met one of the Church of Ireland’s leading Conservative Evangelical clergy yesterday. I would have expected it to be a tense encounter, but it wasn’t. He behaved as I would expect a Christian genuinely speaking in loving disagreement would and I hope I gave the same impression to him. I had been extremely critical – and I mean extremely critical – of the position he represents, and I still am. He didn’t agree with my criticism of his position but rather than seeing it as a cause for angry confrontation, he took it as a sign that he had failed to explain his perspective properly. We had a brief, slightly rushed, but fruitful and very respectful conversation, and finished with promises to continue it again before Easter. I hope we do.

He told me that he and his wife had very close friends who were a non-religious gay couple who they thought the world of and I believed him. He had none of the social discomfort around gay people that I often detect around Conservative Evangelicals – and to give credit where it is due, another person who struck me as being that way was Ken Good. The clergyman referred me to a recording on his website of one of his sermons he preached on the subject of homosexuality, but warned me I wouldn’t like it. I’ve listened to it, and while I certainly didn’t agree with it, I didn’t find it objectionable. He made it clear in the sermon that he had had many positive experiences with gay people and had no truck with homophobia. If every Conservative message on homosexuality was coupled with the message that homophobia is sinful, I would have less problems with those messages. I still take a very different position on what Scripture is trying to teach us on this subject. But I came away with a more positive impression of him than I would have thought possible.

When faced with a debate on fundamental principles, it is always tempting to divide the world into two opposing camps, with ourselves always among the sheep and those we disagree with always among the goats. The genius and the madness of Anglicanism is that it forces us to confront the possibility, on a daily basis, that we might be wrong. Christ came into the world in part to teach us humility. Deeply holy men like St. Peter failed to recognise Christ for what he was even when he spoke to them face to face. It’s not only a possibility that deeply good Christian people are deeply wrong about many things, it’s a certainty. To fail to allow for that is to claim that we are beyond any possibility of sin obscuring our vision. Well, I wouldn’t feel too comfortable claiming that, myself.

This surprisingly pleasant encounter reminded me that we have to be careful not to demonise those we disagree with in this debate. We are all children of God, we all proclaim one baptism. When we see the worst in those whom with we disagree, we fail to live as Jesus Christ did.

At this Lententide, we are to abstain from things that we might be delivered from sin. To keep Lent worthily is, above all, to abstain from all malice, spite and unlovingness. As Robert Herrick put it, “It is to fast from strife/From old debate/And hate/To circumcise thy life”. During Lent, each of us must confront our own sin, our failure to live up to God’s standards. Each of us who exercises judgement on others must exercise it equally on themselves. Each of us is a sinner saved only by the grace of God. Each of us is a child of God, loved so much by God that he sent his Son into the world to die for us.

The other Sunday at Mass in St. George’s, we had that wonderful reading from First Corinthians, that we preach Christ crucified, that the weakness of God is stronger than men. If Christ had wanted us to conquer in power, he would have started a revolution in Jerusalem that Palm Sunday. If Christ had wanted to win the debate with Pilate and the Sanhedrin and secure His release, He could have confused their minds and done so. He was God, after all. He conquered instead in weakness, loved His enemies so much that He died for them. Any debate by Christians and especially among Christians must take place according to His model.

So much of our sin is bound up in our inability to see people we disagree with as fully created as God intended them. We assume those who disagree with us must be those who God disagrees with, we assume that our judgement is perfect and that God is on our side. All of us, on all sides of this debate, are in serious danger of making an idol of our own ideologies. Our history is full of examples that demonstrate our discernment is insufficient to pronounce such judgement on one another.

We mourn for our political power and dress it up as concern for the loss of our moral authority. What fruit did we Christians bring the Lord when we had temporal power and moral authority? The sweating of the bodies of God’s children as slaves or serfs; the subjugation of women; nationalism, imperialism and war; vicious sectarianism, towards other branches of Christianity and towards other religions; making an idol of our own culture and replacing Christ with it; brutal suppression of dissenting voices. Christianity had huge temporal power in the West for a long, long, time and mostly it abused it. God’s judgement is on us as surely as it was in the days of Amos.

All of us, in every branch of Western Christendom and from every standpoint in every debate, need to take God’s judgement seriously. Our moral authority in the world does not exist. We have shamed God too much for that. We have lived too little for Christ, and too much for the tiny portion of His majesty that each of us can apprehend from our own perspective. We demand to possess God, to understand his purposes, to know his mind. Our history should teach us a little bit of humility. We have often been at our worst when we have been most certain we were doing His will. We have an awful tendency to brandish Him as a weapon, sure that our judgements are His. God is not only greater than we know, He is greater than we can know.

This Lent, all three sides of the debate need to think about how we can show each other a bit of charity. I say three sides, because I think those of us on both ‘extreme’ sides of this debate find ourselves very judged by those who claim to be in the middle. Whether one likes it or not, this is the presenting issue of our time and both the liberals and the conservatives recognise the importance of this debate. How we answer it makes profound statements about our relationship to God and to one another. I don’t think anything in Scripture can lead us to believe that God likes giving us easy options. Ducking debates of profound importance tends to look a bit craven in the rear view mirror. At the same time, I think those in the middle are right to keep reminding those of us on the poles of the Church of Ireland that the unity of our Church is important. We are one of the great ancient Churches of this land and we must not fall apart over this.

At the same time, the broad middle needs to recognise that a lot of the energy and a lot of the growth in the Church of Ireland is at the poles, not along the equator. The Church of Ireland can only be what it should be to this land if it can keep its three sub-cultures together; it is a fairly unique ecology of Anglicanism with few direct parallels overseas. It has a liberal Catholic wing, especially in the cities, with a deep Christian faith and a power to keep people in the circle who would otherwise be excluded from the institutional church. It has a moderate Protestant body, especially in rural areas, North and South, with a pragmatic, non-judgemental, conservatism. And it has an energetic and conservative Evangelical wing with a profound call to personal holiness, which has a particular appeal in the sprawling suburban estates of the North. Our Church prospers when each wing recognises the other’s basic decency, their competence as intelligent thinking Christians, and their commitment to Christ. Each of us has things to say which the other two may not always want to hear. These must always be spoken in honesty, but always in love. Each of us sees now only through a glass darkly. Then we shall see face to face.

In terms of this debate, we liberals need to avoid demonising conservatives as homophobic bigots. But conservatives need to avoid demonising liberals as Godless heretics. And those of you in the middle need to avoid demonising those of us at the poles as crazies who don’t care about the Church of Ireland. We all care about the Church of Ireland. Its good health matters.

At the same time, there is a terrible temptation for people to want to find a false middle in the debate on homosexuality. Such a false middle is inherently unstable. It might buy us time. But ultimately the argument will continue, and the secular pressures to resolve the debate one way or the other are going to become ever stronger. There is a deep social change in secular attitudes to gender and homosexuality and it is only getting more profound with time. Sooner rather than later, we are going to have to confront this and what it means for our relations with secular society. I think we’ll be best positioned to do that if we learn to tolerate difference inside the Church, and I think we learn to tolerate difference in the Church by recognising our own personal fallibility and need for Christ, our need for constant grace and constant repentance. Walking together with people on those terms can be painful, but Christ did warn us that we would have to take up our crosses to follow Him.

As we begin our walk towards Passiontide, towards the great drama of Holy Week with its cries of Hosanna and bitter betrayal, towards that ultimate sacrifice for our sins on the Cross and that paradoxical transformation of defeat into victory at the Resurrection, perhaps we should spend less time thinking about our concerns of the day and more time praying about the central act of history. Perhaps then we might be more in a position to answer the great presenting issue of the day and help our Church walk in the way Christ wishes it to.

I am an openly gay member of the Church of Ireland and one of the unwelcome guests who turned up at the Slieve Russell Hotel for the Church of Ireland’s gay conference uninvited because I had spent months trying to ensure, by working carefully and responsibly in the background, that there was meaningful gay participation in the conference, and had failed. Not a single LGBT person worshipping in a Church of Ireland parish addressed the gathering or any of its workshops. Not a single openly lesbian person, from anywhere, was invited to participate in the conference.

This is not a side issue. A few years ago, Changing Attitude Ireland put together a publication called ‘Share Your Story’ which told LGBT people's stories of life in the Church of Ireland. The depth of prejudice and sheer emotional violence faced by lesbians in the Church of Ireland staggered even me, as a gay man. In one incident, a woman in Northern Ireland who had been a pillar of her church was found out to be a lesbian. The woman in question was summoned, alone, to a meeting in the church offices on a weekday evening to be confronted by a gang of nine led by her Rector, told that Satan had veiled her eyes, that it was an affront to see her worship God, and was forbidden from receiving Holy Communion again. I would submit that this is not behaviour modelled on that of Our Lord who happily drank at the well with the Samaritan Woman.

This woman was silenced at that conference because her experience of the Church of Ireland was too uncomfortable for our leaders to hear – both for the conservatives who think this amounts to ‘tough love’ and for the moderates who, in the main, have done little to challenge such vile behaviour. Silenced with her were the thousands of men and women like her who kneel in our pews Sunday by Sunday living in terror that they will be discovered and that discovery will lead to ostracism.

Many clergy at the conference boasted that they would exclude me and people like me from Holy Communion because we love the men or women that we do and we are not ashamed of that love. Most of those clergy were from Northern Ireland, where welcoming congregations like my own parish of St. George are very much in the minority.

Your sincerely,

There are many people who feel I should not have been at the Church of Ireland’s conference on homosexuality this weekend. I wish I could agree with them. There are many, many other ways I would rather have spent this weekend than being the unwelcome guest at someone else’s party. It was not a nice experience. I hope never to have to repeat it. But a point needed to be made and I, and several others, saw no other way to make it.

No legislation was going to be voted on at this meeting. The Bishops always said the best work would be done in non-confrontational small group work. And, in this, they were almost certainly right. At the same time it makes all the more inexplicable their odd decision to make this a tight, invitation only, “closed conference” as the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe put it to me in person. Why not invite some of the people actually affected by this directly? I mean ones who could speak for themselves, unlike the many people I saw there who I know are LGBT and can’t speak out: clergy who face the sack, gay men in opposite-sex marriages, and many people who are comfortable in both their faith and their sexuality and simply lack the confidence to come out to a group of strangers.

There are more people who can articulate the LGBT Christian experience at the edge of the Church of Ireland than in its centre, and more can do so without fear among the laity than the clergy. We should have been invited, in reasonable numbers. Three gay speakers (one of whom was a conservative celibate) and a less than handful of out General Synod delegates among 400 attendees – and not one openly lesbian speaker! Do you really think this is fair?

The crisis leading to this conference was caused by a clergyman entering a civil partnership. The crux of the debate which conservatives tell me is potentially church-dividing, much to my own amazement, is whether or not practising homosexuals in monogamous lifelong relationships can serve as priests and, in particular, celebrate Holy Communion. The Church of Ireland has two publicly gay clergy. One is the proximate cause of the current crisis and in an incredibly vulnerable position personally. The other is a terminally ill man who, like me, was not a welcome guest at this conference. Do you really think it is possible to have a fair discussion in a conference taking place in that context?

The Archbishops, both of whom treated me with grace and gentleness over the weekend, nonetheless infuriate me when they claim that this conference “involved listening to the direct experience of gay Christians”. Well, it did if you mean listening to a handful of gay men (no women!) who don’t actually worship in the Church of Ireland regularly! I heard they all spoke very well and I met two of them and feel sure they did us proud – they were clearly fine people. But the House of Bishops did the bare minimum possible to avoid looking ludicrous. One cannot pretend that being gay in gay Paree is remotely comparable with being gay in Portglenone.

Three of us laypeople, in Ireland’s three major cities, and covering a remarkably wide range of cultural background and theological perspective for such a small group, wrote letters to the Church of Ireland Gazette explaining how excluded we felt by the conference process. Would it have been too much to do to invite us along to ask us why we felt this way? And maybe find a couple of dozen other people who also felt like us, and welcome us along, as Jesus Christ welcomed people. Wouldn’t it have been good to hear our stories, to have misconceptions challenged, to find the people who disagree with us are actually good Christian people, like ourselves. Because one of the tragedies of this weekend for me was that I didn’t come away thinking anything good about the conservative wing of the Church of Ireland. And I doubt many conservatives got the chance to see LGBT church people are decent Christian people leading decent Christian lives.

I know stable lesbian and gay male couples; I know bisexuals living in faithful, monogamous, opposite-sex marriages; I know transgender people; I know gay men trapped in loveless marriages that they thought would turn them straight – a lot of those; I know older gay men who fear their parishes will cast them out if they find out they’re more than a ‘bachelor’. I personally know at least one of all of these types of people who attend a Church of Ireland church Sunday by Sunday within 3 miles of where I live. You silenced all of them, all over Ireland and especially in Northern Ireland.

The sad thing is, I think some people didn’t want to let other people see us in that light. The demonising pictures of the Evangelical penny-dreadfuls of the cyber age – the queer as debased, lustful, repugnant to God, addicted to alcohol and drugs, prone to suicide – are so easily shattered by actual exposure to real gay men and women in the church, because we are in the main so utterly conventional. There are real problems with alcohol and drug addiction in our queer communities, and a reliance on cheap and unfulfilling sex, and a crashing materialism. Queer Christians see the problems every day, and we feel many of our problems as a community are made worse by your denial of our right to live convenanted, faithful, lifelong, partnerships. We also see much in our communities which is generous, open-hearted, accepting, loving, tolerant of difference, open to vulnerability, in short, so much that reflects the attitudes of Jesus Christ as presented to us in Scripture. Like you, we are sinners in need of Christ and yet we reflect in some ways the stamp of our creator.

Our creator also taught us that before we judge we should see if the had beam in our own eye first. Our crashing materialism? With your jumbo sized cars and jumbo sized homes and jumbo sized families on a vulnerable planet? And your chauvinism! You think I don’t understand why a literalist interpretation of Scripture appeals to you, despite all Scriptural evidence that it’s bunk? For a married, heterosexual male, having God tell your wife to submit to you like you were God (Ephesians 5:22) has an awful lot of advantages. So you ignore the conflicting genealogies, you ignore the Gospel and Pauline quotations of the Old Testament that clearly come from the Septuagint and are somewhat different from our Old Testament translations. You ignore all the things that argue against the idea that God’s conception of teaching us the truth through Christ was giving us a second rule book. And I know why – it suits so many of you to argue for literalism against the internal evidence of Scripture, because it makes life more comfortable for straight, married, men.

There were no lesbians at this conference. 14 Evangelicals wrote a book about sexuality and all 14 are men. Heterosexual men get to tell the rest of us what living a sexually moral life means. You people are just too easy to parody as a bunch of chauvinist, sexually self-repelled, bigots with a vested interest in maintaining straight patriarchy and keeping women down.

You’re saying Jesus taught in parables to give us a second rule book? If God wanted a revision of the law code, why incarnate Himself as man and go to die at Calvary? In the New Covenant, we are saved by grace through faith, not through works, although without works our faith is empty. But we are no longer under the Law. Conservatives are right to remind us that St. Paul argues for liberty, not libertinism. But I am not advocating for libertinism. I advocate liberty within a clearly defined framework – “same rights, same rules, same responsibilities”. In the world I want to see, we couple freedom with responsibility. Integrity as befits a Christian, both in our relationships with our sexually intimate life-partner, and with the rest of the world, applies whether we are straight or queer.

One shocking report I heard from the conference fringe – and although these tales can be magnified in the telling, it’s not an isolated story – claimed numerous clergy at the conference said they would refuse homosexuals in faithful relationships Holy Communion. I think we need to remember that we are judged by the measure of our own judgement, and refusing people the Sacrament is a grievous judgement indeed. If I were cutting people off from God and the fellowship of the Church in that way, I would have to be very sure of my ground. Jesus broke bread with Judas on the night he was betrayed. If you’re saying we queers are worse than Judas, I’d be very careful what standard I was setting myself up to be judged by. I would be very careful not to misrepresent the Lord and Saviour who supped at the well with the Samaritan woman. If you have a problem with me receiving communion in your church, you come and see me about it in advance and you read me the First Exhortation from the old Prayer Book. And then you let me make that judgement call, which is after all, about my salvation. And if you feel the need to read the First Exhortation to me, I hope you direct it back at yourself in the same measure.

I think some of you just wish we would shut up so you could get on with ‘more important things’. And personally, I could quite easily. I’m a layperson, I worship in a gay-affirming parish, I’m an out gay man in a loving long-term relationship, my family is pretty gay-positive. I’m comfortable and confident at public speaking. I’m the aristocracy of the LGBT hierarchy in the Church of Ireland. If I it’s impossible for me to get much of a spoke in, the vast majority of LGBTs in the Church of Ireland are completely silenced.

Elements in the Church of Ireland encourage people to become trapped in Mixed-Orientation Marriages, corrosive on them and corrosive on their heterosexual spouses. The people crushed by this burden are silenced.

Elements in the Church of Ireland refuse lesbians communion, form spiritual hit squads to cast lesbians out of the church, and squirm when asked to baptise the children of lesbians, trapped between the generous grace of Canon 26 yet making it quite clear they’d really rather these lesbians Went Somewhere Else. Lesbians are silenced.

In nearly every parish in the Church of Ireland, there is at least one elderly bachelor or spinster who is the pillar of their parish and whose social life revolves around the church, who fears that they will become an outcast if their fellow parishioners found out they were gay. They are often very lonely people. The people ground down by this loneliness are silenced.

For the most part, gays not especially visible in our churches, especially in the North. In the rural North they are entirely invisible. Lesbians are even less visible, unsurprising when open lesbians are repeatedly treated in vile and unchristian ways in our parishes, as documented in Changing Attitude Ireland’s Share Your Story booklet. Other types of queer people like transgender people are barely more than rumoured to exist, although that doesn’t prevent nasty displays of conservative Christian bullying of this tiny and peaceable group of people, as happened while the Gender Recognition Act was going through Parliament.

Although I found it incredibly wearing, not all was bad at the conference. There were also moments of extraordinary grace, the most exceptional of all I received at the hands of our Primate, Alan Harper. Many people criticise Alan, but he is a transparently decent, caring and honourable man and he did a lovely thing for me at a time when I was feeling very low and very hurt. He genuinely believes in servant leadership. We are fortunate to have such a good and genuinely kind man leading our Church at such a difficult time. Some other Bishops were welcoming and a few took robust criticism with generosity and grace. Others made it clear which rock they wished I’d disappear under.

My colleagues from Changing Attitude Ireland were, as always, such kind and convivial companions who made the tough bits bearable. Of those on the Committee, Paul and Margaret, Brian, and Ginnie put in the long, emotionally tiring, stints co-chairing sessions. Darren and Sandra will have graced the conference with their presence. Mervyn and Richard, Charles and I were the goats forced to sit separated from the sheep out in the foyer. The treatment of Mervyn Kingston really is unnecessarily spiteful in the case of a man with a terminal illness. He is not being punished for being a practising homosexual, but for being an honest practising homosexual, in one of the most loving and caring gay relationships I have ever known. If he dissembled and cloaked himself, he would be fine.

Thanks, from the bottom of my heart, to all those who those good church people over the weekend who took the trouble to speak up for queer people when others were condemning us, to those who took time to ask Bishops whether our treatment had been fair, and in particular to those who disagreed with us on the substantive issue but still felt our treatment was shabby. People like you give me hope that we can indeed agree to disagree, agreeably.

If there was a message I wanted to tell the conference that I was not allowed to, it is how dearly I love my partner and how dearly he loves me. We do nothing but good to one another. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to condemn me for it. I find encounters with people who think it does condemn me and that God agrees with them incredibly unsettling.

At one point during the conference, I thought that faith and hope had died, but thanks to some good Christian men and women I find them rekindled albeit in perilous vulnerability. And thus I am still able to argue for the greatest of those three last remaining things: love.

Two years ago, a London-based journalist, Patrick Strudwick, reported Dr Miller to the GMC after going undercover for the treatment.

Mr Strudwick, who is gay, described the Belfast doctor’s therapies as “disturbing” following two sessions via a webcam.

“I felt disgusted and abused by his inappropriate sexual remarks during the sessions. To hear this from a psychiatrist during a session, it was like being sexually assaulted,” Mr Strudwick said in 2010.

[…]

A GMC spokeswoman refused to comment on whether Mr Strudwick’s complaint resulted in the conditions being placed on Dr Miller’s licence, or if there had been additional complaints from the public.

Letter published in the Church of Ireland Gazette, 13th January 2012

What first attracted me to the Church of Ireland was its tolerance and inclusiveness, especially its acceptance of me as a full member of the Parish family without demanding I convert formally. Eventually I did formally join the Church, and one important reason for this was that I could no longer live with integrity as a gay man in the Roman Catholic Church, and I felt that I could within the Church of Ireland.

Over these 15 years of pilgrimage as an Anglican, I always felt empowered to accept myself unconditionally for what I am – a gay man and a Christian. My faith has been deepened beyond measure by the love and prayerful example of my devoutly Anglican partner. I cannot deny that I consider him the greatest gift God has given me, or could give me, on this earthly pilgrimage.

I recently heard someone mention the word ‘schism’ in connection with the current debate on homosexuality. It is horrible to conceive that one might be the cause of schism in the Church one loves. It is a singularly unpleasant time to be gay and an Anglican. The tenor of the debate on homosexuality across the Anglican Communion has been horrifying – self-righteous, arrogant and judgemental. The Church of Ireland has not escaped the ugliness.

For those who cannot accept me for what I am, I continue to pray that God might turn your hearts. But my anger is directed towards those who occupy the ‘middle’ ground in the debate – those who always tell us ‘soon’, but never ‘now’. Why so silent when the of the faith and identity of gay Christians is being attacked? Why allow people to tell us that if we don’t turn into something we can’t ever become, our salvation is a fraud?

If you’re going to crucify gays to preserve the unity of the Church, that’s fine, I can accept it. Push me away to the fringe of the Church if you want. I trust in Christ as my Saviour. To be at the fringes of his dwelling is privilege enough, and as I remember Scripture it’s where he preferred to hang out himself.

But please don’t pretend to me that you’re trying to lead me into some process that can end with my inclusion, when you’re not. And I don’t believe it can, because I don’t hear many people in the Church arguing for my inclusion at the moment.

Gerry Lynch

In recent years, I’ve heard people complain that late Spring and early Summer are always beautiful, but the weather always breaks just as the schools break up and the height of Summer has been wet, dull and humid. That has certainly been my experience of recent years. The data show that is neither a new nor an unusual phenomenon, though.

Of the thirty sunniest months since Armagh’s records began in 1929 (almost a thousand months in total, so these are the top 3% or so), 13 have been Mays, 11 Junes, just 4 Julys and only 2 Augusts. On average, Armagh’s Julys have only 130 hours and 52 minutes of sunshine, while June averages 157 hours and 34 minutes and May a mood-improving 175 hours and 4 minutes. Patterns at Aldergrove Airport are similar.

The two sunniest months in recorded history at Armagh were both Junes – those of 1940 and 1949, followed by May 1935. Another June, that of 1957, takes fourth spot ahead of the sunniest ever July, that of 1989.

Assuming the Armagh pattern holds for most of NI, the two sunniest months since I moved back to Belfast in September 2007 were the May of 2008, which does not jog my memory at all, and the June of 2009, which I do remember as containing many weeks of gorgeous, if not always particularly warm, sunshine. That comes in only in the 20^th spot in the all time list.

At first I assumed that this was partly an artefact of June having longer days than July, although that didn’t explain May. But I forgot that June has only 30 days, so the total amount of daylight in June and July is virtually the same in the Northern hemisphere – at Armagh, 513 hours and 38 minutes of daylight in June, 512 hours and 48 minutes in July. May is only a little way behind, with 499 hours and 16 minutes of daylight.

Although May is our sunniest month, and can be beautifully warm, it can be rather chilly from time to time. As recently as 1996, Armagh managed an average daily maximum in May of only 13.3C, with nightly minimums a genuinely chilly 4.4C. Sure, if you wanted to live somewhere where the weather was good, you’d move somewhere else…

So the myth of exam seasons with the sun splitting the stones giving way to dull and damp summers turns out not to be a myth at all, just a fact of life on our rainy little island… although the well known fact that Ireland is exceptionally rainy actually is a myth, at least as far as the East coast and interior go. More on that another time.

It seems @theSNP has been the recipient of many supportive @ messages and DMs today. So much so, they’ve replied: “Thanks for all your tweets today. Sorry we can't reply to them all. For those asking about joining go to www.snp.org/join”

There is, of course, nothing wrong with asking people to join online. But the nature of Twitter is such that many of those people will never see the SNP’s reply. I appreciate, more than most, how impossible it is for Party admin staff to do all the things everyone expects them to do. But this is surely a case for the semi-mythical army of ‘Cybernats’? Someone with not much else to do all day and rudimentary knowledge of Twitter – which, thanks to the UK coalition, is most 18-30 year olds between Thurso and the Isle of Thanet – should really go through @theSNP’s @ message feed, and their DMs, and reply to them all individually with the link and asking for further contact details.

No democratic political party ever has enough members. They are the most precious resource parties possess. Parties and party activists go through all sorts of rigmaroles on wet winter nights to press the semi-willing into becoming party members. Enthusiastic volunteers are like gold dust; they are ignored only at great loss.

Today’s headlines will be forgotten next week. Today’s enthusiastic recruits will, in many cases, still be knocking doors in 50 years time.

Perhaps more interesting is who is and who isn’t correct on both the technicalities and the ethics of how Scotland might declare independence. The Secretary of State for Scotland will make a statement in the House of Commons tomorrow, setting out the UK government’s position on the matter. In the media battle, spokespeople on both sides are inclined to make statements more aimed at propagandising the public than dispassionately informing them.

As far as the core issue goes, David Cameron is correct in strict constitutional terms. Under the Scotland Act 1998, devolution is a ‘generally reserved’ matter, and therefore entirely the purview of the government at Westminster. In strict legal terms, Cameron is entirely justified in holding a referendum on any basis his coalition agrees to at any time he wishes, and is equally justified in not holding one.

In practice, Cameron is constrained by the myriad understandings and unspoken conventions that underpin the constitutional framework of the UK. One of these, for as long as I’ve been around, is that if the SNP or other Nationalists ever got a majority of Scottish seats in the UK House of Commons, or a majority in the Scottish Parliament, a referendum on Scottish independence would be held in due course and without undue delay.

The SNP fought the last Scottish Parliamentary election with a specific manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on independence, and won an overall majority of seats on that basis. Denying the Scottish people a referendum on independence in that context would be a major assault on democracy, would provoke a major constitutional crisis with implications beyond Scotland and, unsurprisingly, no-one with any power is talking in those terms. Let’s kill that red herring. The referendum is going to happen and everybody who matters agrees it should.

However, things get a bit more slippery when we start talking about who should dictate the terms under which such a referendum should be held. The SNP have been claiming all day that people elected a government ‘committed to a referendum in the second half of this [Scottish] Parliament'. The problem is, regardless of what SNP spokespeople may have said on chatshows and opinion pages last year, they didn’t say this in their manifesto. The manifesto simply says:

“We think the people of Scotland should decide our nation’s future in a democratic referendum and opinion polls suggest that most Scots agree. We will, therefore, bring forward our Referendum Bill in this next Parliament.”

It underscores the slipperiness that has characterised almost all of the SNP’s handling of the referendum procedure – deliberately evasive on timing, deliberately evasive on content, deliberately evasive on alternatives to independence, and crushingly arrogant and dismissive when anyone else expresses a view on any of those subjects. It leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and I’m far from unsympathetic to either the SNP as a party or the idea of Scottish independence.

Cameron’s intervention may or may not have been politically sensible. Indeed, it probably wasn’t; I found his interventions on Northern Ireland during the Bizarre UCUNF Saga irritating and ill-informed. He and his party remain toxic in Scotland. But as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom he does have a legitimate interest in the terms of a Scottish referendum, not least as a majority of Scots at both the 2010 UK and 2011 Scottish general elections voted for pro-union parties. If Alec Salmond wanted more control over the terms of a referendum, he should have asked for more control from the Scottish people last year – i.e. he should have displayed a few more cojones in the text of his manifesto. He didn’t.

We now have two possible ways forward. Firstly, the Scottish and UK governments can sit down like grown ups and rationally negotiate the terms of the Referendum, ideally with the Scottish and UK Labour Parties and the Scottish Tories, LibDems and Greens fully involved. For those of us who think the right of the people to choose their form of government, in and of itself, is the most important question at stake in the referendum, that makes a lot of sense.

The second option is for a long period of megaphone diplomacy between London and Edinburgh where Cameron effectively accuses Salmond of dictatorial tendencies, and Salmond accuses Cameron of being a toff English colonialist. From the reaction today, many in the SNP think there are many ‘Yes’ votes to be gained through a lengthy and bitter cross-border spat. So I think that’s what we’ll get, at least until the Scottish Labour Party regains its bearings, or some credible non-party ‘No’ campaign leadership emerges. We could be waiting a while.

But there will be some sort of credible 'No' campaign in place long before polling day, so I’m not sure that makes strategic sense for the SNP in the long term. But its an easy, enjoyable and probably effective tactic in short-term, so I think that’s what we’ll see. Athenian democracy it ain't.

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled –
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led –
Welcome to your gory bed.
Or to victorie!

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped in away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

From Ariel Poems | 1927

In the North East of Ethiopia lies the Danokil Desert. At its heart is a volcanic crater, Dallol, little known and seldom visited but quite extraordinary.

Surrounding the volcano are acidic hot springs, mountains of sulphur, pillars of salt, small gas geysers and pools of acid isolated by salt ridges. It makes for one of the most bizarre landscapes on planet Earth.

nwhyte

I walk past the Occupy Belfast protesters opposite St. Anne’s Cathedral nearly every day. It would be easy to sneer at them. They have some rather nice tents out of Decathlon, that well known bastion of anti-capitalism, and they seem to have a lot of fun. Not only are they not occupying anything more than Belfast’s new-but-now-traditional venue of left-wing protest, but they aren’t even properly persecuted. I can’t remember the last time I saw a cop there, let alone a raid. All the same, they’ve held out through a winter that has had its cold and wild spots between the mildness, and what’s wrong with a bit of fun anyway? Being young, and free, and thinking you’re about to change the world, it’s a lovely experience – perhaps we sneer at them because we’re jealous of them?

Are they changing the world? Probably not. They aren’t in the right place or the right time, but they are part of something that is. @OccupyBelfast - “We are the 99%”, as it styles itself on Twitter, babbles away via social media with Occupy Birmingham, and Occupy Bratislava, and Occupy Boston. Information surges into Lower Donegall Street through the capillaries of the internet from places where the students on the streets really are changing the world – from Cairo, and Hama, and Moscow. As I said, Northern Ireland in 2012 is not the right place or time to be in the centre of things. There are just too many other things in recent history to deal with here at this juncture. But if a wave spreads, you never know, you just never know.

And that’s the problem with talking about the likely impact of social media on the affairs of the world – we simply don’t know. Weak and inefficient Arab dictatorships were caught on the hop when the revolution started being spread by text message; but China’s security apparatus has been paranoid about the impact of mobile comms and the internet since before anyone else took them seriously. Just as the pen was often not mightier than the sword, Bahrain shows that the heavily armed Saudi urban pacification squad is mightier than the Nokia wielding teenager. Syria might well end up sending the same message.

It’s difficult for a non-Sinophone to get a decent handle on what’s happening on the internet in China, and not only because of language difficulties. The Great Firewall combined with China’s sheer size means that one fifth of humanity surfs through a virtual world only weakly connected with that inhabited by the other four fifths. Chinese surf for video clips on Youku and Tudou, not YouTube, while Weibo and Taobao are used instead of Twitter and eBay. Chinese exceptionalism is as powerful as that exhibited by any country on the planet, and it begins the moment you open your web browser.

In the 1930s, the talking cinema and the radio were the two powerful means of spreading information most recently to emerge on the scene. One transmitted simple information around the world instantaneously, so that a war that broke out in Asia made the living rooms and ministries of Washington and Berlin within minutes. The other transmitted the creations of the world’s leading directors and actors around the world in a matter of weeks or months, transmitting ideas more powerfully and faithfully than any stage piece or silent movie ever could.

While liberal democrats, especially on the left, had their great moments in the golden age of radio on cinema, from Casablanca to How Green is my Valley? to FDR’s fireside chats, Nazism and Communism were enthusiastic and skilled proponents of the new media of the day. Faced with information coming through normal channels, people can become very effective at sorting out propaganda from reality. When receiving information from unfamiliar sources, it takes time to learn to spot the subtle clues that alert one to the bogus. The broadcast of Hitler’s speeches on the radio was a major media event, and Leni Riefenstahl burnished the Nazis’ image while Fritz Hippler demonised their enemies. Stalin, too, was an early and enthusiastic supporter of cinema and its power to shape minds.

Just a few short decades later, radio was past its sell-by date as a vehicle for more than broadcasting pop songs, while the efforts of eastern Bloc cinema and television to sell the virtues of ‘really existing socialism’ seemed cheap and tawdry. By that stage, people had a better sense of when someone was telling the truth and when people were just making stuff up. It wasn’t that propaganda had died, still less than people had stopped believing it, but by that stage, it took time, money and talent to create believable propaganda. The first two were in perpetually short supply in the Communist world and the last wasn’t always available to the state. In the West, where all three resources were available in abundance, quality propaganda survived, but with limits. Not many even among its most die-hard fans saw Delta Force as a meaningful contribution to the debate on US Middle East policy. On the other hand, the relentless, decades long, campaign to normalise homosexuality through British television worked a treat. I’m one of its beneficiaries, and I’m delighted that people invested their time and skills to make it happen.

Most of us have been using social media for less than five years. Few of us understand exactly how any particular concatenation of stories arrives on our Facebook home page. Many of our online contacts are with people we’ve never met in real life; our capacity to judge their reliability as witnesses is limited. We are potentially suckers for the next great propagandist to come along. And I’m not sure we can do anything about that at this point in time.

Gil Scott-Heron’s poem identified the top-down nature of the last great information technology, television, as its critical weakness in promoting social change. Hierarchical, unidirectional, dependent on corporate or government sponsorship, it was not the vector for revolutions. Those watching TV would miss the revolution, which could only happen on the streets.

Today’s great information technology goes out onto the streets with us on our smartphones. It does not only convey information from top to bottom, but also from bottom to top and side to side. It continues to convey information, however, from top to bottom. A lot of information. In the internet age, those at the apex of politics, business or civil society still have enormously more leverage to convey information to the world at large than the average person. Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign is living proof of that, and his 2012 campaign might still underscore it.

The internet can still be used for top-down purposes, and some time soon somebody is going to use that to maximum effect, for good or ill. We lose sight of that at our peril.

Alasdair McDonnell had a two page spread in Monday’s Irish News. Although the Irish News is still pretty friendly to the Stoops, it isn’t quite the SDLP house journal it once was and a double page spread on a quiet news day is as good as it gets in terms of free publicity for the leader of a medium sized party. Although hardly something that wins or loses elections, the article was a useful opportunity for a new leader, with plenty of time before the next election, to set out his vision for his core vote and people who used to be his party’s core vote until recently.

Allowing for the fact that newspapers often either mangle or ignore politicians’ talking points, I don’t think he used the opportunity particularly well. But before I come to that, it’s only fair to congratulate Alasdair on the thing he did get very right – his clear rejection of an SDLP withdrawal from the Executive.

No-one disagrees that the Executive at Stormont is not delivering much in the way of government. Legislation that is remotely contentious is delayed into oblivion by either Sinn Féin or the DUP. This needs to change – but the way to do that is to create that removes disputes from the Executive table and the influence of Special Advisors to a more amenable forum, perhaps a Conciliation Committee in the Assembly, loosely based on the German model, with personnel chosen by the parties for their problem solving and horse-trading capacity.

For all its faults, all-party government has brought us political stability. No major governmental crisis is in view, for the first time since the current system of government was introduced in 1998. I’m genuinely surprised how blasé most of the chattering classes seem to be about this. It’s a major achievement in a deeply divided society.

In any case, Sinn Féin, like the DUP, has a veto on constitutional change and will do for as long as a majority of Nationalists vote for them. At this stage, Sinn Féin regard an all-party Executive as one of the most important elements of our complex architecture of government, and they perceive that Unionist enthusiasm for the politics of government and opposition is a thinly veiled enthusiasm for excluding them from government at the first opportunity. Indeed they probably have a good point on that score.

No official role for an opposition can be created in such circumstances and it is a complete waste of time to talk about it at this stage. Northern Ireland plc has plenty of real economic and social problems to deal with without debating changes to the machinery of government that won’t take place any time soon. Alasdair was right to nix such a pointless debate. The SDLP needs to use its limited airtime on topics more likely to get more people to vote for and join the SDLP.

I was surprised, therefore, at how much space the Irish News devoted to Alasdair talking about process and not about policies with concrete outcomes. For example, I happen to agree with him that a 15 council model would be better than an 11 council model – in fact, I fail entirely to see the need for a costly change to local councils. I also agree that the 11 council model proposed has elements of Gerrymandering favourable to Sinn Féin – pretty blatant in the case adding strongly Sinn Féin Strabane to the SDLP stronghold of Derry, when Derry is a perfectly well-sized and coherent City to begin with. But this debate has been running for some years now and has failed to catch the imagination of the electorate, unsurprisingly when even election nerds like me struggle to maintain much interest. Sinn Féin and the DUP both received strong mandates from the electorate last May, so fairness and the Assembly’s voting procedure both say that where they actually agree, they get to have their own way, even if it’s wrong.

Similarly, while there may be issues with MLA’s remuneration and pension packages, this is not a subject I would devote a quarter of a major newspaper feature to, nor is it one likely to inspire much sympathy on the part of the electorate.

I was astonished at the decision to rotate the SDLP’s Minister every 18 months. It is a recipé for permanent government by the Civil Service, with Ministers replaced as soon as they get used to being a Minister and maybe start doing something practical. Whoever ends up taking over Alasdair’s late watch in the Department of Social Development in January 2015 will have about three months to prove themselves before an Assembly election happens – i.e., they will achieve nothing. Is the factionalism in the SDLP Assembly group really so bad that they can’t just let Alex get on with his job? Especially when it’s a difficult job given the differences between the NI and UK government approaches to welfare and the emptiness of the public purse. But in any case, even if he’s right, I doubt the electorate care too much which strategy Alasdair uses to avoid being the third SDLP leader in a row overthrown in a palace coup.

Stormont insider process issues are irrelevant to most people, indeed actively frustrating when no crisis seems likely to emerge. Why not speak more about the issues that actually matter? It is generally acknowledged that the system of transfer to post-primary schools is in complete chaos, and that Catriona Ruane holds principal responsibility for that. It is amazing Alasdair didn’t bring this subject up.

Similarly, I was astounded to see no mention of the economy by Alasdair. People are very, very, afraid of their economic future at present, with good reason. It’s once more generally acknowledged, I believe, that Sinn Féin has a serious perception gap when it comes to their ability to manage the economy. Tens of thousands of voters have lost their job, been forced to take a pay cut, or have been put on warning that a pay cut or redundancy is likely in the near future; many of them are habitual Sinn Féin voters.

Perhaps, in reality, the SDLP’s economic policy is a bit weak – they’d hardly be unique in NI politics in that! – but one hardly needs a Nobel Prize winning economist to draft a few lines for a party leader to repeat to a journalist. Elections are a long way away and the detail can wait for a year or so. If I were Alasdair, I would be using every opportunity I could to remind people that the SDLP are the sort of mainstream social democrats you’d like to see run your economy (if you’re the average NI nationalist), whereas the Shinners have all this weird Marxist baggage and could be scary to overseas investors.

It’s the only issue I see Sinn Féin being vulnerable to the SDLP on. Otherwise, while there are parts of the country that will always be strongholds of the South Down and Londonderry party, Sinn Féin will remain the dominant force in Northern Nationalist politics until well after Alasdair collects his Stormont pension.