Despicable tactics from McGimpsey

Irish News, The Wednesday Column with Brian Feeney

November 6, 2002

Prospect magazine, with its subtitle ‘Politics Essays Argument’, wouldn’t have a massive readership. Perhaps Chris McGimpsey thought no-one in the north would read this month’s edition. Perhaps he didn’t care if anyone here did. If that’s so he should be ashamed of himself.

The main essay this month by author Richard Kelly is entitled ‘Why Protestants are pessimistic’. It’s obvious from the text that Kelly spent a considerable time with McGimpsey, who is described as a ‘liberal unionist’. McGimpsey is liberally quoted but that’s the only basis for using the word liberal with reference to him. To some extent that’s useful because readers in Britain will conclude that if that guy’s a liberal then the rest of unionists must be antediluvian.

Wait till you hear this. McGimpsey cites evidence of “a Sinn Féin/IRA strategy” to expel Protestants from their traditional neighbourhoods and, wait for it, “capture Belfast by stealth”. Here’s his evidence. Are you ready?

He cites a succession of bomb scares at the Everton Day Centre on the Crumlin Road for which he believes militant republicans are responsible. He says: “I think they want to get that school closed down and bulldozed. If they get Catholic houses there, then Protestant Ardoyne would be done. And if you managed to engineer the fall of Protestant Ardoyne, you’d get the Westminster seat.”

Let’s poke through this pile of nonsense for a while. First, the Everton Day Centre is on the site of the Everton Girls School, closed 18 years ago because there weren’t enough Protestant girls to justify keeping it open. Belfast Royal Academy on the Cliftonville Road easily copes with the demand from Protestant girls. Catholics and Protestants, unionists and nationalists successfully campaigned in the eighties for a non-sectarian day centre for handicapped people at Everton.

Secondly, as someone who presents himself as a man with his ear to the ground, is McGimpsey claiming he doesn’t know that the bomb scares in that neck of the woods have been phoned in by loyalist paramilitaries to disrupt children going to Holy Cross primary school and the three other Catholic schools in the vicinity? Third, does he really not know perfectly well that, in the last five years, bomb scares using a republican code word have been exclusively the work of dissident republicans in the Continuity and Real IRA and nothing to do with Sinn Féin?

Fourth, McGimpsey seems to assume that some form of property qualification is required to vote. Why do nationalists have to move from Ardoyne to houses elsewhere to vote? Even a ‘liberal unionist’ must realise that under the British electoral system people in Ardoyne can vote without getting new houses: their numbers count just the same. But it’s instructive to see that the old unionist mentality endures, the sort of thinking which in the past gave rise to the despicable tactics of gerrymandering across the north.

Not being from north Belfast, let alone from the lower Shankill, let’s give McGimpsey the benefit of the doubt about “Protestant Ardoyne”. No such place, Chris. Never was. ‘Old Ardoyne’ as it was called, was opposite Holy Cross monastery. Glenard was built north of that and then Alliance and Glenbryn. Loyalists may refer to Glenbryn as “Protestant Ardoyne” or even the recently invented ‘Upper Ardoyne’ because they believe there are no areas in the north that Catholics may call their own, only areas ‘temporarily occupied’. What is sickening is to hear a ‘liberal unionist’ talking about “Protestant Ardoyne” and implicitly endorsing the mentality of loyalism.

Finally, of course, even if Catholics were to be housed in Glenbryn, ignoring the suggestion about the Everton day centre, which is too scurrilous for words, it wouldn’t mean the loss of the Westminster seat. The numbers of unionist voters in Glenbryn are too small to make a material difference, certainly nothing like the 6,000 votes Gerry Kelly lags behind the DUP. Needless to say, the Prospect essayist doesn’t believe McGimpsey, instead pointing out that “young aspirant Protestants have for some time been deserting north Belfast in favour of neighbouring suburbs such as Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey”.

The most depressing aspect of McGimpsey’s tendentious contribution is this: Commentators criticise middle-class unionists for opting out of the political process and leaving it to the yahoos. Yet, when a middle-class unionist like McGimpsey, admittedly one who masquerades for political purposes as a ‘mawn of the peepull’, does engage in the process, his language stokes the fears which lead to the Protestant pessimism described in Prospect.