Imagine .........a community forum event held in staunchly Unionist East Belfast, in this imaginary crowded hall are dozens of victims of the troubles from within the Unionist community many of them naturally still grieving over the loss of loved ones.
Widows of RUC officers, sons and daughters of bomb victims, relations of the victims of war, still suffering its dreadful aftermath , raw and still concerned that the recent Democratic Unionist Party move towards a power sharing government with Sinn Féin perhaps represents a profound betrayal of their loved ones.
On the platform is an English man , a newly created member of the House of Lords, Lord Tweedy of Fleet, a journalist who has been in his time, variously, a Marxist, a Tory, and even for a while a Liberal. Now appointed to the House of Lords, by a grateful Prime Minister for his rousing call on peak-time TV for his benefactors re-election as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom .
The audience applause as he begins his address soon turns to shocked silence as he turns on his compatriots and lectures to them that their tendency to what he calls "Unionist victimhood" will only '"hold back the healing process in the North" forgetting that throughout the worst of the 'troubles' he had observed the war from the relative safety of various Fleet Street newspaper office chairs.
Lord Tweedy said pursuit of Unionist grievances over issues like 'unsolved murders' would hold back the peace process and accused his Loyalist audience of being 'out of tune with the rest of the UK '.
“That cultivation of victimhood is not going to bring any peace to this country....“The people of Britain would likely as not regard you as extremely odd people. You appear to have moral problems with the 'Unionist victimhood. ”
There would, of course, be a storm of outraged reaction to such crass insensitivity from a jumped up journo posing as a man of substance. In all likelihood the many defenders of fair play for the Unionist community in the media of the 26 Counties, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Capt. Kevin Myers et al would call for an apology to the victims of Republican violence from the hapless Lord . In all likelihood the most vituperative and viscious of castigations of Lord Tweedy's arrogant and crass insensitivity, would flow in a fluent venomous torrent from the pen of newly created Senator Eoghan Harris in his column in Sir Antony O'Reilly's Sunday Independent, for Senator Eoghan Harris has a sharp eye for injustice and ill treatment of the weak and powerless at the hands of the strong and powerful .
For a potted biography of the fearless Senator Harris
http://www.tribune.ie/article.tvt?_scope=Tribune/News/Home%20News&id=74564&SUBCAT=Tribune/News/Home%20News&SUBCATNAME=
To read what Senator Harris ACTUALLY said when HE was in Belfast go to....
http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/mhcwcwgbojmh/rss2/
