Lydia Talks To... Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
Lydia: Welcome to this episode of "Lydia Talks to.." and I will be talking to Ian James Parsley this evening, who is a political commentator on the politics of Northern Ireland. Now this is a point where I have to kind of keep an eye for Ian joining us. But we've got a lot to talk about this evening, so I hope everyone's ready for that. So I'm seeing a few people join. Just one second if you bear with me.
Rightfully at some stage Ian comes up to... don't you love Technology.. Here we go, here's Ian. Hi. Hi. Hi. Good to see you. Thank you so much for joining us.
so this evening... first, would you want to start by telling us kind of a little bit about you and how you came to be and, well, a commentator on politics, you know, what has brought you to this position?
Ian: That's a very long story. And we'll keep it short, really. I started off actually in public affairs working for a company which doesn't exist anymore, Stormont Strategy, which was right at the start of the Devolution. So the whole concept of actually influencing public policy with our own local representatives was very new and exciting as it was in Scotland and Wales. From there, I got involved on the other side was elected as an Alliance Party Councillor in what was then North Down.
(They've Since merged councils. So that doesn't exist either) in 2005 and since then I've been in various roles. I've worked for a think tank in London. I've worked for the Alliance Party directly. I worked in the Assembly and research. I still do that and I've done some commentary, particularly actually outside the UK and Ireland. I actually studied languages as my degree, so sometimes I help out German and Italian broadcasters and such like..
Lydia: That's quite wide field there.
And you also have a personal relationship with politics, literally.
Ian: That's true, literally, because my wife is also the Alliance Party Assembly Member for Belfast South and topically a member of the Assembly Health Committee. So that is pretty busy at the moment. Yeah.
Lydia: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I'm glad that you at least could spare some time to come and talk to us. And and the reason I wanted to talk about this generally is because Brexit has been a big deal, something that I've been talking about for a very long time. A lot of us have been talking about and I think. I don't think it's incorrect to say that it's probably more significant to Northern Ireland in lots of ways than perhaps the rest of the country.
That's not to diminish how important it is elsewhere. But Brexit is much .. it's brought about quite a lot of constitutional issues, potentially, in Northern Ireland. And the compromise that was arrived at, that was always very much going to be incredibly difficult anyway, has made quite a few people very unhappy. You
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
know, we've seen violence on the streets escalate to a point where it's reported in Great Britain. So that must be significant.
Ian: Yes. Yes.
Lydia: ostensibly on the pretext of the Northern Ireland protocol, you know, we're reading about an implosion within one of the largest parties, the DUP, we're looking potentially at The Northern Ireland Assembly, Stormont, falling apart.
And that's still very fresh in our memory of having three years without a government in Northern Ireland. Other people are talking about a potential United Ireland, including people like Leo Varadker, the former Taoiseach. When do we start Ian? Where do we start with this first, outsiders who are still trying to get to grips with all of this?
Ian: Well, I recognise some of the names joining, so if they will forgive me, if we maybe can start at the beginning and assume no knowledge, people have some knowledge. I always think it's worth going right back to answer the question, what is Northern Ireland? We never ask that question. We certainly never answer it. And you could argue that the answer is contested. But I think what probably isn't contested historically is backed up by the centre of a lot of our market towns. Northern Ireland outside Belfast
And some other larger agglomerations is made up of market towns that are really typically around the 12 to 20 thousand population mark. So rather smaller than they would be in England. And at the centre of some of them, most notably, perhaps Downpatrick, you have three streets right at the centre of the town. You have Irish Street, Scotch Street and English Street. And my contention is that that is what Northern Ireland is, is it's where the Scottish, the English and the Irish meet. And to use the word we will probably used in this broadcast quite a few times this evening:
That obviously creates friction on occasions. Of course, over time, the English and the Scottish have come to be regarded as the British. You have other commentators who can guide as to how long that's likely to be the case. But ultimately here you end up with a perception that you have the British on one side and the Irish on the other in very crude terms. But actually, I think that worth going back to those three actually come together in Northern Ireland.
And there are even hints even in voting now where you have, interestingly, areas of English settlement are still more likely to go Ulster Unionist rather than DIP and you still see hints of it if you look out for it. So I wouldn't completely rule out that you have just one British group it's not quite as simple as that. But of course, you have over time a lot of melding as well. And it would be foolish to say that these two groups have been entirely separate for 400 years.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
They haven't been. So you also have the potential for that.. One visitor put it to me on a visit to Belfast for the first time, that it's very multifaceted. Now we would use the term divided, but he saw it as multifaceted. You know, look at what you can do, lots of things together and you can see lots of different cultures in play and isn't this great. So you can look at it that way. I think it is worth looking at it that way.
If you then fast-Forward to 1998, you come up with the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland being Northern Ireland we can't even agree what to term it but let's call it the 1998 agreement for now. It rather craftily, and you can read the word craftily any way you want. I'm doing my best to be entirely objective, tries to get around this and it says, well, Northern Ireland has this divide. What are we going to do about it?
And it says, well, tell you what, will determine the sovereignty by what the majority wishes and we'll determine nationality by what the individual wishes of the individual British, Irish or both. That's up to the individual that we will recognise them as such. And it also says, although you could argue this is more implicit and explicit, that that means if you want to live a British life part of the United Kingdom, you can do that. If you want to live in Irish life, part of Northern Ireland, you can do that as well.
And that's where things like an open border come into play, because that becomes very important the less friction you can have in any direction, be it as we would term it East-West or North- South the better from the point of view of that agreement.
Lydia: And of course Brexit, you know, one of the big issues for Brexit that the 1998 agreement was formed within the context of the European Union. That wouldn't be possible if we didn't have membership of the Single Market at that time. And so something that I always put across is that because that has become so much of a landmark in all of the politics that we've been discussing over this, that to, you know, by re-erecting structures of any kind, you're basically undermining the basis of that agreement.
But I also understand that some of the big political players in Northern Ireland didn't want to sign the Good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Agreement, whatever we're calling it. Yeah, you know, it was something that a lot of people also resisted. And that's something that some part of the context.
Ian: Yeah, I think that's true. Although it's worth saying that was then the St Andrews agreement and then the 2006 agreement, which pretty much all the players did sign up to, and it left most of the original intact. It changed some of the technicalities of some of the decisions around the operation of the institutions, but it didn't dispute how sovereignty or nationality were to be determined. So that did mean that the other aspect, which is worth noting, is that there are people who will say, well, actually, neither agreement mentions the European Union.
I think, I have to say, I think Katy Hayward at Queen's University, nails that one when she says "Well, it's a bit like talking about a bicycle without talking about the wheels. You don't talk about the wheels, but you
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
do have wheels on a bicycle or it doesn't go very far." it was clearly implicit that we were talking about two member states of the European Union or at least of the European single market.
That is now the crux of where we are. The decision to leave the European Union arguably was one thing, but the decision to leave the single market and the customs union is the real thing that creates a situation where you have to have a border, you can't not have a border, it's just impossible. Yeah, and that's where you lead with the situation we're at. And then you could argue even then that the protocol is a crafty way around this.
It says, OK, we now have an EU/ UK frontier on the island of Ireland.
We have a services regulatory border on the island of Ireland. People tend to forget that, but it's there. We're seeing changes particularly in banking on going to account for that literally, perhaps. And then you have a goods frontier which people can go back and look at your graphics because you've explained in detail in a few hours ago where the regulatory frontier in effect is between the island of Ireland and Great Britain, although only one way so we can export from Northern Ireland freely to Great Britain.
It's the other way that you have the issue and even then it's not
always that you can't import, you can, but it does become a lot more well, to use that word again, there's a lot more friction now involved.
Lydia: yes. Well, let's just take a moment on the Northern Ireland Protocol and maybe just do a little bit of the detail without going into too much of the weeds. Good luck on that, I suppose. But, you know, this is the Protocol that, you know, Boris Johnson fought for as a replacement for the much hated Backstop. And then he also claimed that there wasn't going to be a border in the Irish Sea of any variety and everyone always pointed out that this was impossible, you know, there has to be a border somewhere.
You can't just not have borders because the EU is a regulatory beast, it is based on law, and therefore taking away the mechanisms that would then protect the Single Market as their kind of holy cow... that was just never going to happen. And so there's a lot of behind the protocol that sounds very and if you'll pardon the pun, a bit beefed up in some ways because there are those seem to be saying like it's actually OK, like it's not great, but it's a compromise.
We weren't expecting it to be amazing. We're kind of getting on with this. There are others saying politically, this is awful. We need to scrap it and we need to get rid of it. Of course the Stormont Assembly will get to choose whether Northern Ireland stays within the EU single market or whether it joins the UK single market in 2024.
So there will be a kind of democratic option, for this. it also sounds as though there are then those who are saying, you know some saying, it's fine, some saying it's terrible politically at work. But what's the
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
reality? You know, we heard about shortages at one point. There's a whole lot of stuff about sausages right now, which I find very annoying. What are people really saying? Because it's very difficult to kind of pick that up from across here.
Ian: Well, it's a great question because you ask the question, what is the reality? And to some degree, it depends a bit on whether you look at it from a pure trade point of view or whether you look at it from, bluntly, an identity point of view. And in reality, in Northern Ireland, a lot of things are looked at from an identity point of view. Now, increasingly, I find that in England, things are looked at from an identity point of view as well.
Arguably, we're seeing you know, when I said that I wanted politics in Northern Ireland to mirror that of Great Britain, I was sort of thinking the other way round. We're sort of saying Great Britain had the identity route. But the issue. So on one hand, you can say, well, the average person in the street probably hasn't noticed it very much. A lot of the dispensation or the delays or whatever are still in place.
So a lot of things haven't actually happened. The biggest practical concern to me, although, you know, I'm hopeful that it will be resolved imminently, actually concerns medicines because 98 percent of medicines come into Northern Ireland from Great Britain. If you had a situation where you have to change your supply lines so that all of those have to come from somewhere else, well that's just not going to happen. So they're going to have to find a solution to that.
But even there, you would then have people saying, but for pharma, In Northern Ireland for the people producing them here, this is glorious. I mean, where else would you want to invest in pharma? But here you have the whole of Great Britain and the whole of EU freely on your doorstep. So, you know, it depends. But if you look at from an identity point of view, there's no doubt and funny, I hold both passports, but the UK passport holder in me immediately, even before this struck, I thought, yeah, that's going to make me feel a bit detached because the supply lines are going to shift.
I mean, they are in terms of goods, particularly food. And a lot of people have some sense of that in terms of their identity, that they've been sort of knocked aside again. Now, this, I think is worth saying, because a lot of this does come down at the moment and perhaps, unfortunately, perhaps unfairly, we tend to end up talking about unionism more than nationalism. But realistically, there's an apparent implosion of one of the parties.
We need to talk about that. On the Unionist side. There is this sense that they've been knocked to the side again and there is this sense that goes through the psyche, which has always been there, that actually they will always be betrayed when it comes to it. And if you go back one hundred years, this is an odd thing, because one thing you do say is you're driving around Northern Ireland at the moment are commemorations of the 100th year of the centenary of Ireland.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
But rather oddly, if you look at the time just before that, most unionists didn't want Northern Ireland, really, because that that actually set them apart from Great Britain. They got Home Rule, which actually made them not the same as Scotland and Wales in those days because Scotland, Wales who didn't have it. So even from 1921 onwards, Northern Ireland was cut off in a certain way from the rest of the U.K., it was odd in its political settlement.
So to some degree, that's always been the case. And then you find 100 years on almost exactly, there's an economic border put in. Whatever you think about the practicalities of that, they're not vast at the moment. There is a sense in terms of identity that that is shoving us over the sea somewhere to be forgotten about.
Lydia: It should also be pointed out that in the DUP campaigned for Brexit as well, and then seem to have ended up in this place where actually Brexit seems to have significantly knocked them like they actually argued for the thing that they now hate, it feels like.
Ian: Yes. So, I mean, I you know, again, I'm trying to be an objective commentator, but you go through the votes and you said you can't see that otherwise. So I suppose I'm talking about your average person who broadly feels an affinity with the rest of the UK in the street, suddenly thinks what on earth is? Why is there a border? I mean, from my mother's house, you can literally see Scotland and you say, why is there a border there?
That's odd from a Unionist point of view you never wanted there to be a border there. And so but then you do go back and you say, well, could decisions have been made differently? And there are a lot of people, of course, voted remain in the first place who will say, well, that's kind of why, you know, we weren't mega enthusiastic about the EU, but we thought this is a lot of throwing balls up in the air and we don't know where they'll land.
There were warnings even before the referendum. Tony Blair and John Major did a joint press conference where they almost predicted what would happen. They said that will have to be a border and in reality, it'll be in the Irish Sea to some degree because it's a lot easier to do six airports and ports than to do 300 border crossings. So that's just the truth. Yeah, whatever about anything else. So you have this clash between practical identity and I think personally the DUP got caught up in the identity and I don't know what their strategy was.
The the argument is that some of them that they were looking to actually put a border on the island of Ireland that was intentional so that Northern would be sort of clamped to the rest of the UK. Some would argue there just wasn't a strategy. They thought that somehow some magic solution would come up, that there wouldn't need a border.
Lydia: Sounds like Boris Johnson. You know, it's like, you know, it'll be fine. You know, let's not think about this until it's actually happening. And then maybe we'll even sign an agreement and then still
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
pretend that we don't know what's in it. Yes. And I'm speaking entirely objectively, of course. I mean, there's some other bits of detail, and I'm kind of come into this because, of course, the UK Trust is possibly one of the big elements of this, certainly on the EU/ UK side and whether Boris Johnson has no intention of keeping to the protocol in the first place, given that we've already unilaterally extended one.
What's the word... I don't mean Deadline? What's it called? A grace period. And then the UK has asked the EU whether we can extend the grace period for chilled meats. And that's what this sausage stuff is all about. But as far as I'm right in thinking that that is due to come to an end on the 30th and in a couple of days time. Yes.
Ian: As I understand they're now showing sufficient grace that they were not going to need to worry about that. But yeah, hopefully. Yes.
Lydia: But back to the issue of trust. So from my perspective, I'm looking at the UK and the and the EU squabbling about this and. Northern Ireland in the middle. I mean, and details like that. I mean, how is that going down amongst, you know, shall we say, the man or woman in the street?
Ian: So I think it's fair to say, first of all, that we are really quite insular here. You know, we've never had people in the foreign ministry or anything like that really from here. You've never had another MP in the cabinet of the UK. So we don't really think about UK/ EU really. We do think about things much more internally. So how does this affect us directly? Now you do have committees as per today speaking directly to the European Commission.
That does happen. And there is you know, so there are there's a bit of awareness that obviously there's a UK/ EU trust issue. But I think the bigger thing here is that there's a Unionist/ Nationalist trust issue, which there always was. There's a trust issue between unionism and probably what some people, fairly or unfairly, would call nationalist Ireland, which means nationalists in Northern Ireland, plus the Irish government. The fact that the largest nationalist party north of the border is also the main opposition party in the republic
confuses that a bit, but that's where you get an intervention from Leo Varadkar, which arguably is perfectly in line with the agreement, whichever one you choose. 98 or 2006, where he's perfectly entitled to say, I think we need to think seriously about changing the constitutional status entitled to do that, it says if you get a majority.
Lydia: when you were talking earlier about multifaceted, I thought it was quite interesting, just knowing a little bit about Leo Varadker generally and his politics that he was talking about, almost like a vision of a united Ireland being a rainbow nation, which I thought was, you know, trying to encompass all of those different facets and faces and being, you know, and bringing it all together, which I thought it's kind of I can see the appeal, put it that way, you know, and I can see the appeal.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
But I can also see why that would also horrify a lot of people.
Ian: Yeah, one of the very strongest arguments for the union, although it's very rarely made (that is to say the union with Great Britain. That's what we assume say union here) is that because you have a premade union where you're always hyphen- British, there's something else, there's English, Scottish, Irish, Ulster, even Bangladeshi. But you can say all those things are hyphen-British. whereas there wasn't really a hyphen Irish, Irish is Irish and that that... Certainly unionists or even people of broadly pro-Union backgrounds were beginning to think about.
It was still a sense. Yeah, we're a bit more comfortable with a bit more of a patchwork, a natural patchwork, but that perhaps mistakes just how diverse Ireland has become in the last 30 years. On the nationalist side, you'll get discussion of what they would call a new Ireland. But then the question becomes, will the Ireland of 2021 is dramatically different from Ireland of 1991 dramatically, probably the most different of any country in Western Europe.
So a new Ireland, this kind of already there. And I'm not totally convinced that people in the Republic would want to change an awful lot more. You know, they've done a lot of change and they've ended up at the vanguard. You end up with a complete reversal where it used to be unionists argued that they were the social liberals.
And now it's a complete reversal. But you can see then how identity politics seeps in, where your identity becomes what you're not rather than what you are. And a lot of decisions in the end become made on the basis of, you know, an identity and a social identity. And what my group feels, rather than actually a practical discussion of, well, actually, we have quite a lot of sausages here already this doesn't matter very much.
Lydia: Yeah. I mean, I think sort of kind of want to make one final point on the of the Brexit debate and then quite like sort of a bit more detail about the kind of political landscape in Northern Ireland right now. But in terms of what might happen next with the protocol, I mean, I believe the Northern Ireland retail consortium put forward a proposal with regard to the Northern Ireland protocol to say that actually a temporary observance of EU rules, certainly on veterinary and food standards, would actually wipe out about 80 percent of the of the checks that would be required.
But it was whether that was going to get political movement and buy in from the British government sorry, the UK government and the EU, because the EU doesn't trust the UK government and the UK government is allergic to the EU in all its forms. And so it just feels a lot of the time with Brexit generally. But I think with the Northern Ireland issue particularly, that there's a solution there. But identity in someway is actually preventing that pragmatic response, is that a fair thing to say?
Ian: No, I think that is fair. And it actually put because we've had the ministers in the economy and for agriculture throughout this period, it put them in slightly awkward position because they would sort of say,
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
well, I don't want the UK to adhere to EU rules. But on the other hand, if they don't go with this effectively, they're going to be adhering to EU rules and the rest of the UK. so they are in a bit of a quandary.
They also had a quandary over the Australian trade deal for similar reasons where someone said wait a minute, if we were to go with the rest of the UK here are farming would be well, in their view, wiped out when they said very openly. So in some ways then you're in the position of, well, that looks a bit like the protocol would protect you then rather than, you know. So you're left with again, this internal battle of practical versus identity and a certain reality that it would be easier if the UK stayed closer to the EU because a lot of these things would mean that Northern Ireland could stay closer to the rest of the UK on the very people who argued against that in positions of authority, having to find ways of making that consistent.
Lydia: I mean, I think I've always I think I've always argued that generally in. Was generally easier to stay closer to the EU and certainly Norway and Switzerland, neither of which are members of the EU, have no intention of ever becoming such, have done this in order to make life easier for themselves. So, you know, I think people think the Norwegians, the Swiss are quite sensible generally.
Ian: mean, yes, they were used as examples, and quite overtly by the DUP during the referendum of what we could be.
They even went and visited the Norwegian Swedish border to say "our border could be like that". Well, it can only be like that for as close as Norway is. And so that there's, again, there's a logical failure there somewhere. Yeah.
Lydia: Going back to what you said at the beginning. And this was such an important point from Brexit generally- leaving the EU was one thing, but no one voted to leave the single market. That was a political decision taken and actually, in a way, it was kind of the biggest problem of all. And but that is something we'll maybe park for now. Going back to political landscape, you know, a lot of this may depend may it not on what happens in Northern Irish politics over the next few weeks and months.
The DUP: I keep seeing headlines that say things like "implosion" and "collapse" and things like that. I'm not hearing kind of what's happening around it as it was. Do you want to kind of just give us a bit of a surmise of what's going on?
Ian: Yeah, well, in some ways it's very hard to judge electorally what would happen, because by definition, we can't be out on the doorsteps asking in the current scenario. So we don't know. But certainly there is a sense in my view that one reason, one of the big changes in 2006, which is relevant, is that they changed how the first minister was appointed. It used to be that there would be a sort of joint cross community vote of the assembly will not go into the technicalities of how that would work.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
And that was how it was done. Then it changed to the largest party gets the first minister and that's the end of it. And it was a it was a sneaky change actually done after the agreement in the legislation. But a sudden change to one paragraph where it says the largest party full stop rather than the largest party in the largest designation. So the argument every election from the DUP becomes you have to make us the largest party or Sinn Féin get the first minister.
scare tactics. Now. Last time they only just got away with it. They won by only one seat. If it had been level, they would that again goes to first preference vote and they would have won. But if there'd been two seats fewer, they would have been behind. So it was very close. I think there is a general view, rightly or wrongly, but it's a general view that there's no chance of the DUP winning the next Assembly election from that point of view, that they only need to dip slightly and it looks like they're going to dip considerably.
And that in itself makes it difficult for them to say, "Vote for us or else." because, well, we actually have to vote for the DUP on their merits. But of course, other people are pointing out we wouldn't be in this mess except when they held the balance of power, they took all these decisions and we ended up in this mess. So it's quite difficult for them to get out of that to square that circle. Now if there's any party that can do it, it's probably the DUP.
And the one thing I do think is that their new leader is probably a bit more powerful than people think because they're not going to have another leader any time soon. So I think he can do things the way he wants to do them.
I don't think there'll be too much internal opposition would be my judgement.
But I do say to people that are not in the DUP, I don't think like they think, but I think that that is a bit more powerful position than you might think. He's quite presentable, he knows Westminster fairly well. So, you know, they might make a bit of a comeback. So I was so say on balance, they were fairly comfortably to be the largest Unionist party now in an election, but was that would have been uncertain had Poots remained leader. Almost certainly not the case, in fact.
Lydia: if there were an election tomorrow, which would be fun. And you're saying that actually it's a little bit tight as to whether they would still be the largest party
Ian: There isn't any way really they could they could they could catch Sinn Fein because they would certainly lose ground. And just being on the ground, now having said that, Sinn Fein could lose ground as well. And one of the things about Northern Ireland is that one of the reasons you vote for one is to stop the other. So if you perceive that the DUP is getting weaker, they might be less inclined to vote Sinn Fein. You don't need to stop the DUP because they're going to be stopped anyway.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
So you have this weird sense of the electorate acting collectively and making a decision and all the polls. And again, I'll point to the polls purely objectively, also suggest that the Alliance party would do a lot better, as do recent elections strongly suggest the Alliance party would be at least third because of our transfer system, you know, maybe even a third and first preference vote might not even mean third in seats, might mean better than that. So the question then is- that then raises from objective point of view, serious questions about the origin of the agreement in 1998, because the agreement refers
throughout in various ways to two traditions, to main communities, that sort of thing, and what the breakthrough for Alliance suggests is that actually particularly younger people, particularly younger, maybe just having their first children, middle of their career type people are saying, no, actually, we don't really see this as two communities anymore. This is actually one community. sure, some of our selections are made along the old traditional fault lines. But actually that's not really what we want.
So we're in the middle of another issue here in Northern Ireland which I think is slightly exacerbated by Brexit. But it's there, which is do you try to manage division or do you actually try to overcome it? And increasingly, those who say no, you actually overcome it.
Lydia: A Third Way?
Ian: Yeah, and it's not that this has never happened before. If you look at the politics, for example, of the Netherlands, this happened in the late 60s quite dramatically and quite suddenly it's not been quite as dramatic and sudden.
But there's been a sudden leap in the Alliance from trundling along, drifting up towards seven percent, suddenly being more than double that. . And also the Greens do quite well and independents and unaligned other the to do quite well as well. So there are a lot of people choosing to vote outside the what would have been saying that the traditional blocks and that does mean that they're sending another signal about they want something different from just settling for two communities.
Lydia: Certainly when I've talked to people from Northern Ireland about anything and I'm really ready to get the strong impression that there's this huge frustration, everything goes back to orange and green, the oh, God, are we going to do this again when there seems to be such a strong desire, certainly amongst the people that I talk to, which may, you know, may not be representative, but it's like there must be another way and just go back to the protocol again, just sort of thinking about this and saying, you know, from what we hear, especially from those who were very anti Brexit anyway, but in general, people go" the protocol is Awful. We need to get rid of it. We need to change it." And people saying, "well, is it not also an opportunity to be in this? we're in an odd place, but is this not also an opportunity to be in between the EU and the UK? Is this not a place that we could occupy in a new sense.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
Ian: In some ways that sums up the way the politics is going on almost every issue, one side saying this isn't good enough, we need to scrap it.
That doesn't actually give you an alternative. They don't say what you would actually do. Instead, they just say get rid of it, stop it. And it's all about stopping things and blocking things. The other side you have, because of the institutionalised sectarianism within the system, it's very difficult for them to get their voice heard is why don't we just get on with it? See it works. It might work quite well. We could be one world centre for pharma.
There's already very considerable evidence of vastly more exports to the Republic of Ireland than this time last year. Like double. I mean. That's tens of millions of funds coming into Northern Ireland that weren't before. Now, then there'll be a counterargument said, well, what about Great Britain and all that? We don't have those figures yet. And you probably know better than I do about how they're calculated and calculated differently and all of that. But there's no question that all but exports to the republic are way up.
So and there's an argument that perhaps even exports to Great Britain would be up as well, because if you're trying to get something from the island of Ireland, you might not get it from the north. Likewise if you're in the Republic of Ireland and you want something from the UK you're as well to get it from Northern Ireland if you can. So, you know, there's a lot of evidence of that. You know, actually, there are a lot of people who do say "this could make us quite prosperous.
So hold on here before you scrap this" and they don't get as much of, in my view genuinely, much as much of a say in the media, because the media is so used to the identity politics, so used to, you know, Unionists saying one thing, nationalists saying another. And therefore, we may be thankful for the likes of the retail consortium and others who are able, at least from a reasonable umbrella point of view, to say, actually, our members are saying this, maybe don't throw this away too quickly.
It's not ideal. We're not claiming that. But it may be better than any of the alternatives.
Lydia: Yeah, I mean, as you know, I've always been someone that argued that on balance, remaining in the EU was probably going to be a better idea. But since we ended up with Brexit that, you know, let's look at this pragmatically. And the allusion I was made was it's a bit like being on tramlines and, you know, the number fifty tram goes to a certain place and that's where all the shops are outside, where it stops.
And what you've done is you've actually switched the route somewhere else. And so some businesses are going to suffer and some sectors are going to suffer. But you've also got new opportunities in the new place. And I think if anything, Covid in lots of ways it's hidden a lot of the realities of Brexit. But also it is also shown to us that you have winners and losers and you don't necessarily know at the beginning who those people are going to be.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
It'll be down to a lot of individual elements as well, much down at a smaller level. And I think I think there are still a lot of axes to grind on Brexit. And so it's quite difficult to look objectively without that kind bias of "oh was always going to be terrible" or, "oh, this was always going to be amazing". So, yeah, I mean, just to go just to remain on the politics and the kind of the changing demographics and, you know, the way that people are voting and you've mentioned the system and so on, being kind of ingrained towards the divided politics.
And do you feel that there's any sense in which and you know, as you've talked about the collective action of people, they've been able to do that in order to keep one party in or out. Do you think that there will be enough of a groundswell to maybe bring about this third way that we've kind of talked about in a vague sense?
Ian: Yeah, I mean, I'm actually quite optimistic from that point of view. And I'm optimistic, you know, the 10 years from now will be it will be OK. Five years from now, a bit more questionable. And one reason for that is that you do have this groundswell of people who have become used to just getting on. And, you know, we shouldn't forget that even if you go back 50 years, even workplaces and Northern Ireland were generally segregated.
No, they very rarely are. So, you know, you have although you still have largely segregated schooling, not quite as much as you did, but you still have that and you still have sporting and political preferences often made along the traditional fault lines. That's not as frequently the case. You're more likely to work and socialise with people from across the so-called divide, you and you're probably less likely even to notice that that was what was the case. And I don't mean to downplay that there is still this unmistakeable sense of trying to calculate.
Oh, they said they said that that way, they use that term. That means they must. That's a bit odd. There's a bit of that still much there. And I'm not trying to suggest it isn't, but I think there is a growing sense of people who don't want to be like that. Another thing, it didn't happen last year. But another thing a lot of people don't realise about Northern Ireland is that since 1994, there's been net immigration, including from the rest of the UK.
People don't really think about it in those terms, they would sort of assume.. when you say that people can scarcely believe it, but actually net immigration for the rest of the UK from 2004 is quite a lot of immigration from the rest of what was then the rest of the EU. So you have a slightly different, it's not as diverse as England by any means, but it's much more diverse than it was in lots of ways. And even lots of people who have spent a bit of time in England or in Dublin or somewhere have come back and therefore you have rather different attitudes than maybe you would have had 30 years ago.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
And that just changes the way people see things a bit. And it means they are maybe a bit more ambitious for this place than they were just trundling along with just peace and trying to keep everybody happy some way or other.
Lydia: Yeah, I think ambition is a good word. And in terms of yeah, I still feel that so much of the coverage just goes back to tropes and really are we still doing this?
we're kind of coming to the end here. And I'm just thinking about our audience and looking at all the things that are kind of coming up in terms of politics. You also mentioned to me the marching season that is coming up. And, you know, that's something that we kind of look upon and go "what's the about?"
To outsiders, what would be the kind of one of the kind of key things, do you think, to watch out for when we're looking at Northern Irish politics? You know, is that when bear traps that the media tend to fall into or things that we just kind of need to have the back of the brain?
Ian: Yeah. So as in Scotland, schools break up here at the end of June. We have the summer until late August. And one of the reasons for that is the commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne on the 12th of July, which actually took place in the old calendar on the 1st of July. And then you change the calendar it came to the 12th. So there's a mini 12th from the first and then there's a full 12th and there are bonfires on the 11th.
These are, of course, associated correctly with one side of the community with Loyalism or with Unionism. And again, there are people who are out to make mischief. There are also a lot of people who are out to have a good time. It's like a second Christmas. It's when the families and communities come together and are not out for mischief. So first of all, there's always the assumption of mischief where that doesn't necessarily exist. And many things pass off without mischief frankly.
In many local areas, there are agreements on the size of bonfires and where the parades should go and they're called protocols. And in some areas, unfortunately, there aren't. And they're the ones that get the coverage and that's inevitable. But, you know, good news never sells. So the summer is always seen as quite hot to get flags put up everywhere, particularly on lampposts, which are seen as marking our territory and are sometimes quite unwelcome and not much is done about them.
So, you know, it is it is always a time when that friction, dare I say, between the traditional communities becomes most, you know, to the forefront of our mind. And in the average year, a lot of people who don't want anything to do with that would go away on holiday during the first two weeks in July and escape it. And of course, this year that's harder, almost impossible. We still haven't got our vaccination certification sorted out, so it's even harder for us.
So that's challenging. It's a period when you don't want to do anything too controversial beforehand because, you know, you're going to have a challenge upcoming. And we will see whether the sort of
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
becalming a bit of the waters in the DUP, the sense that they're going to get things done on the protocol with our new leader, help, I suspect it will a bit. But I'm not in a position to say. But, you know, so we're going to have a bit of heat for a couple of weeks.
And you're going to have the usual pictures of the negativity, probably very little discussion of some of the more positive areas where people are getting on well and working out arrangements. But from there we're then into the autumn, where we have the challenge of the assembly survive without Covid? a lot of people would say one reason the executive stayed up was because of the. But, you know, will relations be good enough when you get back to the normal stuff of health and education to keep us going through to May, which is when the next election is scheduled?
And that's another question.
Lydia: Right. OK, so there's some quite big stuff coming up. And so you've already mentioned that that kind of that the press is probably going to focus on the negative rather than the positive. And are there any kind of other tips that you have for us in terms of navigating what we're reading? I mean, there are that kind of dos and don'ts, maybe or things, things to bear in mind when we're looking at Northern Irish politics across the sea.
I think maybe for people who aren't familiar with Northern Ireland, one thing really to note is that our system basically hasn't been built double sectarian veto. They call it the petition of concern, but it's really a sectarian veto, which means that if you want to change policy on pretty much any issue, you essentially need the agreement of both Unionists and Nationalists to do it. And that's very hard to come by when they're antipathetic to each other. So it's not the same as just needing a majority.
We saw how hard it was in the latter days of the last parliament in the UK just to get a majority in Parliament for any Brexit vote. There was no majority for any form of Brexit. When you need a double majority it becomes very hard. So sometimes it's true inside Northern and we can get very fed up with the failure of politics. But you have to sort of also bear in mind you're having to get a double majority every time. Now, I don't think that system can survive for much longer.
I don't think it was supposed to last twenty three years. But when you're having a double box or something as relatively simple as same sex marriage took a lot longer to pass here because you need both sides going with it. So effectively saying you need both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party to vote for it before it can pass. That might have been quite challenging, but you can get a majority in parliament without too much difficulty. And here you have to get both.
So that's where it becomes quite challenging. And I think a lot of people, when they throw their hands up in horror all around politics and very often they have every right to do that. Do also need to bear in mind that it's a bit harder than politics elsewhere to get things done because you need this double majority all
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
the time. And I think we do need a bit more education on this problem of the double majority and why it really isn't up in the society.
I'm saying the figure there are 30 percent not engaged in the Constitution issue. Go to the polls, certainly go into the actual elections were now much more 40, 40, 20 than anything over 50. So is it really up to keep requiring these double majorities? That's a question that will come to the forefront, I think, by this time next year.
Lydia: And that's interesting because, of course, that double majority is also in the interests of those two big parties to keep, of course, and therefore they're going to continue to want to keep it. And so the people who want to keep it will obviously it's a very, very intractable issue.
Ian: Anybody who wins an election under first past the Post doesn't want to change it because they won the election under it.
Lydia: exactly. Because it benefits the party in power so much. Yeah. I mean, I mean, probably we don't want to get started on electoral politics because that will take all evening. And do you want to have the sort of the final word here as we draw to a close about you know, I think a lot of the people in this is audience has been to Northern Ireland. I haven't been to Northern Ireland.
It's definitely on my list... As someone that's kind of been involved in politics and so on, I might find it very fascinating. But, you know, what's what is I suppose I just want to ask you personally what your hope is for. You know, what comes next. I mean, we've talked about the groundswell and that being something I think if you're going to sell Northern Ireland to us and maybe step away from the politics, you know, what is it?
you know, when we're imagining the place, maybe we imagine something with, you know, lots of walls and flags and so on. And I think that is also a picture that maybe a lot of people in Northern Ireland don't have about their own country.
Ian: Yeah, I think I mean, I think we shouldn't step away from the fact that we do have a society, particularly in the inner cities, which is scarred in that way. But you do have this weirdness of even gates to drive through when you cross from one side to the other, and that does happen in for a lot of people in our society, by no means the majority though. Where I live. I don't come from that battle is not part life at all.
So, I mean, I don't mean to discount it at all, but for a lot of us, we would hardly know that is even the case, except that we're aware of it because people tell us. So there's that aspect to it. There's another aspect that we can you know, we sort of rejoice in not being very good at things. That's part of our way of being, part of our black humour. It's how we got through the troubles, really.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
And we sometimes forget to mention some of the things in which we are quite good. We've just built... I'v just come off the board of NI Screen. We've built a media industry in film industry from nothing since 2003 where we end up with Game of Thrones and The Fall and all the rest of it.
Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Great Dramas.
Ian: this has come from literally nothing. There was a bit of luck that we had the site actually where the Titanic was built that was doing nothing. So we just had lots of places. We were able to make the most of that site. Lots of sheds, as I'm told. You see lots of sheds as well. Yeah. So that was an advantage. So there are times where we have done things which are remarkable that even we don't really acknowledge.
But we perhaps you do a better job of selling those and they do lead to a different form of tourism where you can come and see your Game of Thrones was filmed and you can come and might even bump into people. You know, we often do. It's quite funny. We get stories about who's here or did you see Morgan Freeman, who was walking around earlier today, you know, that sort of thing, which is unthinkable.
Some of us be the younger generation, don't quite realise how unthinkable that is because, you know, 30, 40 years ago, that was totally beyond anything imaginable. So I think we are right to be frustrated at some of the slowness of progress. I think that is entirely justified. But on the other hand, I think we sometimes forget how far we've come from the sort of things including, you know, the sheer scale of the pain and grief that was caused by the troubles and emerging from that was never going to be straightforward.
But I think on balance were a more positive story than a negative one. And by all means, people should come and see us and check it out for themselves.
Lydia: Yeah, yeah. It's definitely on my list. And actually, just as little aside, my stepson was sailing around the world and they were stopping in all these ports all around the world. You know, in Australia they were going to New York they were going to L.A., Seattle, all these places. But the party that they were looking forward to the most was their last stop before London, and that was Derry Londonderry. And they were like, that's going to be amazing.
And the whole thing was like, yeah, when we get to Northern Ireland, it's going to be amazing. And we were going to go over and, you know, they had to stop halfway but I just was like, they're going to go to Uruguay, they're going to Cape Town and it's Northern Ireland that everyone's actually really looking forward to. And I just thought, yeah, and, you know, when they finally get there, I absolutely will be there, too.
Yes, yes.
Yes. That is something I am looking forward to.
Lydia Talks To…. Ian James Parsley, Northern Ireland Political Commentator
Ian thank you so much for this evening. I'm going to make copious notes and and I've already kind of shared profile and I know people can and kind of find you. Of course, you know, you're speaking on a personal basis. And I think I'm trying to get a lot of the complexity about the situation and the issues, I think with really delve into a lot of things.
But I certainly encourage people to kind of ask questions and ask more. And if you have views these other things I'd like to say, please do get in touch would be really interesting to share some of these views. So thank you very much for joining us. we'll catch up again soon. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks everyone for coming. Thanks. Bye.