Stormont as Hogwarts
I'm just off air from Inside Politics which this week featured the DUP's Diane Dodds. Listeners might have noticed that having told unionists not to waste their vote on a unionist who can't win, she declined my invitation to specify who exactly that unionist is. On Talkback on Friday she did name Jim Allister eventually, but the DUP has shown general reluctance to speak the TUV leader's name (presumably through fear of giving him extra profile), prefering instead to refer to him as "a lone maverick" or some similar expression.
I was scratching my head about what this reminded me of, then reading a "Harry Potter" book to my son, it came to me. "He who must not be named" is J.K. Rowling's villain, Lord Voldemort. Obviously, seen through the DUP's eyes, the V in TUV must stand for Voldemort.
All other suggestions about which Hogwarts characters match Stormont characters gratefully received (and they don'y necessarily have to be as seen through the DUP's eyes).
One story I discussed with my guests Fionuala O'Connor and Sidney Elliot was an interview in the Irish Mail on Sunday with Fine Gael's Elections Director Frank Flannery suggesting his party would consider going into coalition with Sinn Fein in the future. The paper bills this as a "stunning U turn" two years after Enda Kenny ruled out a deal with Gerry Adams.
We also discussed the European debate televised on the Politics Show. For those who missed it at noon there's a chance to catch it again on 91Èȱ¬1 at twenty minutes past ten tonight.
Two newspaper stories that got squeezed out for time but which caught my eye for different reasons. First, in the Observer, Henry McDonald has an interview with the South East Antrim faction of the UDA predicting they will decommission some guns before August.
Second, Gerry Adams has told a Dublin radio station about how, when he was behind bars in the Maze/Long Kesh, he took comfort from humming along to the Monty Python song The only problem is that it wasn't written until two years after he was released. As any future Truth Commission might discover, memory can play tricks on us all.
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