Amidst the veneration of the Belfast Agreement taking place at Queen’s University this week, there has been a less than subtle message: that the DUP should get back to work and re-join the devolved executive at Stormont. One of the many banging that particular drum – and unlikely to feature in any Orange parade this July – is Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland Secretary.
Heaton-Harris’s speech to those gathered in Belfast yesterday was a browbeating performance par excellence which has raised unionist hackles rather than assuaged them. But while his speech grabbed the headlines for this reason, it also contained an extraordinary appraisal of the history of Northern Ireland and bizarre phraseology for a supposed unionist to use.
If the attitude of the Northern Ireland Office is to seriously engage in revisionism, then the culture within it is worse than many feared
According to Heaton-Harris, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness deserved to be remembered ‘for the courage and leadership showed in persuading the Republican movement of peace’.
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