Historic Hand Job

By AM Friday, July 6, 2012

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No sooner had the queen shook the hand of Martin McGuinness, and scarpered, outsprinted by Prince Philip who had already beaten her to the exit, than the fanfares were being trumpeted again in some quarters. Not quite pitched at the same decibel level, it was clear that signs of media fatigue were emerging. For sure, there was a pun in the UTV headline, 'Giant step' as NI leaders shake hands: making use of the site of the latest magnificent, awesome, resplendent, tremendous, important, novel (truly a MARTIN moment) handshake, the Giant's Causeway. That said, such occurrences continuing to make headlines suggests a puerile focus on the trivial.

How a handshake between two colleagues, who have long stopped fighting, and who have already shaken hands in private continues to excite the media, is a mystery of the peace process. Is there a media superstition that is fearful of not reporting on such mundane events in case it puts the hex on the peace process?  Perhaps the Northern handshake is subliminal political sex that titillates or offends audiences. There is no dearth in the North of those eager to be either titillated or offended.

It is unlikely that UTV was making use of another even better pun, this time for the purpose of a swipe at Sinn Fein, when it reported that:

Mr McGuinness later appeared to have caught the handshake bug, when he headed to the Irish Open at Royal Portrush and joked that he thought he had shook hands with every one of the sell-out crowd.

That type of language does not go down well with the peace process lot. They love words like gigantic, massive, multitudinous, but sell out, nah.

UTV referred to a ‘sham fight between historic Irish giant Finn McCool and his Scottish counterpart Benandonner’. Fine, we are used to sham in this part of the world. Yet no comparable term was used for the handshake despite the fact that it had first occurred when Martin McGuinness offered his hand to Peter Robinson during the latter’s family problems.  They have probably been pressing flesh ever since but who cares?

Perhaps both men were stung into the Causeway cuddle by the pettiness of not yet having consummated their union in public. Ken Reid of UTV in the wake of the queen’s handshake alluded to this: ’is this the end of the big public handshakes? Well, not quite. Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness have not managed it yet.’

The latest handshake occurred at the official opening of the new Giant's Causeway state of the art visitor’s centre, an appropriate symbolic location for the Gulliverian twin towers that loom over the Lilliputian executive up at Stormont. This had surely to make it a gigantic step for mankind, or seismic to use one of the hyperbolic terms that have been so frequently inserted into the political discourse of the peace process.

Renowned for its voracious appetite, the peace process has a constant need for bigger gestures and more historic occasions to satiate it. Not honesty, of course. That tends to give it indigestion.  If ever an alien from outer space arrives on any part of Planet Earth, there will be a cluster of demands for a Martin meets Martian moment all to help the peace process get over whatever crisis it is facing or push aside whatever perennial pest who happens to be unhelpful to the peace process.  

It does not require a great deal of reflection to conclude that it would have been much better for society had both men not shaken hands at all, but jointly shook their fists at the higgledy-piggledy men who with an equality agenda all of their own have somehow managed to equate the cultural with the clownish. They slipped into the centre a nonsensical creationist account of the universe and human origins.  According to the creationist timeline the earth was created long after the formation of the Giant's Causeway. Imagine the laughter that is bound to provoke in more enlightened parts of the world the next time the North is promoted as progressive. Karen Gibney on Malachi O’Doherty’s Facebook page got it well:

Ridiculous - are our politicians intent on making NI people look like complete imbeciles to the world? Shame on the National Trust for allowing themselves to indulge such rubbish for the sake of some extreme politicians.

Mullahs, maniacs, mumbo jumbo men, all welcome. Display your wears and indulge your fantasies and shake hands with ... well not the devil. Nobody by that name here. Try 666 Secular Street, just off Brimstone Road.

Nevertheless, the political class in the North despite opening the visitors' centre will continue to insist that it has never walked with dinosaurs. Hard to assert with much credibility when Nelson McCausland and Mervyn Storey continue to represent the constituency of Jurassic.  Still, consolation and reassurance are to be found in one of the North’s many paradoxes, the steady but shaking hand of Ulster. That now is real progress.

For the bulk of people what is being churned up is probably less a historic handshake and more a historic hand job - a load of auld wank.