The real meaning of "six" in Northern Ireland
"Sex", said a Northern Irish friend once, is what happens between five o' clock and teatime. (Find someone with a Northern Irish accent to count from 5 to 7 and you'll get it).
Calvinistic, homicidal, Jansenist, damp, Republican, dangerous, Loyalist... that's Northern Ireland and it's about the last place on the planet that one would pick for the kind of lurid sexual activities that might destroy the leadership of the province's two main sectarian parties, but there you have it. To the astonishment of the island's tribes, north and south, shivering in Arctic conditions since before Christmas, the chieftains of Sinn Fein and the DUP find themselves in the middle of sex scandals that may very well ruin them.
What's so fascinating about the gossip, beyond the shocking details, is that it reveals the rottenness at the core of the Northern Irish polity in a way that's uncannily similar to the corruption at the heart of the Irish Republic, where a series of financial scandals has laid bare the incompetence of that state's ruling class.
But back to the six, er, sex. First up is Gerry Adams, whose paramilitary pals in their 30 years of ethnic cleansing gave extremely short shrift to "deviants". Except, it now turns out that Gerry's brother Liam was a serial rapist and that at a time when Gerry's comrades where gleefully beating alleged paedophiles to pulp as the IRA attempted to set up a Taliban-like state within a state.
In the case of Peter Robinson, it's his wife that's at the centre of the scandal. Her revelation that during a period of "serious mental illness" she had an affair with a younger man that led her to attempt to take her own life, has left those not already speechless at the Adams disclosures, dumbfounded. But what's added real spice to this episode is that Iris Robinson forgot the old adage about people in glass houses throwing stones, and, far more seriously, beneath the tip of the iceberg there's said to be buried treasure... in the form of public monies, misappropriated, like.
Luckily for all of us, Slugger O'Toole is on the case.
After three decades of internecine strife that was unparalleled in its barbarism, the vicious rulers of Northern Ireland's clans have turned from terror to a lifestyle that would have pleased the young Caligula. That this entire show of horrors continues to be funded generously by the British taxpayer is one of the last remaining mysteries of the Western World.
