Poots’ big question: Can he lead the DUP and be opposed to the scientific base of public policy? – Slugger O’Toole

I’ve not been impressed with the quality of recent southern opinion on Northern Ireland, particularly with regard to Brexit and it’s poor understanding (built on a willingness to believe the worst, and a lack of curiosity over how unionism ticks).

But on Tuesday Fintan O’Toole made an important point about what many see as the leading contender in the DUP leadership race:

As a religious believer, Edwin Poots is entitled to his own faith. As a prospective first minister of Northern Ireland, he is not entitled to his own facts.

This is not about intolerance of religious beliefs. It is about the need to recognise that discourse in a democracy has to be based on rationality and respect for evidence.

On a bend in the Shannon in Co Limerick, there is a graveyard with three burials. One of them has been dated by radiocarbon analysis to 7530-7320 BC; another to 7090-7030 BC; the third to 6610-6370 BC.

Except, if Poots is right, these burials are an elaborate hoax. In 2007, William Crawley asked Poots, on BBC Northern Ireland’s Sunday Sequence, “How old is the earth?”

Poots replied: “My view on the earth is that it’s a young earth. My view is 4000 BC.”

Now, this is edgy territory. It’s not long ago that folks with a Catholic background could barely make it into public life because of their religious convictions. JFK was forced to make a promise that although Catholic he would not rule as one.

The Kennedy example is the fairer frame for Fintan’s argument. One reason that Poots’ ban on the use of ‘gay blood’ wasn’t taken seriously (even though he cited scientific reasoning) was that he doesn’t believe in a science base to public policy.

O’Toole extrapolates correctly:

This rejection of science is not a harmless eccentricity. When translated into contemporary politics, it is the mode of Donald Trump, of Boris Johnson, of Vladimir Putin, of conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers.

Strip away respect for evidence, and the concepts of truth and falsity evaporate. This is the autocratic style: if evidence does not matter, nothing the leader says is open to contradiction. Authority is not earned – it is asserted.

Of course, that’s a list of the socially liberal’s favourite bête noires. Falsity passed as fact is an established feature of Irish politics too, from Martin Meehan’s 2007 classic “I can’t see anything…” to the serial cruelty to victims of the PIRA.

Fintan is right to place this is in the category of autocracy.

The choice facing the tiny DUP electorate is a daunting one. They must know just how odd this will make them look in a part of Ireland that benefited from both enlightenment and the industrial revolution that followed closely on its heels.

This may be why Mr Poots (who has huge ministerial experience) wants to win the leadership but hand the First Ministership on to someone with less stringent religious scruples over the use of Bacon’s scientific method.

It also somewhat nullifies the objection to being lead from Westminster by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson an altogether more urbane character, and who for the first time in his political career seems willing to take the fight to the public…

Or, so we thought until Sam McBride broke the news this morning that senior party officers (in that autocratic manner revealed through the RHI inquiry) that they aren’t allowed to have their rows in public.

Sam writes…

The ‘guidance note’ issued by the DUP press office says that the party officers had decided that “no candidate is to be fielded by the party for media appearances/interview during the period of the leadership during the period of the leadership campaign.

“This applies to both candidates for leader and deputy leader positions.” The note goes on: “No candidate is to unilaterally give broadcast or print interviews about their candidature.”

The DUP press office adds that “the internal press protocol remains in force at this time” – an allusion to the party’s requirement on members to get press office clearance before doing interviews, something for which some members have previously been disciplined when they have acted without press office authorisation.

The ghost in the old Robinson era machine (autocratic too in its own more secular way) still speaks. The DUP (almost as much as Sinn Féin but without the “invisible” hard nut enforcers) is a wartime operator in peacetime.

The mark of success may be who is able to lead them out of the infertile bunker of war and begins to lead its electorate away from the one for yousens, two for usuns that has marked the duopoly before they just split for Alliance and the TUV.

Photo credit: With permission of Moochin Photoman on Flickr.

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