Blessed are the peacemakers?

It is hard to better Christopher Hitchens's account of the DUP/Sinn Fein deal:

I suppose I can understand why people are glad when they see Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sitting down together and consenting to "power sharing" in Northern Ireland — and just in time for Good Friday, too, as if to consecrate a Protestant-Catholic brotherhood just on the verge of the various feasts of the resurrection. But the phony photo-op still made me want to spew.

There will be no return to life for the thousands of people who were murdered in these men's quarrel, and it seems indecent to me that we should be thanking them for their mercy in calling off the bloodshed, let alone calling it off on condition that they alone are declared the winners.

or his view of the two main protagonists:

Both have been photographed carrying coffins at political funerals — funerals that were at one time the main cultural activity in each of their "communities." One day, their private role in filling those coffins will be fully exposed. In the meantime, they are the recognised and designated peacemakers. If you can bring yourself to applaud this, you are a masochist clapping a well-matched pair of sadists.

Comments

[Fred]

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Nuff said!

[Diarmid Logan]

Gerry Adams represents the indigenous Irish population while Paisley represents the British colonial one. The fact that Hitchens is incapable of seeing the difference between the two just shows how out of touch with reality he really is.