My first ever visit to the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia was back in 1997, when I did a ten day tour for my then employers doing trainings for political party activists in various provincial towns. The other imported trainer, flown in at the last minute to replace someone who’d dropped out, was a very nice but tough fairly senior Irish American political campaign organiser for the Democrats, Mary Beth Cahill, parents from Donegal, had never been to Ireland herself. We spent many pleasant evenings in each other’s company, and have never been in touch since. (Of course, I’ve been back to Macedonia many times.)
I just discovered what she’s doing now. She is running Senator John Kerry’s campaign to be the next President of the United States.
It is a small world.
Ian,
Thanks for the response. I should also say that I thought your resignation post was one of the most elegant mea culpa statements I have ever read.
I don’t really blame Conservative Central Office for deciding to dump the NI Tories. I think that decision was dictated by the failure of the project, and the failure of the project was by and large brought about by the voters. Yes, it means going back on a pledge to treat Northern Ireland as electorally identical to the rest of the UK; but the lesson from that is that one should be cautious about making pledges, and prepared to deal with reality rather than fantasy.
I think also that the UK government at central level can play a more useful role in NI when it doesn’t have local political proxies, and that Cameron and Paterson, once in government, realised this too; but the major factor was certainly the electoral failure of the project.
I don’t have a view of what ‘normalised politics’ could look like in Northern Ireland. I frankly doubt that the political system will ever change to the point where the community divide is not the main line of political cleavage. In my view the task of the middle ground in such a situation is to ensure that those who dislike the notion of being categorised continue to have a voice, and to prevent the collapse of the political system into the binary dynamic which essentially defines politics in Belgium or Cyprus. Attempts to expand that issue by bringing in ideology or external linkages are of dubious value, as the experience of the NI Conservatives proves.