At the many TV interviews afterwards McBride developed a fine strain of Irish blarney, which was just what his country needed at this moment of shopping-centre tragedy and showplace triumph. As the winning team had been half from his north and half from the south, and ‘one-third Catholic, one-third Protestant, one-third heathen, all in old Ireland’s green’, McBride said that he himself felt Northern Irish nationalism for one day a year only, which was when he rallied his club side in Ballymena for the annual match against Sean O’Driscoll’s Cork. After that match, when it was in Belfast, he preferred to drink in Sean’s brother’s pub in Andersonstown rather than bomb it. As for those who blew up schools in the name of the Christian religion, in any of its forms, ‘or those who for one instant give any votes or sympathy or shelter or offer weasel words of partial excuse for any of these child murderers, whether from UDA or IRA or anyone else, my whole team would like to have each one of them for two, or better three, minutes under an All Black scrum’ (here the team burst into applause behind him) ‘and for that scrum I would nominate…’ (here he named the toughest eggs from the tournament, including three from Australia, a Welshman and an Afrikaner who had been sent off during it). ‘Ireland means this,’ declared McBride, holding aloft the World Cup, ‘it does not mean the bombers.’
There were some nasty funerals after that month’s bombings, including one where the IRA declared a military burial for a thirteen-year-old who had belonged to one of their brigades. The boy’s parents declared that they wanted no such thing, and wished the ‘antagonisms between our neighbouring communities to be buried with our poor Michael’. As the saintly local priest invited some notables from the Protestant community to come to the funeral, there was likely to be a trial of strength. The TV cameras gathered like jackals.
The cameras showed that Pat McBride, still hobbling on a stick, was one of the party with the parents; so were some other members from the victorious national team, for the father was connected with a local rugby club. At the graveyard six masked IRA men appeared as if from nowhere, and raised rifles to fire a salute. Pat McBride hobbled over to the nearest gunman, struck his hand with his stick and caused him to drop the rifle, which later proved to be loaded only with blanks. The other rugby players disarmed and unmasked the other five gunmen. The unmasked gunman wriggling in McBride’s huge hand was held before the TV cameras. He was a frightened teenage boy. McBride gently kicked his backside and said ‘now take your beastly mania away’. In TV interviews afterwards McBride launched his main attack not on ‘these posturing but actually unarmed children’. He said the most disgusting news of the day was a speech against all Catholics by the Protestant extremist at the mid-Ulster by-election.
The next day McBride was asked to stand as the centrist candidate at mid-Ulster. He accepted, and said he would call himself a candidate for ‘confederacy’. During his campaign he was supported by the British Prime Minister and the leader of the other three mainland British parties, and also by the three main parties in the Republic of Ireland. Unprecedentedly, he received a telegram of support from the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and then on the last day another from the Pope.
It would be splendid to be able to report that McBride therefore won the seat. Because this was Northern Ireland he came merely second, 2 per cent behind the Protestant extremist and 8 per cent in front of the Catholic lady, who made a rather good speech in defeat. ‘If there were a proportional, transferable or alternative voting system,’ she said, ‘all my supporters would have switched on second ballot to Pat McBride, who is a Protestant we respect. We should then have had an MP here who was liked by most of the people, instead of this Paisleyite who is detested by 63 per cent of them.’
This was significant. Way back in 1973 the Ulster Assembly that led to the brief Sunningdale agreement on power-sharing was elected under a system of transferable voting. It has been agreed that the new and long delayed constitutional assembly in Northern Ireland will also be elected under this system.
In 1987 public opinion polls suggest that in Northern Ireland the centrist parties (including the Confederate Party) hold a sufficient block of votes in the majority of constituencies to force the counting of the second votes. If that happens, nearly all the second votes will go to the centrist parties, and there is now a real prospect that the elected majority in Northern Ireland will vote in 1988 to get Britain off the hook of its 1973 declaration that there can be no change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status unless a majority of its inhabitants concur. A majority of its elected representatives will probably vote for a confederate Ireland.
