Taoiseach attends Gay Pride event on his first Belfast visit
The 26 County Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has made his first visit north of the border since becoming Fine Gael leader. It certainly wasn’t an unnoticed visit, as the Taoiseach first called for a “unique solution” to the status of the Six Counties after Brexit and then attended a Gay Pride event.
Speaking to an audience in Queen’s University, Leo Varadkar said a second referendum on EU membership would likely have a different outcome than last year’s shock result. He stressed the need for greater understanding and co-operation between north and south in the face of the major upheaval being caused by Brexit.
“I would hope unionist parties for example, who would be keen to preserve and protect the union, would see how it is much easier to do that if in fact the United Kingdom stays in the customs union and stays in the single market because that takes away any need for any sort of special arrangement or bespoke solution for Northern Ireland at all,” he said.
Undoubtedly, Varadkar’s matter-of-fact tone has unsettled unionists. The Taoiseach appears to have deliberately drawn a line under the policy of ‘creative ambiguity’ maintained by successive Dublin governments when dealing with Anglo-Irish relations.
DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson accused the 38-year-old Taoiseach, who had said he had a limited memory of the conflict from his childhood, of setting Anglo-Irish relations back to the 1970s and 1980s.
The DUP is also understood to be infuriated by the openly gay Taoiseach’s appearance at a gay pride breakfast on Saturday morning amid a debate over marriage equality in the North. The Six Counties is the only area in Ireland or Britain where gay marriage remains an impossible dream. The DUP is deeply opposed to any change in the status quo. As a rainbow flag flew over a government building near Stormont for the first time, Varadkar described marriage equality as a “strand one” issue, meaning it relates to the internal affairs of Six Counties, but something that could be envisioned for the future.
He told crowds outside the Pride event at the Northern Whig in Belfast on Saturday morning that he was not “here to unsettle anyone. But – he added – I am here to state my support and my government’s support for equality before the law and individual freedom for all citizens wherever they may reside”.
The Taoiseach was met by a Sinn Fein delegation. Gerry Adams described the meeting as “productive”. Adams welcomed Varadkar’s decision to participate in the Gay Pride event. “It is an important act of solidarity with the LGBT community and it also underlines the imperative of LGBT citizens in the North having access to the same rights, including marriage equality, that all other citizens enjoy in every other part of these islands.”
Adams also welcomed the Taoiseach’s recent comments on the need for the border between the EU and non-EU British state not to be on the island of Ireland. “I told Mr Varadkar that Sinn Fein’s view is that a designated special status for the North within the EU is the most effective way to defend the Good Friday Agreement, and to ensure that the two economies on the island of Ireland are protected during Brexit.”
Adams said this was an Irish solution to an English problem. “Let’s say loud and clear that the majority of people here voted against Brexit. So that has to be at the cornerstone of any way of preventing the English Tory party having their way on these matters”.
Adams added that ”What this all boils down to is whether unionism is clinging to the remnants of the old order or whether it’s prepared to accept that this state has changed utterly. I know it’s still in transition and so on but it has to be a state in which the rights and opinions aspirations of all citizens are both reflected and promoted and actively defended”.
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Be your own media !
The “minds” behind The Rojava Report website are a group of students from different backgrounds. ANF interviewed them on why they felt more information on Rojava and more in general on the Kurdish issue is needed and how they tried to answer to this need by creating their own site.
How did the idea of a blog on Rojava come about ?
All of us who were involved in setting up the Rojava Report understood that there was a huge lack of information regarding what was happening in the region. When the media in the US spoke about the Kurds in Syria – and this itself was rare – it was always along the lines of ethnic or sectarian violence, or to give another example of the “intractability” of the conflict. It was always in terms of an “Arab-Kurdish” conflict, as a corollary or side-show to the “Alawite/Christian-Sunni” conflict that has been the dominant narrative in the mainstream media. In general we felt that those advancing the revolution in Rojava needed a platform from which their voices could be heard, and on which they could stake out their own vision for the future of their country and the Middle East more generally, without the reductionist narratives there are so common among out the major news outlets here. It was meant to be a more unfiltered, more direct source of news about what was happening in Rojava.
How is the Kurdish issue in general perceived in the States ?
Of course that depends on who you talk to. However even among people who consider themselves informed about events in the Middle East, and are sympathetic to a degree to Kurdish demands for national rights, there is a huge dearth of understanding about the complexities of Kurdish politics in the region and Kurdish aspirations for a new Middle East. In regards to Rojava in particular there is still an assumption that Kurds are – or at least the PYD is (if they can make the distinction) – “close to the regime” or at the very least unwilling to do much about it. This unfortunately was the dominant narrative until the beginning of the revolution last summer – I mean if you read anything in the Washington Post or the New York Times through the Spring of 2012 that is what you find (and forget the television channels because they never had time for the Kurds). Just google “Kurds on the sidelines” and see how many articles come up! Then the narrative began to shift slightly after the revolution and it became something along the lines of “Kurds are dividing the opposition.” I mean can you imagine? It was as if they could not make anyone happy, or at least not in a way that respected the principles of their movement. But that is just the point because that is all lost, and even now the YPG is treated as simply one more sectarian militia, while the entire content of their revolution and their politically ideology is buried under a simplistic discourse of “Kurdish nationalism” and “sectarian strife.”
