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22 Jan 2010
The London Review of Books has a great piece on the Robinson affair by Booker Prize-winning Irish author Anne Enright.
Being mad in Northern Ireland is different from being mad in any other place. The Robinsons come from a community in which people talk to God and He talks right back to them. ‘I have forgiven her,’ said Peter Robinson. ‘More important, I know that she has sought and received God’s forgiveness.’ These communications from God can be fairly abstract, they can be politically convenient, they seldom involve what the rest of the world call auditory hallucinations, but there is no doubt that the sense of conviction they carry can be overwhelming.
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Iris Robinson may not have been in full health when she made her peculiar statements about homosexuality, but if they are evidence that she was unwell, then so are the other members of her party. The radio interview which lost her the sympathy, not just of the wider world, but also, crucially, of Selwyn Black, happened on 6 June 2008. By midsummer, she and Kirk McCambley were lovers. Whatever was happening to her in those weeks, it wasn’t that grey old beast, depression. Indeed, looking at the way she led her life, you might conclude that Iris was more often up than down.
But how far up is a woman allowed to go? Is it mad for a woman from a council estate to adorn her new villa with hand-painted murals, to decorate each room according to a different theme (Oriental, Scottish, Italian). Is it a bit manic to have, in your study, a hand-carved, ten-foot-high, three-ton stone fireplace which you have had specially designed and installed? Is it unhinged to order wallpaper hand-printed with the quotation ‘Non magni pendis quia contigit’ (‘one does not value things easily obtained’) – or is it only counter-productive, because it shows so clearly that you left school at 16? ‘I remember Iris getting a Dulux dog which ate the furniture,’ the DUP MP Sammy Wilson said. ‘She bought a dog kennel the size of a shed. It was so big it wouldn’t fit in the back gate so Peter, myself and his police bodyguard had great fun hauling it over the roof at 1 a.m. when the neighbours were asleep.’
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