Julian Smith used to have the unenviable task of being Theresa May’s chief whip. As the newly-appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, he now has an even harder job. Wrangling unbiddable MPs pales into insignificance when arbitrating the causes and consequences of a brutalised polity.
Members of Northern Ireland’s devolved government still refuse to sit with each other and the legislative assembly is defunct. The police service is chased off Northern Irish housing estates by teenagers and regularly targeted for murder by dissident republicans. Putrid commemoration of dead terrorists saluted by gunfire and sinister paramilitary parades barely raises an eyebrow. Warnings about Brexit leading to a breakdown in peace in Northern Ireland are building to a crescendo of shroud-waving opportunism.
For Smith, there is no functioning administration to outsource these many difficulties to. However, his greatest concern should be elsewhere: in the collapse of confidence in the state-appointed Commissioner for Victims and Survivors, Judith Thompson. The unresolved plight of innocent victims of terrorism is the ghost at Smith’s banquet of priorities.
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