Suzanne Breen on Labour leader’s difficult relationship with NI’s biggest unionist party,

COMPARE and contrast the visit of Jeremy Corbyn to Queen’s University Belfast yesterday with that of former Labour leader Tony Blair last month.

Mr Blair was here to join other key players in the peace process to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

There appeared to be little advance publicity about his presence, presumably in case it led to a mass of protesters angry about the Iraq War.

Ask a random sample of students to name their political heroes and Blair won’t feature. Corbyn definitely does, and he received a rapturous response at the university yesterday. Of all the political figures who have visited the campus over the past year — including Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and new Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald — he leads the popularity stakes by a country mile.

But for a significant section of unionists and IRA victims, Corbyn is a deeply controversial character.

His close relationship with Sinn Fein leaders at the height of the conflict — when they were pariahs in mainstream British politics — means many unionists don’t trust him.

His refusal to meet IRA victims now guarantees this won’t change any time soon and it’s something he must address.

To say the DUP isn’t fussed on Corbyn is putting it politely. When asked by the Belfast Telegraph yesterday about his relationship with the party, Corbyn insisted his door wasn’t shut to the DUP, yet it’s evident there’s not a lot of love on his side either.

“Our party does obviously have meetings and relationships with them (the DUP),” he said.

“Tony (Lloyd) as part of the Northern Ireland team knows them and our party meets them quite regularly to discuss things that are going on within Parliament.

“Obviously we want to work together with people.

“They are, at the moment, the main prop of the Tory Government in Westminster, which is not helpful for those of us opposing austerity, job cuts and underfunding of NHS across the country.”

Corbyn as Prime Minister would be friendlier to Sinn Fein than any previous incumbent of that office. Yet he certainly wasn’t advocating a radical republican agenda yesterday. In the absence of power-sharing, he supported nationalists’ calls for the British-Irish

Intergovernmental Conference to be reconvened. But he didn’t advocate anything like joint rule and stressed that the body should address only non-devolved matters. He also said, if he was in Downing Street, he would remain neutral in the event of a border poll.

In an interview with the News Letter, he specifically condemned the IRA’s 1983 murder of Queen’s law lecturer Edgar Graham, which unionists had been calling for him to do.

Corbyn had been criticised in the past for condemning violence generally but declining to condemn the IRA specifically.

He told the Belfast Telegraph he opposed an amnesty for both former paramilitary and security force members and stressed “the law must take its course” and “the PSNI go where the evidence leads”.

Corbyn also surprisingly declined to give a pledge that he would change the law on abortion or same-sex marriage here.

He said his views on both issues were well-known but he would prefer for a local Assembly to deal with them.

The Labour leader was totally relaxed during his visit and gave the media greater individual access than Theresa May has during her most recent trips.

Yet his past associations will continue to dictate how many unionists who lived through the Troubles view him.

For the younger generation, that is perhaps not the case.

Pupils at Belfast’s integrated Lagan College, which he visited yesterday, were given complete freedom to ask him whatever questions they wanted. Nothing was off-limits. They quizzed him about Brexit, economic policy and the environment.

Not one raised the past.