Bradley a prime example of British establishment’s attitude to North

REVENGE, we are often told, is a dish best served cold. But the obverse of that is that if one must eat humble pie, it is best eaten swiftly while warm.

We have already learned that Karen Bradley, the person chosen by UK Prime Minister Theresa May in January 2018 to manage Northern Ireland’s affairs at one of the trickiest times in its history since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, is very far from being a skilled politician.

For many people on this island, Karen Bradley is a prime example of the gratuitous ignorance about Northern Ireland prevalent among the British establishment to an alarming degree. In September last year, eight months after taking on the role of Northern Ireland minister, she publicly admitted she had no understanding of even rudimentary facts about the sectarian nature of politics in the region.

“I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa. So, the parties fight for election within their own community,” she told Westminster’s internal ‘House’ magazine.

She was not the first person given an important job who did not understand the first thing about it – and will not be the last.

But her inability to suppress that nugget of abject ignorance until she is publishing her retirement memoir tells much about a lack of political nous, and a lack of care for the people whose lives she is now responsible for.

This writer has the 1999 tome ‘Lost Lives’ – the meticulously researched stories of the 3,600-plus men and women who died over three decades of the so-called Northern Ireland Troubles – close at all times when writing about the North. The book steps away from political bickering and tells us about the everyday people who paid the ultimate price in that conflict, and their bereaved relatives whose lives were broken by grief and injustice.

On Wednesday, Ms Bradley correctly told MPs at Westminster that under 10pc of those killed in the Troubles died at the hands of the police and security forces. But her further comments stoked nationalist fury.

“The fewer than 10pc that were at the hands of the military and police were not crimes. They were people acting under orders and under instruction and fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way,” she said.

Ms Bradley came back and apologised, partially and gradually. She met with Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney privately in London on Wednesday night and he tried to make the best of an invidious position without conceding ground.

SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said it was either ignorance or wilful disregard. The timing could not have been worse. Next week authorities will say whether the killers on Bloody Sunday in 1972 will face charges.