Rod Liddle
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She was always quite hard on the poofs, Iris, as I have pointed out. Her religion, or ideology, called for her to be quite hard on adulterers too, although she never quite stepped up to the plate on this one. This may well be because whilst married to Northern Ireland’s First minister Peter Robinson, in a holy union ordained by God, she was nobbing some extremely fit 19-year-old kid called Kirk McCambley, in those sparse moments when she was not voting or praying. The godless among you will say that it was hard to blame her for this — Kirk is very good-looking and the gay magazine Attitude has begged him to pose for its centrefold. But it’s only one step up from buggery, in the Presbyterian scheme of things.
Also, in a rather horrible Tiger Woods sort of way, more stuff is emerging. She has not merely shagged Kirk, apparently, but also Kirk’s Dad, Billy the Butcher; Billy was more than happy to chuck her some prime beef fillet from time to time, if you’ll forgive me for having been so coarse. So Kirk and Billy, then — and more are beginning to poke their heads above the parapet with slightly shamefaced expressions, expressions assuaged not by the blood of Christ but by the swifter application of large amounts of money from tabloid newspapers. The Presbyterian Blood of Christ is good stuff, obviously, but — as they say — oranges are not the only fruit.
Apparently there is not much sympathy for Iris Robinson from within the ranks of her Democratic Unionist Party colleagues, who are apt to believe that her behaviour is perhaps not quite on a par with buggery, but also not far short of it. You cannot offer a quickie to Billy the Butcher, perhaps behind the black pudding counter, and expect the Blood of Christ as a beholden right.
And so Iris is now seeking ‘acute psychiatric care’ which is a consequence, the more cynical among you may have decided, of what happens when a viciously sexually repressive ideology comes into conflict with what we might call human life. When the unstoppable force — Iris’s commendable sexual appetite — comes into conflict with the immovable object — her equally commendable, I’m sure, religious beliefs — industrial sized vats of the Blood of Christ etc.
Her husband Peter, the first minister, has gathered in most of the sympathy, as you might expect. It is alleged that he did not report to the authorities the questionable amounts of money his minxy wife had passed to her toyboy butcher’s son of a lover — and Peter has thus temporarily resigned his post to look after Iris and maybe also to sort out this allegation of financial chicanery.
On this question you might, as a human being, rather than a political opponent, exonerate Peter Robinson. He told Iris to pay the money back, but he didn’t dob her in to the authorities — fair enough, I reckon. But on a deeper level he was party to a marriage based upon the elevation of bigotry and repression to heights which, I would argue, made it almost impossible for a normal person not to transgress them. Especially, perhaps, if you were the female in this relationship, because this sort of fundamentalist Christianity is not entirely equal in the way in which it treats men and women. And transgress them Iris did, repeatedly, not just with the butcher’s son but with the butcher himself, apparently.
As a consequence of this minor sexual misdemeanour (even if it is a genuine tragedy for those involved, which I would not dispute for one minute), the politics of Northern Ireland are thrown into a kind of fabulous chaos. It may well be that the grateful recipients of this nonsense will be Sinn Fein, who might soon find themselves being the biggest single party in the province.
Good old Sinn Fein, entirely separate from the whacko sexual repression which afflicts their Protestant counterparts. Apart from the paedophilia — apart from the vicious, abusive paedophilia, huh, Gerry? The priests messing with those altar boys, the ingrained paedophilia in the families which is also the unwanted consequence, one way or another, of a sexually repressive religious indoctrination.
It is undoubtedly true that not every Roman Catholic child has been buggered by his parish priest, or by a friend of the family, or by a relative of Gerry Adams. Just as it is true that possibly a majority of Presbyterian marriages endure beyond the arrival of the monthly bill for sausages.
But on each side of this sectarian divide there is much that might bring the rest of us, those of us who are mercifully beyond it, together. Iris with her yearning for the blood of Christ to assuage the sins of sexual deviants and then her sudden recourse into psychiatric care. Liam Adams or Gerry Adams Sr abusing children. This what happens when politics is left to the impeccably devout; there’s not enough Blood of Christ to go around.
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