The equation, film plus Northern Ireland, has not usually equalled accuracy. Some of the cinematic offerings on Ulster have been laughably wide of the mark. One notable exception to this trend is the excellent In The Name Of The Father, the story of the Guilford Four who were wrongly imprisoned for a bombing in England in the early 70s. The scene were Daniel Day-Lewis' character is dragged away for the first time by the British army is particularly poignant. "No", protests Pete Poselthwaite as Day Lewis' onscreen father, "you've made a mistake. My son's not political."
This is a very accurate piece of Ulster talk. To be "unpolitical" in NI is seen by many to be a virtue, a sign of an individual's normailty and inoffensiveness. A significant minority of us may eat, sleep, and most of all, drink, politics day and night but a much larger number take no interest in current affairs whatsoever. The zeal of the few is balanced by the apathy of the many.
During the Troubles, when a civilian was killed, a relative would often appear on the TV to tell the world, between sobs, that their loved one "wasn't intereted in politics". They would inform us that their Jimmy didn't care about any of that silly nonsense, his only passion was football / birdwatching / snake-handling. Many considered the murder of someone who didn't care about politics to be even worse than the kiling of a person who did. In the pyramid of innocence, the non-political were right at the top.
My regular reader(s) will know that I can claim no such purity. I used to call this blog "Everything's About Politics" in a statement of mono-maniacal defiance. Indeed there was a time when I thought that everyone should be as consumed by politics as I am. I considered a person's inability to name the last ten British prime ministers to be a sign of personal failing. The world, I was firmly convinced, would be a better place if only everyone else was as political as me.
As with so many other things, the absolutism of adolesence has given way to the messy compromise of adulthood. I now accept, somewhat grudgingly, taht some people will never care about politics the way that I do. Just as I will never give a damn about who won the Stanley Cup this year, so some people won't care who won the recent election in Belarus.
But if I have to moderate, then so do the non-politicals, whether in NI or elsewhere. Just as there's nothing wrong with hating politics, there's nothing wrong with loving it either. I'm fed up hearing the phrase "I'm not interested in politics" in such haughty tones, as if it were the moral equivalent of "I've just adopted a severely disabled child."
Unfortunately such reciprocation from the non-politicals seems unlikely. With voter turnout falling across the democratic world, politicians are starting to pander to the prejudices of the non-political, pretending to be "ordinary guys", doing regular stuff like following the football or watching reality TV.
This tendency has reached absurd lenghts in the US where politicians accuse each other, bizzarely, of "playing partisan politics." This is the equivalent of one doctor accusing another of "practising medicine." Candidates for elected office treat the term "lifelong politician" as a slur rather than a recommendation, as if experience in your chosen profession is somehow a bad thing. Bush even speaks, astonishingly, of the election campaign as being "the political season" as though he, the president of the United States, is only inviolved with the "p" word at election time.
Politicians may wish to hide their zeal in order to appeal to the non-politicals but I, thankfully, have no such need. I'm an unrepentant political saddo. Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go, there's a programme starting soon about last week's council elections in Latvia. Can't miss that.