Before You Post To Facebook

Ruth "Kill The Shinners" Patterson

Look over the words you've typed on the screen. Read them carefully. Have you expressed what you intended to express?

Now look at what you've written. Is it the sort of thing that you want the Facebook-reading public to see, or have you composed a rant more worthy of private airing?

In Ruth Patterson's case, she skipped over the second step and put her screed out there into cyberspace, where her suggestion that Belfast loyalists attack a planned Sinn Fein gathering and kill some of the senior leadership could be seen by those who might take the DUP poliitician's remarks as marching orders.

The last thing the politicians in Northern Ireland want these days is the slightest hint of continued trouble between the Protestants and the Catholics. Businesses looking to invest in an area don't like fighting and bloodshed and riots. It just doesn't offer much in the way of a return on said investment.

Every year, a gaggle of loyalists demands the right to parade through Ardoyne, a Catholic district in Belfast, and every year they protest this denial. They have a certain dislike of the Parades Commission for denying them this opportunity to antagonize their enemies, and so they jump at the chance to make a scene over Catholics being granted the right to march.

The Parades Commission has allowed the Shinners to hold a rally to honor a couple of IRA volunteers who blew themselves up thirty years ago when the bomb they planned to place went off early.

At last, an opportunity for payback. Let the Commission ban the Catholics for a change and see how they like it.

Alas, the Commission did little more than restrict the route of the Sinn Fein march to their gathering. The parade would go on as planned on Sunday. And Ruth Patterson was livid.

She put down her angry thoughts into words that she then posted on Facebook. Using her fertile imagination, she penned a bit of speculative fiction in which the Sinn Fein parade was attacked, a unionist's dream scenario in which the leaders of Sinn Fein would be killed. She called it a great service to the world, and to Northern Ireland, which is the world to the unionists who firmly believe in bigotry and blatant prejudice.

The Facebook post has been deleted, Miss Patterson issued an apology, and then she was arrested for intimidation and inciting violence.

She'll get a slap on the wrist, and solid support for her position from those who elect her to office for her strong anti-Catholic stance.

From her party leadership she'll get a stern reprimand, because it is clear that Ms. Patterson has failed in a critical portion of the politician's creed. What she says to her constituents cannot be aired in public where corporate leaders might hear. The facade of peaceful coexistence must be maintained, even if the structure holding it up is crumbling. It is all about keeping up appearances.

At the least, she might consider a few courses in creative writing at Queen's University Belfast. Her prose could use a little polishing to take the edge off.