THE whole honours system has long been discredited and tinged with a hint of anachronistic farce. However, it is worth noting that the former First Minister of Northern Ireland and DUP leader, Arlene Foster, has been made a Dame in the latest Queen’s Birthday Honours List, and the Reverend Mervyn Gibson, the Grand Secretary of the Orange Order, is awarded the MBE.
READ MORE: The most controversial figures on the Queen's Birthday Honours list
This could be interpreted as merely a sop to Unionist sentiment in the North, where many are feeling abandoned and disregarded by Boris Johnson and his maverick colleagues. Nevertheless, to honour two leading Unionist figures who both actively opposed the Good Friday Agreement, and whose antediluvian social opinions and tribal cultural views display the worst excesses of sectarianism in the province, appears to be both partisan and deliberately obtuse.
It would seem that those who represent the dark days of intransigence and bigotry are to be honoured and rewarded by the monarch and her government providing they profess fealty to the Crown and an antiquated disunited kingdom that is bent on self-destruction.
Owen Kelly
Stirling
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