Look who's talking as TUV retraction underlines more unpredictable politics

Sinn Féin's publicity director Danny Morrison once came up with one of the most memorable slogans of the Troubles when he described the party's electoral strategy as operating "with an Armalite in one hand and the ballot box in the other".

This week he was back in the news - this time for something he didn't say.

And all thanks, unlikely as it may seem, to the TUV leader Jim Allister, a man as politically disparate from Morrison as it is possible to be.

Confused? Welcome to the world of Northern Irish politics where things are unrelentingly predictable until they're not.

In some ways, it is all the fault of Stormont's new Irish language commissioner Pól Deeds and this correspondent, who asked him for an interview after an event celebrating Irish Language Week in Stormont's Great Hall.

Now if Deeds was sensitive to controversy, it's probably a job he would not have accepted in the first place.

But he probably did not expect the interview would result in his position being described as "untenable".

And all because of his choice of language when he told unionists that hostility towards the Irish language wasn't doing them "any favours".

He said "every word spoken against the Irish language "could be seen as "another blow struck in the cause of Irish unification".

It follows an Irish language campaign group voting to change its constitution "to work towards a united Ireland for the benefit of the Irish language".

When the interview was broadcast the following day there was outrage from some unionists, notably Jim Allister.

In a statement, headlined "Irish language commission links language to IRA campaign - he should go", the North Antrim MP said that Deeds' words were "very clearly an echo of the infamous comments of Danny Morrison that 'every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom'".

"Morrison made those comments at the height of the IRA campaign, when innocent people were being shot by the movement of which he was a prominent spokesman," the statement added.

"For a statutory commissioner to use rhetoric that so clearly mirrors that thinking is totally unacceptable."

The only problem? Danny Morrison was not the source of the "infamous" comment.

Writing on X, Morrison said: "Jim Allister is absolutely wrong. I never made such a statement. If he is so confident then he should publish when and where I said it."

It was a challenge Allister did not take up.

In fact, he and his party did something perhaps even more surprising. They retracted the claim.

An hour and 40 minutes after the initial statement came a new one.

The email sent said the comments had "wrongly attributed the Irish language/bullet comments to Danny Morrrison when it should have been Padraig Ó Maolchraoibhe".

There was no apology and we are left to guess as to whether there was an embarrassment.

He was a Sinn Féin cultural officer and teacher who at a party seminar in 1982 said: "I don't think we can exist as a separate people without our language.

"Now every phrase you learn is a bullet in the freedom struggle."

Others on social media also wrongly attributed the quote to the former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.

Equally certainly, the words were not first used by the Irish language rap group Kneecap in spite of a journalist friend telling me Pól Deeds' comment was "a reversion of a line out of the Kneecap movie - it had feck all to do with Danny Morrison".

Kneecap did in fact use the line in the movie, but they did not invent it.

As my friend pointed out it would have been ironic if Pól Deeds had decided to quote Kneecap anyway.

He has made it clear in the past he is not a fan of the band, famously telling the BBC News NI: "I don't do Kneecap."

Like I said - it's been a funny old week.