It’s back to the future. We are where we were fifty years ago, a year or so before the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association got under way.
NICRA’s most lethal weapon was to demand the same rights as UK citizens in Britain. Unionists had no answer except to say, guess what - ‘NO’.
So unionists got themselves into the position of opposing ‘one man one vote’, though nowadays it would be one person one vote. It was irrelevant that multiple votes applied only in local government elections. No one cared. Unionists were objecting to universal suffrage; that’s all that mattered. The slogan was deadly. Unionists were agin a boundary commission to stop gerrymandering. They were agin a points system for allocating housing and so on. They were so busy losing they couldn’t win.
With equal political brilliance they have now set their face agin same-sex marriage. The north is the only part of these islands holding out. Unionists will lose again. It’s inevitable. In the meantime they will hand a marvellous political advantage to Sinn Féin who will be able, quite correctly, to present themselves as the party of modernity, freedom and equality. For their part unionists will say equality is, wait for it, a Sinn Féin plot. Brilliant! A previously unheard of political stance. How can you be threatened by equality?
The DUP will strenuously oppose equality but then haven’t they always? They’ll come up with all kinds of red herrings such as clergy being forced to officiate at same-sex marriages in church, problems with surrogacy, all the rubbish dredged up in the Republic and dumped by the wayside: all irrelevant.
The campaign against the DUP will be simply based on equality of status and parity of esteem and is unanswerable. Unionists can’t see that refusing equality is discrimination against those they won’t treat as equal and makes the DUP toxic.
It doesn’t matter that political cowards in other parties here agree with the DUP. They won’t have to say a word because the DUP will lead the charge and act as a shield for them. Even if Sinn Féin gained a majority for a fifth resolution in Stormont in favour of same-sex marriage the DUP will block it with a so-called petition of concern thereby taking all the blame. No matter. Their defeat is inevitable. It’s quite likely that a case coming before the courts in November or December will compel a change in the law.
It’s all part of the poisonous legacy of Paisley who managed to create a political party in his own backward bigoted image, full of hatred and bile. The result is a party which doesn’t resemble the make-up of northern Protestants. There are only 10,000 Free Presbyterians in the north but 30 per cent of DUP members and 40 per cent of DUP councillors are Free P. Of 38 DUP MLAs 35 per cent are Free P. Most northern Protestants don’t vote for them yet this tiny sect tries to impose its outdated, blinkered view of the world on the rest of society here and so far has succeeded unless the courts have stepped in to defend the majority of people’s rights.
Sinn Féin’s next big campaign announced on Saturday will be to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution which prevents dealing with fatal foetal abnormalities. On Monday the Minister for Primary and Social Care Kathleen Lynch said she believed it is ‘doable’.
Essentially what has been happening in the Republic in the last twenty-five years is the dismantling of the social elements of the 1937 constitution in effect written by Archbishop McQuaid. Bunreacht na hÉireann may as well have had ‘nihil obstat’ printed at the bottom.
What will be interesting as a result of this decision by Sinn Féin is that same-sex marriage and abortion reform will both become issues in next year’s assembly elections. The question is whether the issues will produce a sectarian divide or whether the DUP and the Catholic Church will form an unholy alliance to prevent change.
At least unionists can no longer claim Home Rule=Rome Rule. You don’t suppose Sinn Féin came up with a strategy of social change as a way of driving a Trojan Horse into the fortress of sectarian politics, do you?
