Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Irish Brexit policy is knocking the DUP off-balance

DUP leader Arlene Foster at the party's 2017 annual conference
DUP leader Arlene Foster at the party's 2017 annual conference DUP leader Arlene Foster at the party's 2017 annual conference

The past weekend was not a good moment for Arlene Foster to scold Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar.

Not good for unionism’s image, but then it has never seemed much interested in making allies.

Only the British government of the day matters, a relationship often misread.

When the dominant mood in media/political class Dublin is anti-northern nationalist, as it has been for years, is when unionist politicians sound most reasonable.

They really do not need to fret about republican ‘revisionism’.

But they cannot be told.

IRA responsibility for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the Troubles is a fixture in the public mind.

Sinn Féin’s now clearly established place in southern politics will rankle with some for years to come, unaltered by Gerry Adams retiring.

What swings southern opinion against unionism, at least fleetingly, is language like Foster’s ‘crocodiles’.

And language as used by The Sun to ‘young’ Varadkar, perhaps like that of Foster on RTE on Sunday, when she chided Coveney for supporting the idea of an Irish language act and his ‘aspiration for a united Ireland in his political lifetime.’

She thought that was ‘quite aggressive’. Irish minister aspires to a united Ireland; the nerve of him.

Varadkar hadn’t continued Enda Kenny’s engagement with Foster, she claimed, which meant she heard only his amiability.

The Irish sin in British/unionist minds is to have its own policy on Brexit.

The DUP refuses to have its own policy.

But this is a weird moment.

Even if her own position was stronger, no wonder Foster sounds off-balance. The Brexit-border business has disturbed the air.

For the first time in living memory of even the oldest here, a majority in the independent Irish state can see that their economic interests are the same as those north of the border - more than that, are tied tightly together.

This does not necessarily make for easy, happy identification. Nationalists here felt warmth for Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern when those Taoisigh did their best in negotiations that eventually brought a flawed, piecemeal peace.

As yet there isn’t much warmth for Varadkar and Coveney. But the more they attract British hostility the higher their stock rises.

It is clear that with their diplomats they have maximised Irish influence in Europe, as Kenny did before them, to push a divided British government towards a Brexit that will do least damage in Ireland, north and south.

The flak from Brexiteers, sneering and crudely anti-Irish, is proof enough of Irish effectiveness.

Then smack into an already fraught situation comes the unfolding history of that email to Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald, latest outcrop of unsatisfactory government relations over years with the dysfunctional Garda.

So governments to the south and east of us are beset by scandal, potential scandal and intrigue.

The Republic’s political system has been through a week of eye-rolling disbelief. May, her party awash with factions, is beyond jokes. Yet the DUP spent the weekend patting itself on the back, entirely on the strength of their deal to prop May up.

Deputy leader Nigel Dodds implied that the party’s good fortune in Westminster eyes was thanks to divine assistance.

He meant the outcome of the general election, clearly, by which the DUP became May’s prop and stay.

Though where was Nigel’s God when unionists lost their majority in the assembly election? Still, what is Stormont to Dodds, now a player to his own unreadable heart’s content at Westminster.

His increasingly nominal leader meanwhile has to ‘big up’ her own status however she can.

So Foster writes to the 27 EU countries to set out her stall, as though she speaks for the majority here.

The idea that she thinks this fitting recalls those always galling unionist assertions that they were ‘the people.’

Still bumptious, unionists, about British Northern Ireland, this ‘country’ they make no effort to sell to nationalists but nonetheless expect respect for.

But they cannot even tell themselves any longer that they are the people, and in the referendum on leaving the EU Arlene’s party backed the Northern Ireland losing side.

That’s been all but vaporised in general consciousness, certainly in Britain, by the way the DUP have tucked in tight beside Britain’s Brexiters.

Michelle O’Neill might as well write now to the EU countries to tell them she has more right than Foster to call herself the north’s spokesperson.

Though she need not write to the Republic. They know already that those who voted Remain here are at one with sentiment there, across the vexed border.