Not for the first time, unionists are frozen in the headlights of onrushing change, not looking at each other. By contrast a multi-faceted exercise is under way to tune up a politics that can represent the Irish in the north, also known as northern nationalists.
(Funny, isn’t it, how being told what to call yourself and your home-place makes you contrary, or even more contrary? For the whole life of their invented ‘country’ unionists have tried the naming game. In the Republic now, ‘Ireland’ is the increasingly rote and unquestionably official title of the 26 county state. ‘Northern Ireland’ is the legal name for ‘the north’. So ‘the north’ is only preferred by the backward and unregenerate? Hah.)
Nationalist re-thinking may take some time. The Dáil is only beginning to notice, understandably distracted by economic stress in addition to the threat of a no deal Brexit. But here and also there the course of broader nationalism is worth watching, as well as being a sensible alternative to fixation on British parliamentary politics losing the run of itself.
There surely must be a sizeable number of unionists watching the Mother of Parliaments through their fingers. Yes, the DUP, chosen by most of those who vote, is apparently in control of the British prime minister in tandem with the small but noisy ERG (European Research Group). A moment to feel pride in Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley, who hosted the ERG’s Jacob Rees-Mogg here last week?
Sammy of ‘go to the chippy’, Paisley of free first-class travel and luxury holidays; what the bulk of unionism in truth, in private, behind their own doors, make of them is hard to imagine. Even those least inclined to study the mood beyond Westminster cannot miss the dislike in Britain for what the DUP stands for as well as Brexiting.
If unionist opinion here was convinced the DUP-Brexit line is good for the fortunes of Northern Ireland, this would not count. Cartoons of a mannish and pugnacious Arlene in a bowler would be easy to shrug off by farming and retail spokespeople as metropolitan near-racist snobbery, if they thought Sammy had it right. The opposite is true. That is not what business and farming think and for a wonder they have continued to say so, even after characteristic DUP name-calling.
Yet the other main unionist party, the people who briefly announced themselves as ‘civic unionism’, churches, none of these have offered objective comment on the performance of the DUP, their acknowledged political leaders. There are more clouds ahead. That report on the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) hangs over prominent DUP heads, as it does, to a lesser degree, over the Stormont Sinn Féin team. As if things were not murky enough, the public killing by loyalists of 45 year old Ian Ogle raises more questions for the unionist community. Or it should do.
The barbarism in Cluan Place most resembled the frenzied, public killing 14 years ago last week of 33 year old Robert McCartney. The major difference this time was how local people immediately demanded that police arrest the suspected killers, unlike 2005’s Sinn Féin-fronted protest against follow-up police searches in the Markets. Classic present-day Sinn Féin rewriting of history, unhearing their own revisionism: Gerry Kelly promptly demanded PSNI action plus ‘unequivocal’ calls by unionist leaders for loyalist disbandment. Shameless, but well targeted.
The DUP represents east Belfast unionism. Articulate, reasonable Gavin Robinson MP expressed shock and sympathy for the family without ever naming the loyalist gang whose leftovers hold down the east. Unionist politicians have coasted a long way alongside loyalist paramilitarism, at least inside unionist politics excused and shielded by the argument that the IRA was nursed away from violence by nationalist leaders. But this has been inconsistent, contradictory nursing, sometimes full-frontal alliance as in the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Strike. Or use of paramilitaries as cover against accusations of sellout, as when Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble finally walked into pre-Good Friday Agreement negotiations with Sinn Féin, accompanied by loyalists including paramilitary convicts.
In recent years the DUP has directed official funding into loyalist-dominated groups, effectively abetted by Sinn Féin encouragement of schemes involving republican ex-prisoners. But loyalist paramilitarism keeps on dragging down their districts, the term ‘paramilitary’ instead of simply ‘gangs’ steadily less appropriate. In their ground-down districts, only something like Cluan Place vents the disgust and despair.
Does the rest of unionism feel no kinship? The Troubles stretched the nationalist/republican ‘family’ painfully but the bonds held. What happened to the unionist family?
