Opinion

Patrick Murphy: The DUP has made a mess of unionism which is isolated in both Britain and Ireland

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Ian Paisley destroyed all that was potentially liberal about unionism
Ian Paisley destroyed all that was potentially liberal about unionism Ian Paisley destroyed all that was potentially liberal about unionism

It is generally accepted that the DUP has made a mess of Brexit. However, a more in-depth analysis might suggest that the DUP has made a mess of unionism and that the Brexit confusion is merely the latest indicator of a political tradition which has lost its way and is now isolated in both Britain and Ireland.

So, as it faces the most crucial election in its history, what is unionism, where is it going and how will it fare in a rapidly changing political environment which it does not yet appear to understand?

Unionism is simply a desire by those, who are mostly descended from 17th century planters, for Britain to rule the north. Unlike other peoples who have arrived here, northern unionists have rarely integrated into the existing population.

The Anglo-Normans (the first invaders from England) arrived 850 years ago. They later married into the Irish, with only their surnames surviving. (Their descendants today make a significant contribution to hurling: Fitzgerald, Power and Tyrell.)

In more recent years, the new Irish, from across the globe, have integrated to the extent that the best hurler in County Leitrim this year was Iraqi-born, Zak Moradi. He arrived here in 2002, aged 10. (When Arlene Foster went to a Gaelic football match, it was national news.)

In between these two groups were the descendants of the English Protestant ascendency who, by the 19th century, were known as the Anglo-Irish. Mainly members of the Church of Ireland, they shaped Irish cultural and political life. In literature, they included Wilde, Swift, Goldsmith, Synge and Yeats. In politics there was Tone, Emmet, Grattan and Parnell and the Irish language enthusiast, Lord Ashbourne.

Although most were unionist, they recognised their Irishness. Northern unionist leaders never progressed that far. They sought to maintain union with a Britain which has not existed since Victorian times, when Britannia ruled the waves and Johnny Foreigner deserved a damn good thrashing, whether in Ireland or India.

(Unionism usually aligned with the British aristocracy, not the working class. Some little Englanders live in Ireland.)

As Britain changed, many unionists remained in the 17th century, a bit like the political equivalent of the Amish people in the USA. (They refuse to use modern devices like zip fasteners.)

Indeed unionism became so estranged that, like European settlers in Algeria and Zimbabwe, they were prepared to fight the motherland in 1914 to maintain what they believed to be its way of life. It was an Enid Blyton-style, romanticised view of Britain, maintained in Ireland by repressive legislation, such as the Special Powers Act.

The Orange Order preached civil and religious liberty, but unionism denied civil liberties until the civil rights movement in the 1960s. (Seamus Heaney said that unionism was a caste system, rather than a class system. But he missed the role of the Orange Order in concealing class divisions, by having the factory owners and the workers in the one lodge.)

By the 1960s, there were the beginnings of a thaw in unionism. But that was destroyed by Ian Paisley, who created the myth that a normal society betrayed his selective biblical and political values. (Everyone was a Lundy but him - and then he became one too.)

Allowing him to set the agenda was unionism's lost opportunity. When it needed a Sylvia Hermon, it got Sammy Wilson, Gregory Campbell and Ian Paisley Jnr.

Fortunately for the DUP, the IRA campaign confirmed its siege mentality and it is not difficult to understand some of Arlene Foster's antipathy towards Sinn Féin, in view of the attacks on her and her family. But in pursuing Paisley's tradition in what could have been a new society, the DUP again missed the chance to follow the examples of the Anglo-Normans, the Anglo-Irish and the new Irish.

Ian Paisley destroyed all that was potentially liberal about unionism. It is difficult to see who might undo that harm, but until someone does, unionism will remain lost, as long as it is led by the DUP. Isolation is Paisley's fitting legacy.