Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Tactical voting can show the DUP what people think of their Brexit arrogance

Fionnuala O Connor
Fionnuala O Connor Fionnuala O Connor

There is mild fun to be had out of tactical voting this Thursday. It might even remove two DUP MPs.

But a state built on a headcount is doomed to sectarian politics, something forgotten each election time by those who lament the dominance of green vs orange. Centuries go by but communal psychology changes very slowly. Sinn Féin has only gradually emerged from the ‘armed struggle’, Derry’s Apprentice Boys are mannerly now but they still hang Lundy. Until unionism re-orients itself to political reality here and in Britain, first past the post polls are bound to have an air of the census about them.

The big shift came fifty years ago, followed by the big freeze of the Troubles. In 1969 unionism lost the Westminster convention that left it to run Northern Ireland as it chose. The comforting predictability of Stormont and Westminster elections disappeared. Monolithic unionism fractured. The combination had robbed nationalists of hope, but Gerry Fitt arrived in Westminster in 1966, John Hume and colleagues in Stormont three years later. By then unionist in-fighting had prime minister Terence O’Neill hanging on by a thread.

Hume and the SDLP kept politics alive. Hume’s genius for internationalising the Northern Ireland problem and ‘transcending’ the narrow ground fed optimism. ‘Physical force republicans’ went on calling called politics a fraud. Unionist leaders circled the wagons.

After 1921’s first Northern Ireland election returned a few independent unionists in addition to the predicted generous majority for the Ulster Unionist Party, the party dubbed independents ‘renegades’. Proportional representation was dropped, constituencies redrawn, and elections became stark unionist vs. nationalist. Catholic oppositionists gave up. In 1933, the Unionist party won before a vote was cast because nobody contested 27 seats.

What might be dubbed the neo-feudal aspect of pre-Troubles Northern Ireland is neatly illustrated by the electoral history of O’Neill’s successor as prime minister, Major James Chichester-Clark. He inherited his South Londonderry seat from Dame Dehra Parker, who had effectively handed it to his father (and her relative) Captain James Lenox-Conyngham Chichester-Clark, then reclaimed it on his death. The son faced a contender for the first time in 1969, only the second fight in over 40 years for the seat.

In 1949 Dame Dehra won it by 9,193 votes to 5,909; Major Chichester-Clark by 9,195 to 5,812. Which meant his family had held South Derry since partition.

Half a century later the only certainty is that unionists are bereft of direction and, therefore, talking up the chances of a restored Stormont. You could almost blush for them.

Nigel Dodds and Jim Allister turned up at Friday night’s Ulster Hall rally, closed to reporters. The leader of the Westminster party, Arlene Foster’s ‘eminence orange’, central to negotiations with Conservative prime ministers, trooped in to share a microphone with Allister, last of the Naysayers. Both of them there to stay onside with who, exactly? So that nobody can call them Lundy? As though showing up at the Ulster Hall is serious political business.

Whereas, after much muttering about first past the post, tactical voting here and in Britain is getting serious consideration.

Advice recommends how best to thwart a healthy majority for Boris Johnson, naming constituencies that could make the difference between a Conservative majority and another hung parliament. The Observer gave polling expert Peter Kellner two pages to lay out the 50 seats that could block the Tories. The odds, as one commenter puts it, are surely with the (Tory) sods. How many will tick new boxes is un-pollable, still unknowable, possibly to themselves.

For many here, not all nationalist, the aim is simpler. How best to show the DUP what people think of their wilful ignorance and arrogance on Brexit? Naomi Long might be loaned votes as a personal tribute. If so, it will be in spite of frustration with her party colleagues in North and South Belfast. Who on Thursday might preserve two DUPpers, in the name of moderation and non-sectarianism.