Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, but there’s way more room for cannon on the left.
Never mind the stalemated old sectors, there is a third party on the block. All the noise is from their right but Jeffrey and Edwin should think about the drift to Alliance rather than Jim Allister. Some think the Neithers will decide the fate of the state, and what they decide is yet to be decided.
This year’s 100th anniversary of partition, which unionists grandly call ‘The Centenary’, arrives when they are no longer in charge. As established some time ago in all the sectors unionists once dominated – education, law, medicine, business, public service, politics - nationalists are now a considerable force. With the Neithers on the rise.
Though the smoke of war blurred the shift and the cost was enormous in suffering and upheaval, nationalists have been on the up for almost fifty years. From 1972’s dissolution of the original Stormont unionists have experienced the precise reverse. The Catholic share of the population, long stagnant, and not coincidentally, began to grow. How to lead a community through that?
Sinn Féin’s rise is the scream in the unionist nightmare. Those few who long ago pointed to the networking of John Hume, SDLP ability to enlist southern political support, superior Catholic use of communal organisation, a single church as helpful to communal centrality, are sidelined or called Lundies. Realistic unionist voices who say that the IRA became politically influential because they abandoned violence are ignored.
The multiple unionist parties are in themselves minor enterprises, as witness the DUP’s implosion and Ulster Unionism once more in search of a leader. Some innocent abroad this past week asked why the UUs cannot profit as the DUP falls in on itself. As though he heard the question and decided to be helpful, Steve Aiken promptly resigned. The fifth leader since David Trimble, the BBC’s Gareth Gordon wrote. (Pub quiz territory. Clue; ‘R’ for remember.)
Loyalist paramilitaries soaked in feuding and crime compete for the funding handed out to encourage them away from violence. New or newer voices insist they represent loyalism now and are not being listened to. Saying what? Last and least the once all-powerful Orange Order feels obliged to say something, in spite of lacking an institutional brain.
Today’s would-be leaders could re-interpret the shift in power healthily – by recognising the original imbalance as bad for both communities, as it surely was. So far, an ask too far. Instead the downfall of majoritarianism is presented in a way that can only feed rage, desire for revenge or worst of all for any politician trying to rescue a declining party, despair.
Bewilderingly unfair, they preach, extorted by violence, ‘concessions’ demanded insatiably by the former minority and granted thanks to ‘betrayal’ by Britain. Nationalists didn’t and don’t expect much from London nor indeed from Dublin, so nobody can ‘betray’ them whereas unionists who would love to be loved by Westminster have been susceptible to empty promises. It was almost sad to watch them glow in alliance with Theresa May, then Johnson, their support for Brexit combusting in front of their eyes as they were cast aside. They talk about ‘saving the Union’ while everyone else sees that the rest of the Union does not want them.
Setting out his stall as would-be next leader of the DUP, Edwin Poots promised a think-tank on the future of unionism. Not to be established, though, until after the next election, because he knows the history of unionist think-tanks.
Nationalism gearing up for unification is awkward, flanked by the thought of angry, unprepared unionism in any new Ireland. But work is started, where the task for unionists should have begun a while back. Their crisis is now, in the week of ‘The Centenary’. No scriptwriter would run those timelines into each other. Like the old joke says, you wouldn’t start from here.
