Einstein might have been a genius, but he also had a reputation for forgetfulness.
Who can blame him? When your head is full of multiple universes, there’s not a lot of room for much else.
On a train once, a conductor asked to see his ticket. No matter how hard Einstein searched, he couldn’t find it. “It’s okay, Professor Einstein,” the conductor said. “I know who you are, I’m sure you bought a ticket.”
He walked on checking the other passengers. When he reached the end of the carriage, the conductor looked back and saw Einstein on his hands and knees searching under his seat. The conductor went back to him and said: “It’s fine. I don’t need to see your ticket.”
Einstein looked up: “Without the ticket I don’t know where I’m going.”
I know it’s a leap of the imagination, but I thought of that story this week when I read Jeffrey Donaldson’s response to The Irish News/Institute of Irish Studies University of Liverpool poll.
Donaldson is no Einstein, but he’s lost his ticket and hasn’t a clue where he is going. As the May assembly elections come closer, he’d better get down on his knees and start looking for it.
The world knows the DUP is in a tail-spin, but it is pretty obvious the DUP doesn’t appreciate the predicament it is in. The voters do, however, that much is clear.
At the end of the day political parties are judged not on what they say – and the DUP says lots – but on what they do.
Put yourself in the shoes of a unionist voter and look at what the DUP has achieved. Not a lot.
Brexit is perhaps the blackest of black marks on its record. It was so clear that leaving the EU was not in Northern Ireland’s interest, that voters here ticked the box to remain.
Faced with a choice between a soft Brexit - keeping the UK within the single market and/or the European customs union - and the hardest of hard Brexits, the DUP chose the latter.
The Northern Ireland Protocol, with a border down the Irish Sea, was the inevitable consequence.
To disguise its culpability, the DUP is now trying to weaponise the protocol, and persuade its voters that there is an existential threat to their ‘Britishness’ because of it.
To whip up further alarm – and in the hope of electoral advantage - the Northern Ireland Executive has been collapsed and with it the interests of the economy, jobs, the NHS and the recovery from Covid.
Whenever a judgment call is to be made, you can be certain the DUP will make the wrong choice.
That’s hardly surprising from a party which has in the past openly flirted with paramilitarism; a party which destroys rather than builds; and a party which divides rather than promotes consensus.
To be fair, for much of its 50-year history, playing the sectarian card has worked. By exploiting people’s fears and insecurities, the DUP has moved from the margins to a position of political dominance.
For a heady moment, it had it all. It held the balance of power at Westminster after Theresa May’s ill-fated general election in 2017, and it had real power to change things for the better here in the restored executive and assembly.
It squandered those opportunities. The only beneficiary has been Nigel Dodds – wooed and then shafted by the Tory right – gifted a seat for life in the House of Lords.
Ermine robes might keep him warm, but they will be of no comfort to his former constituents who cannot afford to heat their homes, put food on their tables or rely on the health service when they need it most.
As this week’s poll shows, the DUP’s past is catching up with it. It’s being found out, helped in part by the emergence of a credible Ulster Unionist Party leader (social media misjudgements aside) who cannot be portrayed as a republican fellow traveller.
We have also witnessed growth in the number of voters who no longer see themselves through orange or green tinted glasses.
Pessimists believe the DUP will succeed in scaring unionist voters into returning it as the largest party, securing for unionism once more the title ‘first minister’.
But what use is that title, if its incumbent delivers nothing but further instability and a weakened economy?
Instead, assembly voters would do well to remember Einstein’s warning: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
