Opinion

Brian Feeney: Alliance surge shows the game is up for hardline unionism

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

Newly elected Alliance MLA Kellie Armstrong and party leader Naomi Long. Picture: Hugh Russell
Newly elected Alliance MLA Kellie Armstrong and party leader Naomi Long. Picture: Hugh Russell Newly elected Alliance MLA Kellie Armstrong and party leader Naomi Long. Picture: Hugh Russell

This election has changed the structure of the north’s politics. The results are so decisive they have answered several questions which have been avoided for several years. Other questions remain avoided and unanswered.

First, as we all know to our cost, the north was created as an artificial entity where unionists would always be the majority and run it as they pleased. That’s no longer the case. Unionists are not a majority, Sinn Féin is the largest party and a republican is entitled to be first minister. What therefore is the point of the entity known as Northern Ireland? If the north was devised to protect and defend unionists and their identity from the rest of the people on the island, what is the need for it when unionists’ rights and identity are guaranteed by the Good Friday Agreement and threatened by no one?

Again, what is the point of the place as a separate political entity?

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As a result of Thursday’s election unionists are about to prove conclusively that the entity does not work unless they can maintain the spurious reason for which the British created it a century ago, namely to purport to run the place as their place alone. The DUP has promised they will not turn up to run the north unless they get their way, despite the fact that the majority of other parties want to operate Stormont according to its rules and also support the Irish protocol. We even hear suggestions that the DUP leader will hang on to his Westminster seat rather than risk a by election in Lagan Valley, or that the DUP will boycott Stormont, or both. Either way, the DUP/TUV will strive to prevent the democratic will of voters here.

In this attempt they will be supported by the British government whose dishonest, discredited leader intends to take power to bring in legislation which he claims will protect the Good Friday Agreement but in reality wrecking it. Johnson claims, entirely falsely, that according to the GFA (and DUP/TUV) there needs to be cross community consent for the protocol.

There is no such need. However, despite the requirement in the GFA for ‘rigorous impartiality’ Conservative governments since 2010 have brazenly sided exclusively with unionists and shamelessly interfered in the running of this place at the behest of the DUP. Now the British government looks set to act (again) against the democratically expressed wishes of a majority here. It’s obvious they take the same view as the DUP/TUV, namely that regardless of elections, the only people who count are unionists because this place was devised and created for them however few of them there are.

Such a disgraceful attitude suits the DUP/TUV down to the ground because it means the DUP don’t have to enter an executive which for the first time looks as though it’s going to have a cross-community majority with SF and Alliance outvoting the DUP dinosaurs. Even if the seriously diminished SDLP and UUP were to win enough seats to qualify for executive seats they should go into opposition and leave the executive to the three largest parties. Having ministers did neither the SDLP nor the UUP any good. They were constantly side-lined and got no credit from the electorate for their decisions.

However, all the indications are that there will be no need for such decisions because there will be no executive. Never mind the protocol or other specious reasons Donaldson presented in his disastrous campaign, the shock of Sinn Féin’s massive victory has confirmed the worst fears of DUP/TUV unionists: the game is up for ethnic solidarity unionism. It will take time for that stark reality of these election results to sink in, but the evidence is that for young, liberal, educated unionists it already has.

The evidence is there in the Alliance surge of unionists who know they’ve nothing to fear in a pluralist Irish society.