Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Be careful about talking up unionist pain

Michelle O Neill arrives at the count in Magherafelt with Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald. Picture Mal McCann.
Michelle O Neill arrives at the count in Magherafelt with Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald. Picture Mal McCann. Michelle O Neill arrives at the count in Magherafelt with Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald. Picture Mal McCann.

Unionist politicians and contrarian media allies settling into re-interpretation of the election results - as not really a triumph for Sinn Féin, nothing that should give unionism pause – makes it harder than ever to empathise with them.

Never mind the rise of Alliance, eh. Discount the level-headed, punctilious psephologists like David McCann who was already dubbing Naomi Long a queen-maker back when Alliance had 8 seats? This may not be a ‘Zeitenwende', a historical turning-point, what a smashing word, but it is surely not a situation to be blurred by parroted, tired demands.

Into the never-ending re-negotiation of the level playing field in the north-eastern corner of Ireland, are we? Or in the ill-chosen words of the daftly glib Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, into ‘perpetual political instability’? Which he insisted would be the fault of Boris Johnson, of course, not Sir Jeffrey’s, if Johnson did not remove ‘the Irish Sea border’.

Nothing new about northern instability. Except this formulation and employment of it as what sounds like a tactic.

Northern unionists have traditionally loathed instability and craved for a permanence unattainable on any terms they have been ready to negotiate. It’s nationalists who treat instability as challenge, lure, reassurance. Unionists have always known that, scolded nationalists for thinking it. The things they know that aren’t so are now outweighed by the things they refuse to remember.

For years the ‘progressive’ end of the DUP occasionally yearned to break out of the Free P/loyalist/working-class box. But that has been sabotaged; by a hard Brexit, the wretched half-understood and much-exaggerated protocol, Tory serial betrayal, and the remorseless rise of the nationalist vote. Scared of the Allister TUV threat - rightly as it turns out, though of course they inflated it and Allister’s clout by their own weak-kneed inconsistency – the DUP were drawn into the anti-protocol campaign while having little control of it.

Night-time rallies with marching Orange bands and sharing the platforms with no surrender rhetoric from odds and sods, what a recipe. Too shapeless to call it a tactic, part of no (surrender?) strategy. It doesn’t seem to have stifled the TUV vote and inevitably put off many more squeamish unionist voters. Who well knew, anyway, particularly business and farmers, that the DUP was an enthusiastic part of the hard Brexit campaign right through to signing the deal with the EU that included the protocol.

The central unionist beef with northern nationalism/republicanism has morphed into unthinking recitation of objection; the protocol denies their identity, severs them from Britain, makes them second-class British citizens, outliers in the United Kingdom. And the SF insistence on talking up the need for a border poll is divisive and dangerous. Nationalists, the Johnson government, the aggressive anti-unionist Dublin government, allegedly all fail to be sensitive to this pan-unionist pain, supposedly aren’t listening.

Here is a checklist to re-focus anyone disoriented by the aftermath of this election. Point One; it isn’t only northern nationalists who detect a refusal to accept that unionists are no longer the NI majority, sharply focused now on refusing to acknowledge a Sinn Féin first minister. Point Two; could it be that Sir Jeffrey’s first concern is his seat at Westminster? Ah, surely not, at a moment of maybe-Zeitenwende? Point Three; there is something very familiar about the complaints of insensitivity in talk of a border poll.

Maybe political scientists will eventually be able to bear out the suspicion in tired old heads that every time a DUPper repeated it like a robot, another nationalist decided to vote Sinn Féin. And perhaps thought to themselves, ah I’m going to read up on the difficulties in the way of creating a new Ireland, I might just go to one of those meetings. Shine up my Irish. Because telling me that wanting a new Ireland is insensitive to unionists effectively says unionism comes first, has superior status to nationalism, is the norm. B...ah to that. Entirely peaceably, ar aghaidh linn.