Let’s be quite blunt.
The Northern Ireland public are being taken for fools. Little wonder nearly 40 per cent don’t vote.
Those who voted did so with the reasonable expectation of fully functioning power-sharing administration which would prioritise urgent matters such as health, education, employment, economic recovery and community cohesion
These voters are not just being let down, they are being punished.
The sense of entitlement which ultimately led to the suspension of the old unionist regime at Stormont in 1973, still flourishes amongst refuseniks within the ranks of political unionism.
Some have yet to fully accept that unionist hegemony is over and power-sharing is permanent.
Of course, the DUP leadership invokes the ‘iniquitous’ NI Protocol for their de facto abstentionism.
They claim it undermines the Good Friday Agreement - an agreement they never endorsed but from which they took full advantage having destroyed and demonised the Ulster Unionist Party.
Political unionism led by the DUP ditched the aspirations (and hopes) of the Good Friday Agreement when they discovered it was easier to corral their supporters through fear and prospect of a nationalist first minister.
Now such a fear has come to pass, the DUP need another sabre to rattle and thus the NI Protocol becomes their toxic totem.
Their enthusiastic support for Brexit in 2016 was driven by a reckless desire to roll back on the Good Friday Agreement in some form of forlorn hope that physical border checks would reappear on the island of Ireland. They calculated wrong.
The NI Protocol (whilst clunky and clumsy) is a direct result of Brexit.
A Brexit formed, fashioned and foisted on Northern Ireland (against the will of the majority of voters here) by the DUP and their fanatical partners in the ERG at Westminster.
En route to what they perceived to be some sort of post Brexit Orange Narnia, they destroyed the career of a committed unionist prime minister, Theresa May.
Bizarrely, the DUP complain about the NI Protocol overriding the principle of consent, whilst conveniently forgetting that it was their friends in the right wing ERG who successfully argued against any of the devolved regions being involved in the Brexit process. They maintained it was parliament which was sovereign, not regional assemblies. Despite this, the EU and UK government agreed that the Northern Ireland Assembly should have an opportunity to review the effectiveness (or not) of the protocol (ie consent) in 2024.
Naturally, the DUP want to ignore this part of the negotiated UK/EU process as the recent assembly elections has returned 53 MLAs in favour of the NI Protocol and 37 against. A majority unlikely to change within the next eighteen months.
So the principle of consent is really about veto.
The current British government to whom the DUP plead their case is, for the most part, widely regarded as intellectually and morally bankrupt. The Johnson administration is as cavalier about equality and fairness in Northern Ireland as they were about the application of Covid restrictions to themselves during lockdown. The prime minister is banking on the Ukrainian situation preventing any EU retaliation over any unilateral action he may take on the NI Protocol. He is grossly mistaken in his belief. The EU and USA can see through his game.
Truth is everyone from Sinn Féin to the DUP and from Ireland’s Future to the Tory ERG know that the recent elections prove the constitutional position of Northern Ireland is very far from being under any threat. And the fact is Northern Ireland has always been treated differently from other parts of the UK since 1922 through to 2022. It’s both integrated and separate. Unionists know this better than anyone else as they did everything possible to maintain its separatism by blocking rafts of equality legislation.
By turning up to sign on for wages but not for work, the DUP simply increases public cynicism about politics and politicians.
