Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: DUP shouting sell-out rather than reflecting on unionism's future

DUP MPs Nigel Dodds, Gregory Campbell, and Sammy Wilson listen as Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivers a statement about his Brexit deal in the House of Commons on Saturday. Picture by House of Commons/PA Wire
DUP MPs Nigel Dodds, Gregory Campbell, and Sammy Wilson listen as Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivers a statement about his Brexit deal in the House of Commons on Saturday. Picture by House of Commons/PA Wire DUP MPs Nigel Dodds, Gregory Campbell, and Sammy Wilson listen as Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivers a statement about his Brexit deal in the House of Commons on Saturday. Picture by House of Commons/PA Wire

BY the time today's Irish News appears in print, the road away from the European Union may have taken another turn.

After years here of little or no detectable political movement this is a sign of the times.

Events rush on, meaning sometimes barely glimpsed before a consequence, often unintended, overtakes interpretation.

"Sell-out. Treachery. Betrayal," MP for Strangford Jim Shannon shouted across the House of Commons at prime minister Boris Johnson.

Useless for Johnson to profess that his proposed exit deal with Europe does nothing to weaken Northern Ireland's place in the Union.

Thanks to the DUP's foolish trust in Johnson and the Tories it is "now on the Union's window ledge", scoffs outgoing Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann.

Swann, to ramp up the insult, was quoting one of the most plaintive ever laments of unionist insecurity, in 1985 from Peter Robinson, the DUP leader before the current one - unless by the time this appears in the Irish News the current leader has taken herself off to spend more time with her family.

Strong argument in that direction; stronger against; who wants the job?

It looks as though her deputy Nigel Dodds, the dour but articulate leader at Westminster, as he has before, stepped out of the centre-frame at the moment of peak pressure.

Complete with convincing detail, reports had the 10 MPs split 7/3 in favour of Johnson's deal, Nigel Dodds, Sammy Wilson and Gregory Campbell the dissenting three.

Dodds the ranking MP, Wilson the (usually) useful rumpus-raiser, Campbell short on internal clout - but one telling gloss had it that in opposition to Johnson the group decided to 'jump together'.

Clearly, as on previous occasions, Dodds declined to wield his gravitas, experience and seniority. The Johnson machine crunched on.

Dodds and co were spat out with contempt by a wholly contemptible crew, who used everything and anything to relegate them and their claim to be the voice of unionism.

Lord Trimble came in handy, quoted on the mechanism for consent in "the Good Friday Agreement" although that title has scarcely passed his lips since April 1998.

The name 'Good Friday Agreement' has always been mystifyingly offensive to unionist politicians.

Trimble-ish punctiliousness insists the 'Belfast Agreement' is what it says on the official cover page. It may be that anti-punctilious Team Boris heard one name and thought the other.

Perhaps for one week only, perhaps as the start of a novel phase, the DUP is being clasped to Westminster bosoms. (No, no, no, not real ones.)

No matter how sympathies for the betrayed flow now, including from the Labour party and SNP, their new-found status will not last.

But it should be good for them, more diverse clasp that it is than that of the eccentrics who led Jim Molyneaux, Trimble's predecessor as Ulster Unionist leader, down misleading paths.

Enoch Powell easily convinced Molyneaux that through him Jim, and Ulster Unionism, had an inside track to Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher at that very moment was engaged in the on-off negotiations that produced the Anglo-Irish-Agreement. Thatcher was a unionist. Johnson is a Johnsonist.

The nonsense of denouncing Leo Varadkar as an evil crypto-republican leading Johnson astray merits no more than a mention.

At a guess, Varadkar is as enthusiastic about uniting Ireland as Johnson is about reading the fine print in anything he 'negotiates'.

But it is Northern Ireland's good fortune, though unionists will self-destructively continue to try derailing it, that as well as self-interest the Dublin government has a care for the whole island.

The historic Republic ignored nationalist grievance and unionist misrule, as London did, for as long as possible.

Foreign Office serpents did not connive with Dublin to intrigue against northern unionists at the CIA's request - a prime Molyneaux/Powell delusion - but because British-Irish cooperation was the only sane response to the Troubles.

This should be another step on the road to unionist reflection, but shouting sell-out is much easier.