Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Theresa May in survival mode as she does a deal with unloved DUP

British Prime Minister Theresa May greets DUP leader Arlene Foster, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds and MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson outside 10 Downing Street in London ahead of talks aimed at finalising a deal to prop up the minority Conservative government 
British Prime Minister Theresa May greets DUP leader Arlene Foster, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds and MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson outside 10 Downing Street in London ahead of talks aimed at finalising a deal to prop up the minority Conservative government&nb British Prime Minister Theresa May greets DUP leader Arlene Foster, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds and MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson outside 10 Downing Street in London ahead of talks aimed at finalising a deal to prop up the minority Conservative government 

The Tory-DUP deal could make Conservatives look like the nasty party again, says Chris Patten. But then unionists here knew what Patten as junior minister thought of them. And as George Osborne’s cuts play out in thousands of blighted lives who doesn’t already think the Tories are nasty?

Theresa May out with the handshake on the footpath yesterday was welcoming, respectful. But this is survival stuff.

Sammy Wilson in Westminster sitting behind Caroline Lucas, the Green MP illustrated the real situation of Northern Ireland unionists. Sammy displayed resting face, temper for once well dialled down, although Lucas in a contemptuous aside with a wrist-flick had just called the DUP dinosaurs. She wondered if deal manoeuvres explained why the Queen’s Speech said nothing about the environment.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson leapt up as she finished. How dare she disrespect the DUP’s vote! His party has an environmental policy in their manifesto! (And never mind that climate change denier Wilson was made environment minister a little while back.) The Speaker deemed the ‘dinosaur’ tag parliamentary language, if perhaps lacking in taste. Displaying his own taste, he urged Donaldson to remember how long dinosaurs had survived: chuckles in the chamber.

If Arlene Foster finds Ian Knox a mite disrespectful she cannot be charmed by Steve Bell - as she arrives yet again for a face to face in Downing Street, against the tapestry of bobbies outside Number Ten in sashes, boiler marked RHI being hauled into place, bowlers on the lackeys conveying the Queen to Westminster. Add in a rumour that the prime minister, already scattered, had been leaving the job of sweet-talking Foster to minions, and it may even be true that phone calls from Downing Street have gone unanswered.

If it was anyone else and any other party, there might be a temptation to feel pity. But it turns out that Foster and Simon Hamilton did indeed try to line up the liberal Scots on gay marriage. Except Foster failed to remember that. Why would it stand out in her memory that she wrote to another devolved legislature urging them not to undercut Stormont’s ban? Well, it would have been embarrassing to remember just at this moment, wouldn’t it, when the party is so annoyed at being depicted as anti-gay.

Others are also annoyed. Some very anti-DUP nationalists dislike what they detect as snobbery and even anti-Irish racism in the mocking onslaught. They are not wrong. They are also showing empathy with DUPpers who abhor the very notion of empathy in politics.

Some Protestants who see themselves as liberal are hard-pressed by the mockery, some like Alf McCreary in the Belfast Telegraph are hurt, distressed. It has clearly been a shock to be depicted with such naked hostility, as though they are another race entirely from the British instead of bone of their bone, blood of their blood. Whatever happened to kith and kin?

This is caricature, is the complaint, stereotyping, misrepresentation of a party which is not in policy or in the generality of its membership homophobic, climate-change denying, creationist. Those, they insist, are merely the views of individuals. The people most hurt tend to waft over another strand of the mockery, those jokes about DUP closeness to loyalist paramilitarism.

But ambivalence seduces because you don’t see it in yourself. Polite unionists convince themselves that only nationalists are ambivalent about the violence from inside their own community. Unionists vote DUP, not PUP, they say, but nationalists vote Sinn Féin.

Dublin’s reaction has been almost as illuminating as London’s. Arlene the crocodile-basher not long ago opened southern eyes to the less likeable aspects of her party but today the DUP and Sinn Féin are both horrors, deserve each other. Let them get back into Stormont and give our heads peace.

True, these are parties well matched in aggression. Martina Anderson yelling about sticking it ‘where the sun don’t shine’ is as lovable as a Sammy rant. Neither ‘mother country’ sees them nor the people they represent as beloved children. Nationalists know themselves as Irish as the Republic’s people, but they also know southern dislike goes back a long way.

The unloved DUP are an uncomfortable watch, because the watchers are also unloved. But a sense of proportion is the thing. Manchester doesn’t love London, nor London Manchester, Cork and Dublin strike sparks. Corkonian Simon Coveney no doubt arrives as foreign affairs minister with the full set of southern sensitivities. He came second lately. Here’s his chance to use his fresh eyes, and try even harder.