Opinion

Newton Emerson: Brexit text potentially a game-changer for nationalism

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

London has apparently agreed to the EU’s Brexit ‘backstop’ option, which would see Northern Ireland staying in the customs union and single market, despite Theresa May saying last month no British prime minister could ever agree to it. The absence of DUP hysteria indicates this is not what it seems - the UK has only signed up to a version of the backstop, with most details of that version still undecided. The only point agreed regarding single market and customs union membership is that the UK as a whole will align with both in the absence of a trade deal, meaning no sea border.

However, TUV leader Jim Allister has spotted one major defeat for the DUP. The latest text specifies seven new areas of north-south cooperation, in addition to the 12 already in the Good Friday Agreement, all to be “in full respect of Union law” and with provision for London and Dublin to add more. The seven new areas are: energy, telecoms, broadcasting, inland fisheries, justice and security, higher education and sport. This is potentially a game-changer for nationalism - and a strong case for it returning to Stormont.

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The DUP’s confidence on Brexit may stem from thinking the backstop is like the Irish language act at St Andrews - something London has agreed to in principle but not in practice. The DUP may also have noticed the clause in the law enacting the Good Friday Agreement, which says the Northern Ireland Office can strike down any Stormont order that “would have an adverse effect on the operation of the single market in goods and services within the United Kingdom.” This is the only mention of a trade-related issue in any agreement text.

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The ‘five techniques’ of interrogation used on the hooded men, a group of 14 internees in 1971, would undoubtedly be classed as torture today. The European Court of Human Rights found otherwise in 1978 and in losing a technical appeal against that ruling this week, brought through the Irish government, campaigners have ended up frantically having to explain that the techniques have not now been endorsed under present legal standards. In fact, not judging past crimes by current standards is a human right itself - article 7 of the Human Rights Act (“no punishment without law”) - otherwise people could be retrospectively criminalised.

This case seems to point to the limits of legal activism in dealing with our past. The passage of time is not only making memories unreliable but law inapplicable. We are approaching the point, at least on events of the early 1970s, where truth and justice will be better served by historians than solicitors.

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The DUP has only itself to blame for the stink hanging over its dealings with Cambridge Analytica. The party’s declared spending with the political consulting firm, for £12,000 of social media support during last year’s assembly election, was normal and above board. Where the DUP has come to grief is by insisting on donor secrecy back to 2014, when it spent £33,000 from its mysterious £425,000 Brexit donation with a Canadian online promoter linked to Cambridge Analytica.

All this dabbling in high politics and fancy technology appears to have been little more than an ego-boosting hobby for certain underemployed DUP parliamentarians, indulged as harmless by their leadership on the assumption the EU referendum would be lost and nobody would care.

Now the party finds itself in high places in Westminster, the harm arising from that indulgence - to itself and its Conservative partners - is deliciously ironic.

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Something felt off when Sinn Féin’s Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, in a tweet on Sunday, described the Milltown cemetery murders as an “RUC-UDA attack”. In the controversy that inevitably followed, other Sinn Féin figures were bounced into saying this is what many republicans believe. Nevertheless, it went against the tone of Sinn Féin’s commemorations of Gibraltar and Milltown up to that point, which had been noticeably non-confrontational. The party’s official 30th anniversary statement, delivered by Alex Maskey at a mural unveiling, included one reference to collusion throughout the Troubles overall and only in terms of the perceived insult of police escorting the Gibraltar cortege - not of Milltown.

Ó Muilleoir defended his tweet as “a fact” but his claim requires more proof than an assertion. It is a fact that prior to Sunday, Ó Muilleoir had been in the news for declaring Sinn Féin “relaxed” about Stormont’s direct rule budget. He certainly changed that conversation.

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Ulster University’s Gateway Scholarship programme offers £1,000 a year to students in financial difficulty. Successful applicants include single parents, those suffering illness or bereavement and people from backgrounds where the five-figure debt a degree incurs is simply too alarming a deterrent. There is just one catch - the programme is funded entirely by donations from university staff and current and former students. Availing of Ulster’s considerable resources and access to funding, or just cutting fees, is apparently out of the question. The University has now begun writing to retired staff to ask if they will also contribute. As with its Belfast campus building site, Ulster University is always looking for others to dig it out of a hole.

newton@irishnews.com