The riddle of Brexit has sucked sense out of politics here and in Westminster.
Sinn Féin has nakedly moved energy south of the border, most recently invested in the plan to contest the presidency.
What remains of an institutional SDLP is perhaps edging towards Fianna Fáil as less embarrassing than declaring the party dead. Neither this nor fighting Michael D. for the Áras is a brilliant plan but it could be argued that both show thought. Whereas unionists here are still stuck in a time-warp, their imaginary relationship with Britain.
So perhaps it is not daft for Peter Robinson to once more raise the possibility of a united Ireland. But remotely respectful to his successor, in tune with his own leadership of the DUP?
He can claim to have said what has been unspeakable, unsayable. Sammy Wilson, for years the nearest Peter came to having a friend in the party, calls his new stance ‘dangerous’ - though for Sammy it is said respectfully. Gregory Campbell has been less dismissive than might have been expected, Ulster Unionist former leader Reg, now Lord Empey, reliably spluttery.
It is a measure of how resistant unionists are to debating the subject that this degree of exchange counts at all.
What is more intriguing is what perpetual plotter Robinson is up to. Does he want to be remembered for suggesting that unionists must face into minority status in a new Ireland, rather than for being conspicuously greedy, possessor of an unpleasant tongue, mere fixer and organiser in the shadow of Paisley senior? Perhaps in boredom money is not enough. Maybe his vanity needs more than to be credited as the little tugboat that turned around a big, slow vessel and docked it alongside a former leader of the IRA.
Robinson himself is now retired. All of two and a half years after he stepped down from the top job in the largest unionist party, this is his second go at offering new thought. His first – including tart remarks about the courage leadership required - seemed a barely-disguised jab at Arlene Foster, with February’s collapse of her negotiations with Sinn Féin then still raw.
We’ll come to the calibre of his own leadership. His other comments last Friday were also problematical.
A restored power-sharing Stormont is crucial, he told the MacGill summer school, to protect Anglo-Irish relations post-Brexit. How so? Because the North-South Ministerial Council and the British Irish Council, structures linked to Stormont, provided a framework for relationships and ‘mutually beneficial outcomes’ and ‘no-one felt threatened by it.’ Anyone remember warmth from unionists for those structures? As opposed to sneering at the North-South Ministerial Council?
Robinson on a united Ireland casts unflattering backlight on Foster’s stumbly response to that televised question from Patrick Kielty, on a hypothetical referendum that said yes to unification. Robinson the unflustered pragmatist gives it the hard-headed ‘insurance’ policy treatment.
The effect on Foster of 2018 Robinson is not hard to imagine; RHI hanging over her, relegated by Nigel Dodds as she is, badly out of her depth from early in the job. For which she was chosen by Robinson, effectively installed when the only remotely likely contender, Wilson, was blocked at the last moment. The DUP inner circle isn’t big on loyalty.
In his summer-school outing Robinson had time for a wallop at the May government, at least implicitly, for failing to consider what should happen after Brexit. Another go at Arlene’s unthinking Brexiteering after the vote? And at Nigel, Jeffrey, the Conservative-dealers?
He has a nerve, but we knew that. He caused waves as leader by lamenting segregated education, though this proved to be characteristic unionist insistence that state schools are integrated, to be improved by the demise of a Catholic sector. Are we now to regard as a daring leader the man who withdrew in a flash from development of the Maze with Sinn Féin, when the Orange and Ulster Unionism, led by supposed liberal Mike Nesbitt, ganged up on him? Then he wrote that letter from his American holiday urging the Orange to flout Parades Commission rulings.
Yes, what a good thing that one smart unionist would accept, with ‘protections’ for unionists, a border poll leading to the north joining the south. It is a pity, always was, that in his prime Robinson could not bring himself to be the best that was in him. He has left it a bit late to re-invent himself as torch-bearer for a mutually respectful future.
