Even though this is no time to be superior, only the saintly – not a good look for a columnist - would deny they had it coming.
To be called ‘witless’ and better friends to the unification of Ireland than the IRA is bound to sting, even though Brexiting has already brought nothing else but discomfort. Forecasts of the UK breaking up and estimates of support for a border poll come hard on top of several swipes by British opinion-mongers at the DUP.
Swimming against unfavourable polling is a knack various sets of people develop, to keep going with at least some spirit. Those shivering as the break-up of their ‘precious Union’ looms do more shouting than swimming, which saps energy and repels more than it attracts. But British lack of love for northern unionism and Irish distaste for northern nationalism bookend politics here. Arguably, they also squash or at least seriously discourage the development of strong local organisation.
Today’s northern nationalist leadership is split and short on direction. Today’s unionist leadership is so dire they almost invite pity.
Almost. Readers tempted to think ah no, unionists are the truly pathetic ones, we’re more realistic, more inventive, altogether less lost, need only focus on the Republic’s daily concerns to realise how little it focuses on us. At the minute with Covid sharpening attitudes, the official focus feels markedly unfriendly. Aligning his ‘shared island’ notion with lack of cooperation on travel has stretched Micheál Martin’s articulacy to the limit.
But there is and has been a major British-Irish difference over the past half-century. Official Ireland put energy and talent into making the Good Friday Agreement, after doing similar work on the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Some suspect that was effort to make the knots of the northern problem go away as well as the IRA, and with them the north as a weight on southern conscience. It was inarguable effort with a useful outcome. As witness the weird spectacle of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson among others now claiming the GFA as protective shield. Sir Jeff, who sped off rather than be in the room when the agreement dragged itself to a close. (One of the smaller quirks of the present has been to hear unionists cite it in their own defence as the Good Friday Agreement, not the ‘Belfast Agreement’ as insisted upon for so long.)
Once actual Brexit began to unfold, thrashing about inside the DUP was inevitable; Ulster Unionists so irrelevant they fail to invite curiosity. The UUP under Jim Molyneaux and David Trimble made some friends in London, but they were the wrong friends. The DUP never seem to have tried.
They eventually clung to the most ultra Brexiters, who dumped them. Others have always kept their distance. Unfriendly Londoners are now audible on cue, George Osborne, wielder of austerity’s scalpel, with his Northern Ireland ‘headed for the exit door’ of the UK because of the DUP’s ‘unbelievably stupid’ Brexiteering. A Financial Times uppercut made the DUP nationalism’s secret weapon. Then there was the weekend’s Sunday Times polling, seeing the Union as shaky, ill-defended, Scottish independence as a real prospect, 51 per cent support for a border poll here in five years.
Polls come and go, the relative strength of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Irishness’ among the most arguable of their findings. It cannot be much comfort for quiet unionists, repelled by the Sammy Wilson/Ian Paisley approach, that northern secretary Brandon Lewis will be tasked to talk up NI’s importance to the UK and the UK’s importance to NI. This is Lewis who denies the most visible damage of Brexit, tasked by Boris Johnson, so memorably video-ed saying traders asked for post-Brexit documentation should ‘throw it in the bin’.
The cultivation of America, Brussels, Strasbourg, that John Hume was so good at was a thing no unionist put heart and soul into. Too late now, and maybe past time to try persuading the other orphans on this narrow ground.
