Fionnuala O Connor: Donaldson is polite unionism’s ambivalence made flesh
SINCE the cherry on top is Stormont, the wonder is that anyone goes into Northern Irish politics.
Jacinta Ardern’s resignation must have focused minds on leadership, but her readiness to admit her tank was empty is very rare.
Politics’ dislikeability does not stop calls to northern politicians to ‘show leadership’. Hoiking Sir Jeffrey Donaldson across the line is surely beyond most imaginations.
A recent twist includes a supposed incentive to go back into Stormont: re-establish power-sharing and the assembly in time for the Agreement’s 25th anniversary; ‘save the Good Friday Agreement’, and reap a Joe Biden visit.
In what universe would unionists see a Biden visit as blessing on their participation in power-sharing?
Political fiction and fantasy set north of the border is scarce in bookshops but plentiful in current affairs coverage.
Brexiteers remain tireless. Reporters, and who can blame them, are tired trying to make sense out of nonsense. Calling out each fake fact would cost them interviews with one whole side of the divide. Instead they simply recite developments – or rather non-developments – at face value.
There is a fairly strong argument that unionism’s representatives kiboshed the Agreement’s potential from early on. The DUP portrait of themselves as defenders of the GFA is enough to make a cat laugh enough to cough up a hairball.
Sinn Féin can be fingered and are, very readily, as 50 per cent to blame for the stop-start pace of post-1998 Stormont. But a lazy, misleading equivalence has been concocted between today’s DUP boycott and the walkout Martin McGuinness felt bound to announce on the first day of January 2017.
That was when Arlene Foster refused to stand down while her role in the RHI disaster was examined.
Republicans, the refrain goes, ‘kept Stormont down for three years’. Nothing about Foster, rarely a word about the deal Edwin Poots and others drafted with Sinn Féin on the Irish language and other issues – on which the DUP welshed as soon as their MLAs saw it and gave off smoke and fumes.
It was lopsided from the off. A northern unionist vote ratified the Agreement by the narrowest of margins. Its political representatives never thereafter took the necessary leap of optimism, and yes, leadership, to gradually build a stable future.
They weren’t the only ones. The Anglo-Irish Agreement, GFA precursor, originally met FF hostility in the person of Charlie Haughey. Until he realised how it intrigued republicans and could satisfy the Republic’s limited interest.
Unionists could have talked up the protection of equality and fairness in the Agreement’s architecture. But there was more bitter fun to be had in rants against it, in denying, then blocking its north-south bodies, alternating diatribes against taoisigh and the oddest of praise for Enda Kenny, Micheál Martin.
Political unionism has almost idly sabotaged the GFA with little feints of pretend defence, then retreat under the Allister cosh.
The cosh is their community’s ambivalence about any power-sharing, veneer on hostility. Having only ever worked the GFA begrudgingly – apart from that somewhat sickly Paisley partnership with McGuinness – the DUP now block a set-up in which they would be Number Two. (Extra marks for that.)
Outstanding analyst of her community Susan McKay, now Press Ombudsman so lost to commentary, surveyed some keen to share with their neighbours. She called them and herself Lundies, de-fanging the ancient insult.
When Donaldson became DUP leader she wrote that in damning the protocol as an enemy of stability because ‘all of unionism’ opposed it, "his disingenuousness was startling – a majority in Northern Ireland opposed Brexit. The DUP ignored them, fought desperately for the hardest Brexit possible, ended up with the protocol, and now blames everyone else".
So it goes. Reviewing unionism’s righteous anger at Sinn Féin and mistrust of Britain is idle. Sir Jeff is polite unionism’s ambivalence made flesh. He wouldn’t know leadership if it bit him.
He is there to block not move. Fuel in his tank would be a waste.
