In the doldrum life of Northern Ireland politics losing one seat is a misfortune, two careless, three criminally negligent. To have escaped two more potential losses is a serious warning from the future for the DUP that for too long played just one card.
Since the writ of that one card trick (keeping the FM’s job for unionism) ran out in the last Assembly election in 2022 the party has been on notice that it needs to find another reason for people to vote for it. Its two year boycott didn’t help either.
Unionism as a political philosophy has no internal political consistency (no form of nationalism, Irish, British or otherwise has). Its origins lie in an alliance between conservatives and liberals in the 1880s in scrambled defence against Home Rule.
As the institutions of the Belfast Agreement mature (and they are still here despite the fantasies of the serial abstentionists), the need to defend the union lessens and the demand for a functional form of domestic politics will increase.
The question of what is the DUP actually for will increase and intensify. Despite the misapplication of the word seismic to Northern Ireland where political inertia has become the norm since the restart in 2007, it is deeply appropriate for them.
Take two of their most fundamentalist MPs in Antrim, one in the north was taken out from the right by, what any reasonable observer would have to admit is a far more able candidate in Jim Allister, whilst east was squeezed from the left.
The third Antrim seat fell to the liberal UUP. It’s hard to escape the impression (unless you choose to ignore it) that in the east of Northern Ireland in areas where nationalism is barely a presence there is a full on row going on about who should lead.
Voters in the east are no longer happy to hand the DUP the kind of tribal carte blanche nationalist voters do in the west/south. They care about who represents them and many feel that Messers Paisley and Wilson have embarrassed them once too often.
This is less civil war more a Potteresque ‘sorting hat’ process where people choose new tribes to belong. It’s a re-alignment that could never have occurred under the strained circumstance of the Troubles. And it’s substantially an affordance of “the GFA”.
It signals that people in the east are no longer bound by purely tribal concerns. Belfast, which has been the epicentre of a growing trend towards cross community cohabitation and marriage for over a generation, is now substantially post unionist.
The SDLP, though weakened since the agreement it co-negotiated with the UUP, is the only Irish or British ‘nationalist’ party to attract substantial numbers of voters from ‘the other side’ and uniquely holds South Belfast on a plural mandate.
Far from feeling threatened by the so-called ‘greening of the west’ or indeed the incessant talk of a border poll the voters of the east are slowly unravelling that old defensive alliance of conservatives and liberals and setting themselves up for a good old row.
As Neil McCarthy put it in the News Letter:
If one big unionist party had stood instead of three, many UUP voters might have voted Alliance or simply stayed at home. So-called unionist disunity allowed for the the proper working out of differences within unionism in this elections.
Whilst this is and ought to be seismic for the DUP, if it is a crisis for Northern Ireland it is barely visible on the streets of Belfast and Derry (where we have seen such crises erupt disastrously before). It’s hugely aided by Sinn Féin’s committed absentionism.
Those seven SF MPs will play no further part in Northern Irish politics until the next Westminster election, whenever that may be. And what’s not immediately visible is very unlikely to trouble either unionist or post unionist voters.
One reason why the old guard of unionism instinctively distrusted the Belfast Agreement was the explicit provision that when the numbers add up to leaving the UK no one would or could stand in its way. Over time, talk of resistance has faded.
In the east mixed marriages are commonplace (especially in metropolitan Belfast where couples can move to mixed areas where it is acceptable, in the west there are fewer options) and schools are evolving to cater for them. It has seeded a robust pluralism.
This is why pro Remain UK (rUK) voters gunning for the DUP. Generally it is not happening in the front line with Sinn Féin, but largely in the eastern interior where rUK voters have had enough of being characterised as conservatives and bigots.
SF and its proxy commentators in the media clearly believe this is a prelude to mass defection to the cause of Irish unity. But rUK folks are materially comfortable in Northern Ireland (and are very comfortable travelling freely right across the island).
They aren’t afraid of a United Ireland, yet nor are they seeking one, so there is currently no thought of moving out of the UK. They like their lives, the high standard of public education their kids can access, relatively cheap housing and public services.
These are not things obviously available to residents in the south, as the perusal of almost any Dail speech by a Sinn Féin deputy on the perceived scale of inequality in the south might confirm. Unity for them is a solution looking for a problem.
There have been a number of analyses published since the result on where this leave unionism. Alex Kane argues that it should press for a vision capable of garnering a majority. Philip Smith pitches for reflection, change and realignment.
The thing is I’m not sure a majority is what unionism needs (or can get), it just needs Nortehrn Ireland to work for most of the people who live there. In 2003, we wrote in the final pages of our influential Long Peace report on the future of Unionism:
Unionists must focus on a basic goal – a peaceful, economically prosperous and politically stable Northern Ireland – while drawing on a reservoir of deeply held values. But ‘no’ should never be their final answer. Defensiveness is far too predictable a strategy.
A genuinely disruptive politics must shape the terrain on which future contests for the Union will be fought, opening up alternatives, rather than shutting them down. It relies on democracy – a Northern Ireland that cannot govern itself will always be a brittle and unstable entity.
There must be space for enterprise, an audience for new voices, room for fresh ideas. Unionism would do well to cultivate a certain restlessness; to allow the questioning of hallowed principles; to let mavericks have their head; to encourage experimentation on a small scale to see what will work on the large.
Ultimately, this is a battle for people and not for land. 1066 and All That tells us that the English Civil War was ‘an extremely memorable struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Romantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).’ In future struggles, unionists need to be both right and attractive.
Ever since, political defensiveness has defined unionist politics, and the electoral track has led downwards, first for the UUP, then the DUP. But they have not been losing those voters to nationalism, but to brighter, post unionist alternatives.
One interesting take on the wash up after Sinn Fein’s disappointing result in the local and European Parliament elections was there was no bright upside to the story of doom and gloom of life under the coalition they told to the electorate.
It didn’t help that the media at times held their main rivals to a different standard of scrutiny. Contrast for instance the difference between the constant interruption of Gavin Robinson with the deference with Michelle O’Neill on The View?
The truth is that in the years that have passed since 1998 Northern Ireland has stablised, become less violent and far more open in its social attitudes than at any time since partition. And it is more prosperous with lower cost of living than the south.
Critically for both unionists and nationalists, people are now 20 times more likely to think about jobs, education, health and welfare than constitutional issues. Yet, NI politics has wound itself into a chronic state of future blindness.
Unionism has only one thing to sell, and that is the life we are all living right now. That contrasts with nationalism which despite all the calls on someone else (like the southern government) it has yet to come up with a vision that it might hope to sell.
Whilst northern Nationalism struggles to articulate that sellable vision [after many years of wittering on about it? – Ed] unionism already has what it needs to sell a Northern Ireland that works for everyone rather than just one minority or another.
Arthur Aughey once quoted Schopenhauer’s fable of the porcupines who, he wrote “believed, that life becomes tolerable: our mutual needs can be reasonably satisfied and, as far as possible, we can avoid pricking one another.”
Mutual needs, not mutual grumbles should be unionism’s watchword, and change. The principles of evolutionary biology suggest you vary your offerings, select the best, then amplify. Or more prosaically: contend and let the devil take the endmost.
Competition in unionism is one of its innate strengths. It can use that to take time to re-align, renew and rebuild alongside the genuine needs and ambitions (rather than feeding the fears) of all the people of Northern Ireland…
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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