Dr Stephen Goss is an historian, policy and research manager, and a Conservative councillor in Reading.
Last week Ulster Unionist Leader Doug Beattie MC wrote a piece for the Belfast Telegraph in which he stated that “the DUP have stolen our clothes”.
He argued that many of the so-called concessions which HM Government had condescended to give the Democratic Unionists on the Irish Sea border (which remains), and the fact that Northern Ireland continues to be inside the EU so as to “get Brexit done”, have long been Ulster Unionist (UUP) policies, and that: “if you apply strategic thinking, they were always going to end up following the Ulster Unionist Party logic”.
Beattie is right to an extent; sticking with the clothing metaphor, the DUP have ended up trying to wear an old Ulster Unionist suit. They have found themselves having to defend concessions as part of an agreement which restores devolved government to Northern Ireland against persistent sniping from an intransigent wing of the party and more hard-line unionists.
Yet, while David Trimble and the Ulster Unionists were once harangued for compromising to establish, and then keep working, a fragile power-sharing settlement, not for the first time what the DUP have claimed as a victory is nothing of the sort.
The DUP refused to sign the Agreement in 1998 because they considered it a sell-out, and subsequently relished every opportunity to lambast the Ulster Unionists for the terms on which devolved government was restored to Northern Ireland.
It criticised the UUP (which were then the largest party and leaders of unionism) for its weakness, for supposedly granting concessions to republicanism, and for allegedly forcing unionism into retreat. Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster both resigned from the UUP in 2003 in opposition to the party’s policies and efforts to make power-sharing work, shortly afterwards joining the DUP.
By 2004 the rhetoric had paid off, as the DUP became the largest unionist party. Their parliamentary and local government manifesto the following year declared:
“Today it is the DUP’s agenda that dominates the political process with London, Dublin and Washington accepting our demands as fundamental prerequisites. The pan-nationalist front has been fractured and Sinn Fein [sic] is more isolated than ever before.”
After twenty years of DUP dominance, however, not only is unionism treated with derision in London, Dublin and Washington but its demands are fundamentally ignored by Brussels.
What’s more, far from being isolated, today Sinn Féin is the largest party in Northern Ireland. Michelle O’Neill, their Northern Irish leader, is now the First Minister.
Slow in coming, the electorate’s disillusionment with the DUP has seen unionist voters abandon the party. Not for the obvious alternative in the Ulster Unionists, or the smaller reactionary unionist parties, but Alliance: a party which refuses to take a stance on Northern Ireland’s constitutional position, is vehemently opposed to us having left the EU, and has embraced ‘progressive’ causes no less enthusiastically than Sir Keir Starmer, with his inability to define what constitutes a woman.
Since 2022, this has been the third largest party in Northern Ireland, leap-frogging over the waning Ulster Unionists. The so-called leadership of the DUP has produced a political situation where unionism is at its weakest position since the creation of Northern Ireland – and even their previous alleged triumphs are now coming back to bite them.
In 2006 the St Andrews Agreement, which restored power sharing, the late Ian Paisley’s great achievement was to secure recognition that although the positions are joint and equal in all respects, that the First Minister would take precedence over the Deputy First Minister, and the former receive a salary a token amount higher to signify that illusory primacy – now conferred on O’Neill.
Not everyone in the DUP was convinced that all this made sitting in government with the political wing of the IRA suddenly acceptable. A cadre of diehards, led by Jim Allister MEP, left the DUP in 2007 and founded a new party: Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV).
Allister was elected to the Assembly in 2011 and since then has been effectively a one-man opposition to the Executive in general and the DUP in particular (and an effective one at that).
Paisley and the DUP had been a thorn in the side of the Ulster Unionists, as fierce hard-line critics, for over 30 years. Yet having stolen the UUP’s mantle, they quickly found themselves in the same position as the Ulster Unionists they had long reviled: looking over their shoulder lest they lose ground to their own vicious unionist critics, now in the form of Allister and the TUV.
Unionism has been in serious decline since the DUP became its dominant party. It cannot be said that the DUP have come to lead unionism, as they have embodied the Yes, Minister quote: ‘I am their leader; I must follow them’.
Under the DUP’s watch, unionists lost their majority on Belfast City Council for the first time in the City’s history. As a result, in 2012 Republicans, Nationalists, and Alliance voted to stop flying the Union Flag from the City Hall and restrict it to 18 designated days instead of flying it the long-established 365 days a year.
To put it mildly, this did not go down well with unionists and loyalists. They took to the streets of Belfast and protested violently. These events propelled to notoriety one Jamie Bryson, a vocal and highly influential loyalist who has denied connexions to the UVF. (In the DUP, both Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson, his successor as party leader, also always denied any link to paramilitarism).
Since the ‘Flag Protests’, Bryson has become the leading figure in opposing the Northern Ireland Protocol, and all of the superficial efforts to mask the fact that a constituent part of the United Kingdom has been left in EU. Such is his dominance of the narrative that the DUP and TUV leaders felt compelled to attend and speak at a rally at his behest in 2022.
Since Great Britain – but not Northern Ireland – left the EU, the DUP have danced to Bryson’s tune and refused to return to government until the Irish Sea border is removed. Three weeks ago they decided they would return anyway, having negotiated utterly meaningless concessions they hope can be sold to the unionist electorate as successes.
The Windsor Framework was undoubtedly an improvement on the Protocol. However, the Safeguarding the Union Command Paper on which the DUP have gone into government as junior partners constitutes a defeat. It announces some rebranding and meaningless legislation reiterating Northern Ireland’s statutory place within the UK; as the EU were not involved in negotiations but have rubber-stamped the deal, demonstrates there is no meaningful change.
The DUP’s 2001 manifesto stated:
“Under the Belfast Agreement all-Ireland bodies with Executive powers have been set up with unionists in a permanent minority… The range and powers of the all-Ireland bodies are being already being [sic.] increased. An embryo united Ireland government is being set in place in which UUP Ministers are playing an active role.”
Safeguarding the Union leaves unionists in a minority. The range of powers all-Europe bodies have over Northern Ireland are unchanged. With Sinn Féin dominant in Northern Ireland and poised to form the next government in Dublin, an embryo united Ireland government is being set in place – one in which DUP Ministers are playing an active role.
Since 2006 the DUP have tried to dress themselves up in Ulster Unionist clothes. They do not fit. Unionism is in a much weaker position since they became its largest party. Safeguarding the Union has been sold by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson as a new suit – but it’s nothing more than the Emperor’s new clothes.
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