Ian’s unicorn moment

“Oh look – over there – a unicorn standing on its hind legs!”

That’s not a direct quotation from Ian Paisley Jr, but it does indicate what Paisley and the DUP generally are seriously anxious to do: get the spotlight away from them as they scurry around in circles, bumping into each other, climbing over each other, falling to their knees sobbing.

Indeed the DUP has much to sob about. The good news for it is that it has been playing to its knuckle-dragger constituency with enormous success. The bad news is that in doing so, it has alienated just about everybody else  – nationalists, republicans, Alliance Party, Ulster Unionist Party, all political parties in the south, all the political parties at Westminster, all the countries of the EU, all of the decision-makers in the US.

So what unicorn stunt Is the Man Who Would Be King If the DUP Was Hereditary up to now? Well, he figures the Good Friday Agreement is not functioning (pssst, Ian a chara – would that have anything to do with the stay-at-home policy of the DUP?)  so it needs to be changed, and one important change would be that any border poll would have to produce a super-majority to  achieve success.

That’d be like the super-majority of Irish people that was necessary to carve out NEI in the first place.

Ian the Younger isn’t all talk either. He’s putting together a bill for the House of Commons.  His bill calls for “a supermajority of votes in favour of a proposal for constitutional change on which a referendum is being held in order for it to be decided in the affirmative.”  It was the absence of such a supermajority, Ian claims, that led to the difficulties with Brexit.

No it wasn’t. It was the deluded clowns who thought that they’d  Make Britain Great Again and Harden the Border while they were at it. The clowns who promised sunny uplands, independence for the UK, juicy deals with powerful countries, and whatever you’re having yourself. And didn’t the DUP stuff money into a big drive in Britain that it was hoped would help Brexit happen?

Somebody once said of President Richard Nixon “Think what that man could have achieved if only he’d been loved”.  Maybe if Ian’s mammy Eileen was to give him a great big warm, slow-motion hug, it might help her son realise that., far from distracting,  he’s just plunged the DUP into even deeper doo-doo than it was already neck-high in.