On this, the shortest day of the year, perhaps we should devote a precious minute or two to feeling the pain of the DUP? Could it be that they are misunderstood by the general British public and by their fellow-Irish men and women?
Stephen Collins certainly thinks so. He stands shoulder to shoulder with them in this morning’s Irish Times. He dismisses the notion that the DUP might be working under the bed-clothes to ensure there’s a hard border between the north and the south of Ireland. Stephen supports this statement by saying “it ignores everything its [the DUP’S] representatives have said about the border issue since the referendum on EU membership.”
What’s more, the DUP’S claim that Theresa May’s proposed agreement with the EU would treat our GTC differently from the rest of the UK are soundly based:
“ If the withdrawal agreement’s version of the backstop comes into force, Northern Ireland will be prevented from leaving the single market and the customs union with the rest of the UK. In order to ship goods into the North, companies from Great Britain will have to complete a customs declaration because, by law, they will be operating from a third country.”
Let’s take those two points in turn.
To claim the DUP isn’t working towards a hard border in Ireland because they say they aren’t is about as naïve as to say Leo Varadkar is a good man because he gets up early in the morning. If Stephen cared to dip into the RHI inquiry sessions, he’d see that the DUP show a considerable gap between their claims of innocence over the giant waste of money in the scheme and the truth of the matter. Because someone says something means someone says something, nothing more.
As to the claim that our TGC will be treated like a third country, well, spot-on, Stephen. So it will. But then there are a range of ways in which the north has been treated differently from other UK regions. British soldiers, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t shoot dead 14 innocent people on the streets of Hackney. And they didn’t collude with right-wing armed gangs to kill innocent civilians in Birmingham or Wolverhampton. Our TGC is treated differently because it is different from the rest of the UK. Finchley it is not.
But let’s not be too hard on Stephen. He joins a long line of southern journalists who have always rushed to the defence of northern unionists, seeing their plight as uniquely painful. My own reaction is a bit less empathetic. When the British government wanted to introduce a Home Rule bill for Ireland in the early part of the last century, what did Ulster unionists insist on doing? Declaring themselves different from the rest of Ireland. The result was a bloody civil war and the violence which has marked and continues to mark life in Ireland to this day. So unionism is now finding itself faced with a future where there’ll be clear distinctions between it and the rest of the UK. That line from the Nobel prize-winner Robert Zimmerman springs to mind unbidden: “Tell me, how does it feel/To be on your own?”
Save your sympathy, Stephen, for the part of your country that’s about to be dragged out of the EU against its democratically-expressed wishes.
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