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The DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson was on RTÉ the other night explaining that the British Government must do more on issue of the NI Protocol and that the Unionist people of the North felt betrayed by Boris Johnson. Yes, those “plain speaking” people of Ulster, as referred to in Jeffrey’s tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh, who apparently prefer to riot rather than speak plainly. The truth is the UK Government and the EU are close to finessing the NI Protocol, ironically without the DUP, which was never going to ‘go away’, no-matter how much Unionists wanted it to. To think that violence was going to achieve that goal was naive to say the least, a lesson Unionism should have learned nearly twenty-five years ago. However, when the new version of the Protocol is released, we will no doubt hear how the demands of the Unionist people of ‘Norn Iron’ have been accepted. Political Unionism did little to stop the violence. When a DUP Councillor was interviewed at the Cloughfern Roundabout in Newtownabbey, he was standing what looked like around two hundred yards away from the rioters talking about how they were betrayed by BoJo and that the violence was understandable.
The DUP, UUP and others must have been on another planet while many of these riots were taking place. They consistently referred to them as “peaceful protests” even while petrol bombs were being thrown at police lines. Only in the last few days of violence did political Unionism actually step forward and imply the violence had to stop, while sitting in the nice warm offices while nationalist leaders and representatives stood in their communities between people who were realistically their own voters and Loyalist rioters, trying to keep the two sides apart. The DUP are still, to this day, attempting to play down their role in what unfolded in the North over the past week. A role which saw the NI Protocol rolled out against the wishes of their Loyalist voters.
Our Jeffrey had a bit of a rant at Simon Coveney too – “We need to see an end to the lectures of unionism that we are just going to have to suck it up in terms of the Northern Ireland Protocol”. Obviously, this wouldn’t have been the case if the DUP had actually worked toward a deal, instead of scuppering any deal that was placed on the negotiating table. Simon Coveney, for all his flaws, is an extremely shrewd negotiator. He and the Irish Government gave the British Government and by extension the DUP, copious amounts of space and time and in some cases actually fought the UK’s corner in the Brexit negotiations. While the DUP were urging the British Government and Boris Johnson to outright scrap the NI Protocol which they helped engineer, Irish MEPs, unknown to the UK Government, were lobbying the EU Commission on the UK’s behalf to change parts of the NI Protocol which were causing issues…and then BoJo waded in and bounced both the Irish Government and the EU by temporarily suspending parts of the Protocol. So, in a way, Northern Irish Unionism does need to “suck it up” because they have quite literally caused all the issues surrounding the NI Protocol.
Boris Johnson’s inaction on the violence here simply highlights the fact that the North doesn’t rate very highly on his or his government’s agenda. It was very telling that the Irish Government came out quickly and condemned the violence while it took Boris Johnson almost a week to do the same. He is more focused on his ‘Little England’ than anywhere else and that has been the case since he took office. The only reason he was so interested in the North initially was because he needed the DUP to make up his majority. The DUP were warned numerous times that when Johnson no longer needed them, they would be kicked back across the Irish Sea so fast they wouldn’t have time to shout “Never”. They didn’t listen.
What we now see is a DUP side-lined, backed into a corner of their own making, losing votes to the TUV and to a lesser extent the UUP, with their voting base rioting because of what they actually voted for. Will Unionism learn their lesson this time or will we be quoting the same line to them next election, spoken by the very man they idolise and are faced with every day on the drive up to Stormont, who spoke Irish and played Gaelic games as a child and who labelled himself an ‘Irish Unionist’.
”What a fool I was! I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into Power.” – Edward Carson
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