Where does the DUP go from here?
Northern Ireland's largest Unionist party was persuaded into the Northern Ireland Executive but som supporters condemn the deal: what does the future hold?
For reasons I understand but feel obliged to frown on, the general public’s attention, when it has been dragged towards the subject of Northern Ireland by some major news story, drifts away again very quickly. I said in The Irish Times in 2022—the 50th anniversary of the suspension of the Parliament of Northern Ireland—that this attitude extends to politicians at Westminster and even ministers. “The real problem,” I maintained, “is that Northern Ireland has for the past 50 years largely been consigned by most of Whitehall to a box marked ‘Too difficult’.”
We’ve seen this happen again only this month. It seems an age away but it was not even a month ago that a new Northern Ireland Executive was formed after the Democratic Unionist Party agreed to participate in the Northern Ireland Assembly after nearly two years boycotting the institution. The media and, insofar as one can judge, the public acknowledged the historic nature of that day, with Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill becoming the first Nationalist to head Northern Ireland’s government, while the DUP’s Emma Little-Pengelly became deputy first minister. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, travelled to Belfast for this significant occasion, but soon we looked away and returned to thinking about other things.
I exempt myself from that because Northern Ireland is a subject in which I’m very interested, and I wrote a few pieces about O’Neill’s appointment (for The Spectator), the future of Northern Ireland’s economy (for CapX) and the prospects for a functioning cross-community administration (for City AM). But it would be uncharitable of me to criticise anyone for missing a news item last week that Sammy Wilson, the MP for East Antrim, had resigned as the DUP’s chief whip in the House of Commons while remaining “a party officer”. He seems to have made no comment on his decision, but was a stern critic of the agreement his party reached with the UK government to participate in the assembly at Stormont and the devolved administration. This agreement was set out in the command paper Safeguarding the Union.
When the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, announced the agreement in the House of Commons on 31 January, Wilson spared no criticism. He noted, correctly, that ministers in the exceutive about to be formed “will be expected by law to adhere to and implement laws that are made in Brussels, which they will have no say over, no ability to amend and no ability to stop”. This state of affairs was, he went on, the responsibility of a “spineless, weak-kneed, Brexit-betraying government, refusing to take on the EU and its interference in Northern Ireland”.
Wilson is an odd man. He has been in the House of Commons since 2005, when he ousted the Ulster Unionist MP Roy Beggs, a rather stolid Orangeman and former teacher who regarded the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement with enormous suspicion and believed in grammar schools and academic selection. Wilson was also a teacher, latterly head of economics at Grosvenor Grammar School in Belfast, but he enjoyed a parallel career in local government. He represented the DUP on Belfast City Council for almost 30 years (1981-2010) and was twice lord mayor of Belfast, in 1986/87 and 2000/01, the first DUP politician to hold the office. The lord mayor presides at council meetings, with a second or casting vote in the event of a tie, but is otherwise a ceremonial and ambassadorial role for the city. (From 1921 to 1972, he also sat ex officio in the Northern Ireland Senate.)
He spent most of the 1980s and 1990s, as did the majority of the DUP, ploughing. disgruntled furrow as a hardline unionist who saw potential betrayal around every corner (not always inaccurately). In 1986, he chaired the rally in the Ulster Hall at which a new paramilitary group, Ulster Resistance, was unveiled, with speeches by the DUP leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, and his deputy, Peter Robinson. When a cache of arms was discovered in Armagh in 1988 and linked to the group, Wilson defended “the right of Unionist people to resist”, and added that “Ulster Resistance are doing no more and no less than Lord Edward Carson”.
Although the DUP campaigned against the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and the Northern Ireland Assembly for which it provided, it has prospered since 1998, displacing the Ulster Unionists as the main Unionist party. Wilson was elected to the assembly for East Antrim in 2003, and acted as the DUP’s education spokesman. He served in the executive as environment minister from 2008 to 2009, then minister of finance and personnel (2009-13). However, some of his views diverge from the mainstream: he dismissed anthropogenic climate change as a “myth” based on “dodgy science” and criticised the “green lobby” and scientists for fostering “the illusion that there is a serious problem”; after a spate of racist attacks on Romanian families in south Belfast, he noted “charges of racism were always coincided with the holding out of the hand for more money”; and in 1992 he had argued against allowing gay rights activists to use facilities at Belfast City Hall on the grounds that “They are poofs. I don’t care if they are ratepayers. As far as I am concerned they are perverts.”
Wilson stood down from the executive in 2013 and gave up his seat in the assembly two years later, concentrating on his duties at Westminster. He was an enthusiastic supporter both of holding a referendum on the United Kingdom’s EU membership and of leaving the EU:
to break down the walls of the prison in which we have been held for the last 40-odd years. In that time, we have been robbed of our money, our fishing grounds have been violated, our farmers have been destroyed and the EU Court of Justice has run over the rights of victims while upholding those of terrorists.
He was the DUP’s spokesman on Brexit, and became the party’s chief whip at Westminster in December 2019.
Although Wilson opposed the deal his party concluded at the end of January, he was careful not to criticise the party leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, directly, unlike some of his colleagues outside the House of Commons. Earlier this month, with former deputy leader Lord Dodds of Duncairn and party chairman Lord Morrow, he co-wrote an editorial in The Belfast News Letter which pointed out that the EU still maintained jurisdiction over Northern Ireland and a border still existed in the Irish Sea. This was, they were careful to say, “no fault of our negotiators, and it’s no criticism of their commitment”, but their conclusion was stark.
The Government has accepted, and is implementing, the right of the EU to exercise these powers or indeed to demand that all goods go through the full EU border control checks if the EU decides it wants them to. Thus it is obvious that the battle on the Irish Sea border is not over.
However, they noted that the arrangements were to be reviewed in November 2024, and they vowed to keep the pressure on the government and continue to campaign against the agreement, and “fight on for our entitlement to be treated as equal citizens within the United Kingdom”.
I have some sympathy for Wilson’s stance on Safeguarding the Union (and that of Dodds and Morrow). For all the protestations of government ministers, the command paper contains very few material changes to the EU’s involvement and jurisdiction over Northern Ireland and the consequent distinctions between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Windsor Framework, which was agreed between the UK and the EU in February 2023 to make the Northern Ireland Protocol more palatble, was not repealed or altered. For purists, and part of me is among them, that strikes at the very heart of the Union.
Article VI of the Union with Ireland Act 1800 is—it seems to me, as a non-lawyer—unambigous on the matter of commerce within the union which the legislation creates.
The subjects of Great Britain and Ireland shall be on the same footing in respect of trade and navigation, and in all treaties with foreign powers the subjects of Ireland shall have the same privileges as British subject.
However, the Supreme Court ruled in February 2023 that Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, part of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement made under the authority of the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020, did infringe Article VI, but that the primary legislation passed by Parliament “authorised the making of the Withdrawal Agreement (which included the Protocol)”. The judgement pointed out the 2020 act explicitly stated that it was:
An Act to implement, and make other provision in connection with, the agreement between the United Kingdom and the EU under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union which sets out the arrangements for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU.
This wording in the act’s long title essentially authorised modifications or infringements of the Act of Union, which meant that while Article VI was compromised, that was done with the authority of Parliament.
Whatever one thinks of this legal argument, it has been exhaustively explored by the courts. Wilson and other opponents of the new arrangements are perfectly entitled to maintain that in legal terms very little has changed from the protocol through the Windsor Framework to the command paper, and then take a political view that it is an intolerable imposition on their view of what the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland should be. However, they must realise that the legal arguments have been conducted and decided, and because they are now making a political argument, it is only amenable, if at all, to a political solution.
It is not clear what further developments might be possible. The most vehement of opponents of the new arrangements, like Jim Allister KC, the leader and guiding spirit of Traditional Unionist Voice, and activist Jamie Bryson, have condemned the deal as not only ineffective but damaging. Allister recently wrote that the command paper meant Northern Ireland’s “place as EU territory… has been underwritten”, the province “is no longer exclusively ruled by laws we make in our own country and which we can change” and the “dismantling of our Union continues”.
Bryson has dubbed the agreement the “Surrender Deal”. In his view, it maintains “continued subjugation and suspension of the Acts of Union”, and:
proclaims fidelity to the foundational importance of the Acts of Union, whilst championing arrangements which leads to the subjugation and suspension of Article 6 which is the core of the economic Union created by Article 6.
What is particularly significant about Bryson’s approach, and to an extent Allister’s, is that he sees the DUP as knaves rather than fools, witting accomplices in undermining the Union and active would-be deceivers of the people of Northern Ireland. He believes the leadership of the DUP are seeking to stifle any debate about the command paper: he accepts that there “can be honest disagreement about purist principles v pragmatism & how that tactically manifests itself”, but not in the current climate because “there can’t be honest disagreement between the truth and a lie. The truth is what it is.”
As I have said, and say again for clarity, I think the Allister/Bryson view is in many instances correct in constitutional terms. While repeating that I am not a lawyer, it is undeniably the case that, however we arrived at this situation, there are different customs and border arrangements in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the latter falls within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice while the former does not. The argument is made that this is legally acceptable because of the implied authority of the long title of the withdrawal act and its ability tacitly to modify the Act of Union. In political terms, however, as I have made it clear we have to deal, creating two separate and different jurisdictions is not a very Unionist position to contrive, and it is certainly understandable that some Unionists find it uncomfortable at best, intolerable at worst.
That can, of course, apply to all sorts of arrangements. In his “second career” as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down from 1974 to 1987, Enoch Powell, for whom the indivisible authority of the Crown in Parliament was almost an item of religious faith, never really reconciled himself to the idea of any kind of devolution. The UUP had objected to the suspension and then abolition of the Parliament of Northern Ireland after 1972, and found itself badly divided over the following year’s Sunningdale Agreement which provided for a new assembly and a power-sharing executive. It was ambivalent towards the abortive Northern Ireland Assembly which had a shadowy half-existence between 1982 and 1986, and furiously rejected the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. Ulster Unionists then participated in the purely deliberative Northern Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue 1996-98, and engaged in the talks which led to 1998’s Belfast/Good Friday Agreement as the principal representatives of the Unionist community. The DUP initially took part in the talks but withdrew once Sinn Féin was allowed to participate before the Provisional IRA had decommissioned its weapons, and opposed the agreement.
Powell had a different plan. Although he never expressed it in public, he wanted to persuade his new party—and in particular its cautious, rather dour leader, James Molyneaux, who regarded Powell with respect bordering on deference—to embrace an attitude of integrationism. This would entail a rejection of devolving power to a single Northern Ireland body and instead governing the province in the same way as England, Scotland and Wales, that is, through the Westminster Parliament. To reflect this, the number of Northern Ireland MPs, which had been 12 since 1950, should increase (as indeed it did in 1983, to 17, under the provisions of the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act 1979).
There was a narrow window in which this reorientation might have been practical. Airey Neave, the Conservative MP who was shadow Northern Ireland secretary from 1975 to 1979 and a close ally of Margaret Thatcher, seems to have favoured some kind of integrationist strategy, favouring the reform and strengthening of local government in Northern Ireland rather than a single devolved authority. This would have been compatible with Powell’s views, though it is uncertain whether the bulk of the UUP would have been accommodating. But Neave was murdered by the Irush National Liberation Army a few weeks before the 1979 general election, and the new secretary of state, Humphrey Atkins, reverted to the traditional Westminster policy of pursuing administrative devolution.
A very persuasive case can be made that integrationism was the ‘purest’ form of Unionism, since it would have aligned Northern Ireland most closely with the other parts of the United Kingdom. But—and here is its relevance to the current situation—however intellectually coherent it might have been, in political terms it had virtually no support. By definition it was antithetical to Nationalists and Republicans, and the UUP still hankered after some kind of replacement for the original Stormont parliament. Ian Paisley, as he mapped out his full ideological landscape, was briefly drawn towards integrationism in the early 1970s, but then, he also flirted with supporting an independent Northern Ireland for a while in 1973-74. With no supportes, an idea is useless.
Mutatis mutandis, I think we have to take a similar attitude towards the current situation in Northern Ireland. Even if one accepts that the arrangements confirmed by Safeguarding the Union are noxious and corrosive towards Unionism, they are now in place, and the establishment of an executive has, for better or worse, been widely welcomed. (I am heartily sceptical about how well it will work in addressing any major policy challenges, but that is another issue.) One might wish the executive had not been formed, or regret that it was formed under false pretences of some kind, but it has been in place for almost a month now, and the messages being broadcast by all parties involved at the beginning of February, while duly cautious, were not rolling the pitch for further suspensions. My instincts, and they are only that, persuade me that most parties currently feel that this has to work, at least institutionally.
Which sees us arrive at the most challenging question. If you dislike the command paper—and I absolutely accept that many have valid reasons for doing so—what is the next step? Where do we go from here? A negation is not sufficient, it cannot simply be said that what we have is bad and must be pulled down. That might be adequate in a seminar or an abstract philosophical discussion, but in the real world there is a jurisdiction of 1.9 million people which has to be governed and managed. There are decisions to be made and policies to be implemented. So what is the alternative?
This is a question of profound importance and huge scale. In my view, it touches upon another question, which concerns the future of the DUP. The party is 52 years old now, and this September marks the 10th anniversary of the death of its founder, Ian Paisley. It exists in a world wholly different from the one which gave birth to it: the 2021 census revealed that, for the first time, those identifying as Roman Catholics outnumbered Protestants, at 42.3 per cent and 37.4 per cent. The story of the decade since the previous census was not so much one of the growth in the number of Catholics, which had gone from 40.8 per cent to 42.3 per cent, but the slump in the Protestant population from 41.6 per cent to 37.4 per cent.
This was a seismic event. The borders of Northern Ireland had been drawn for the Government of Ireland Act 1920 very carefully to provide the most coherent political unit in which the Protestant population would be comfortably dominant. Three of the nine counties of the historic province of Ulster—Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan—were excluded as predominantly Catholic, leaving a six-counties jurisdiction in which Protestants outnumbered Catholics by around two to one. Even so, Fermanagh and Tyrone had Catholic majorities, and only Antrim and Down were heavily dominated by Protestants. At the last census, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh and County Londonderry all had Catholic majorities, and Protestants only represented the largest minority in Antrim.
The elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly in May 2022 therefore presented a predictable but still historic change. For the first time in the province’s history, the largest party was not a Unionist one but the Republicans of Sinn Féin, who won 27 of the 90 seats. The DUP came second with 25. This would entitle Sinn Féin to nominate the first minister; the only consolation for Unionists was that in terms of designation they remained fractionally ahead, with 37 Unionist MLAs of all parties, 35 Nationalists and 18 (17 of them the Alliance Party) designated as “other”. It must be at least possible, however, that there will be predominance of Nationalist MLAs within two or three electoral cycles.
The DUP doesn’t look like a political organism that’s ready and able to adapt to this changing landscape. Over the past five elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, its vote share has fallen consistently, from 30.1 per cent in 2007 to 21.3 per cent in 2022, a high of 38 seats to today’s 25. Having had two leaders in 44 years (1971-2015), it has had three in the eight years since (though one, Edwin Poots, now speaker of the assembly, lasted little more than a month). While it may be true that Northern Ireland is more socially conservative than Great Britain, the DUP has gradually become more notable for its positions on moral and ethical questions. Poots, for example, is a young-earth creationist who rejects the theory of evolution, and he struck a flat note in 2016 when he identified the most important role of the newly elected first minister, Arlene Foster, as being a “wife, mother and daughter”. His colleague Jim Wells, who was briefly minister of health from 2014 to 2015, maintained a ban on gay men donating blood after similar strictures had been lifted elsewhere in the UK in 2011, telling a hustings in South Down that “the gay lobby is insatiable, they don’t know when enough is enough”. Trevor Clarke, a South Antrim MLA, admitted in 2016 he had only recently learned that heterosexuals could contract HIV/AIDS, and was forced to apologise in 2020 for liking a social media post which identified the Covid-19 pandemic as “God’s judgement” for the legalisation of same-sex marriage and abortion.
People are entitled to socially conservative views, of course, but the DUP must contend with an electoral impact. In 2017, a study by the University of Liverpool showed that while four in five Protestants under 40 supported Northern Ireland staying in the United Kingdom, only a minority, 47 per cent, voted for Unionist parties in Westminster and Stormont elections, in part because of their professed policies on same-sex and inter-denominational marriage and abortion. The law on abortion in Northern Ireland was liberalised and brought into line with the rest of the UK in 2019—on the initiative of the UK Parliament, not the Northern Ireland Assembly—and surveys suggest the majority of the population supports decriminalisation. However, the devolved administration has been extremely slow to commission services, and in 2022 the chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, Alyson Kilpatrick, said that “women and girls are still faced with deplorable options” with regard to abortion provision, which is particularly sparse in the west of the province.
This is an acute dilemma for the DUP. It still has very close links to the conservative Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, the denomination established by Ian Paisley in 1951, of which 65 per cent of its elected representatives have over the years been adherents. The majority of party members are evangelical Christians. In 2021, the party leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, met with representatives of the Rainbow Project, an LGBT activist group, the first time a DUP leader had held such a meeting. He had also supported the apology offered by then-deputy leader Paula Bradley for some past public statements by the party on these issues. But apologies from the leadership for the way in which views have been communicated do not resolve the problem the DUP faces as an electoral force.
Quite simply, without making any value judgements, the gap between the views of the existing party membership and the broader mass of less committed voters, especially those under 40, is widening, and there is no obvious way to address it. While the idea of voters switching straight from the DUP to Sinn Féin might be far-fetched, it is entirely possible that it could lose support both to the UUP and to Alliance in one direction, but also perhaps to TUV in the other if it makes too big a step in a more liberal direction. Yet if it makes no change at all it risks clinging on to a shrinking island of support. While the extent is often overestimated, demographic change does not favour the DUP’s core supporters, since Catholic families are generally larger than Protestant ones, and the Protestant population is older and therefore dying at a higher rate.
The question of what opponents of the Safeguarding the Union command paper do next is therefore analogous to that of how the DUP responds to changing political circumstances. There are passionate arguments to be had about what has happened, and whether it is right or wrong, beneficial or disadvantageous, but they have little to contribute to creating a strategy for the short- and medium-term future. The choice now seems to me binary: reject the notion of Northern Ireland’s access to the EU single market, which underpins the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Windsor Framework and the current command paper, on the grounds that the cost is constitutionally noxious, or accept the status quo, even if only for the time being, and focus on using the DUP’s participation in the executive to address problems like economic growth, the sustainability of Northern Ireland’s financial foundations, the shape and size of the public sector, inward investment and educational attainment. Being ruthlessly pragmatic for a moment, I just cannot see that there is a significant constituency which would support the former course of action.
The DUP finds itself caught between historical and demographic forces. The population of Northern Ireland is becoming less sectarian, or at least less defined primarily by confessional identity, it is becoming younger and its attitudes are becoming to an extent more liberal and pluralistic. But the section of the electorate on which it believes, probably rightly, it can most comfortably rely feels embattled and under siege. The UUP, led since 2021 by former regular Army officer Doug Beattie, has attempted to redefine itself as an inclusive and pragmatic political force. In his campaign for the leadership, Beattie offered to be someone “able to reach out to all people in Northern Ireland regardless of what your religion is, sexual orientation or ethnicity”. He framed last year’s local elections in explicitly pragmatic terms, offering “a clear choice between delivery or dysfunction”. It was not a message which resonated, a least not for the UUP, which dropped three points to receive only 10.9 per cent of the vote and 54 councillors, down from 75. But it is hard to see what other direction Beattie could have sought.
This is a transformation which is not really open to the DUP. The legacy of Paisley is too important, too intrinsic to abandon completely, and in any case its diminution might reasonably cause people to wonder what the DUP was for in a multi-party local democracy. Speaking, admittedly, as an interested and sympathetic outsider, I have a sense that no major political figure from any tradition has yet found a new way to articulate ideas and satisfy aspirations without the crushing burden of the past, theirs and that of others.
Doubtless members of Alliance think that is what they’re doing, and their rise from 3.7 per cent in the assembly elections 21 years ago to 13.5 per cent in 2022, which has given them two portfolios in the 10-member executive, lends the argument some weight. However, although they are the third party in the assembly, they hold only 17 seats out of 90. While they have benefited from the increasing diversity and liberalism of Northern Ireland, they remain strongest in urban areas and particularly Belfast: by contrast, they have been unable to win any councils eats in Mid-Ulster or Derry and Strabane, and are weak in Fermanagh and Omagh as well as Newry, Mourne and Down in the south, and in Causeway Coast and Glens in the north. Perhaps like the DUP, if for different reasons, they don’t necessarily have a great deal of electoral headroom in the current circumstances.
I sometimes wonder if the political situation in Northern Ireland is waiting for an unidentified catalyst, something that will force substantial change and bring fluidity. In the medium- to long-term, perhaps that is simply a slow transition towards a united Ireland. As a Unionist, I hope not, though as a democrat I’m fully resigned to its inevitability if that is demonstrably the will of the electorate (though I don’t think it’s the only possible outcome nor do I think it is imminent). Alternatively, perhaps one of the existing parties will develop a new approach or find a new figurehead that unlocks substantially greater electoral appeal: if so, I suspect it will not be the DUP or Sinn Féin. More modestly, perhaps the system will be dragged towards a degree of change by the grinding necessity of everyday administration, being forced to focus on what the Americans call “pocketbook issues”, because they fear, I think rightly, that the electorate will punish as self-indulgent further theatricality over constitutional issues and unwillingness to engage.
Unionism is on the back foot in Northern Ireland. The UUP has its own soul-searching to do, but the DUP faces fundamental questions over its identity, its past and its future. I don’t even know if these questions can be answered satisfactorily, let alone what those answers might be. And yet they all poured forth, for me, at any rate, at the prompting of the tight-lipped resignation of a 71-year-old former teacher from East Antrim, an occasionally intemperate exponent of the unironic moustache, Sammy Wilson. Sometimes, politics is also this.
A very fair analysis of the situation. You might have acknowledged that the DUP are, to some extent extent, the authors of their current dilemma. They were cheerleaders for the hardest possible Brexit and Sammy was probably the loudest voice in that respect. The effects on Ireland (North and South) were largely ignored during the Brexit referendum campaign. From the day after the referendum, the Irish Government and the EU made absolutely clear that they would not agree anything which created new trade barriers between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In that situation, there were only two ways new trade barriers between Britain and Northern Ireland could be avoided (there were already some checks on goods travelling between Britain and Northern Ireland); (a) abandon Brexit or (b) leave the EU without a deal. When push came to shove, it was clear that there was not a majority in Parliament for the latter option. The DUP foolishly put their trust in Boris Johnson and helped him destroy Theresa May's deal which tried to square the circle. Johnson then double crossed them by agreeing a deal which safeguarded Britain's trading interests at the expense of Northern Ireland. The only way to eliminate these new trade checks is for the UK to choose closer trading alignment with the EU.