That’s it: the end of the ‘mad month’ when all the worst elements of unionism and Orangeism are on display for the edification of the public.
Still, it’s nothing like as appallingly offensive and provocative as it used to be. Damage is mostly now self-inflicted. It’s primarily unionist districts that suffer the toxic fumes and particles from gargantuan bonfires and the tons of rubbish left by drunken revellers.
Thanks to the Parades Commission, it’s also mainly unionist districts that Orange marches and their followers prance through, leaving a trail of garbage their spectators strew.
Thankfully the month passed off peacefully, though not if you were a migrant living in districts dominated by loyalist gangsters.
Unionists no doubt take comfort from these traditional performances of another peak parading month as evidence that nothing has changed, but they know change has happened and will continue.
It’s not only the smaller turnouts and the reduced geographical spread but the visibly ageing diminished membership in Orange lodges out marching, and most obviously the absence of professional and middle class input to the whole shebang.
That’s mirrored in the turnout in the British general election in July, the result of which delivered a profound shock to political unionism.
Unionists have no enthusiasm for their political leaders and why would they have after the litany of failure of the last eight years?
It’s the DUP which has suffered worst, losing three MPs and dropping 8.5% in its share of the vote. That wasn’t entirely due to the intervention of the TUV, though the party leader pulled off the most spectacular result by ejecting Ian Óg from North Antrim.
In East Antrim the DUP’s conference clown Wilson had a narrow squeak, coming in 1,300 votes ahead of Alliance, but the UUP was up 7.3%.
In Lagan Valley, the DUP vote share was down 11.5% while Alliance’s went up 10.9%.
Overall the TUV vote was down on its 2019 European result, the nearest equivalent outing for the party.
While the general disenchantment was with the DUP, unionism is hopelessly split and certain to remain so. Unionism is now represented at Westminster by three parties and an Independent.
The DUP itself is still divided, with some MLAs and a couple of MPs leaning towards Jim Allister’s view of the Irish Sea border.
Gavin Robinson, the DUP’s weak, silent leader is handicapped by his involvement in negotiating and overselling the ‘Safeguarding the Union’ con job; so too is Emma Little-Pengelly. She’s in an even weaker position, having no personal mandate and perceived as Donaldson’s protegée. To add to the party’s difficulties, the leader sits in Westminster and has no input into daily events at Stormont.
What the DUP has not come to terms with is that its bitter internal dispute is now irrelevant. ‘Safeguarding the Union’ is a dead parrot. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired.
It never amounted to a row of beans because it didn’t change a syllable of either the protocol or the Windsor Framework, but now there’s a Labour government which has binned it. So what are Allister, Carla Lockhart and Sammy Wilson going on about?
Is it just the age-old unionist quarrel about who can be most intransigent and bloody-minded? Who can best sustain the myth of an unchanging citadel? As Yeats’ wrote in Sailing to Byzantium, ‘studying monuments of its own magnificence’. Or, as you’ve read here before, in futile competition how best to ensure that the future will be the same as the past?
How will unionism come to terms with the reality that for the next 10 years – for overturning Starmer’s massive majority can’t be done in one go – they will be powerless to prevent change?
Admittedly it’s unprecedented, but unionists could engage with change to their own advantage.
For over a century unionists have blocked Irish self-determination by sedition, subversion, violence and the threat of violence, oblivious of the paradox that in so doing they have blocked their own self-determination as a minority ethno-nationalist bloc, a status they repeatedly reaffirm in demands for unionist unity über alles.
For over a century unionists have blocked Irish self-determination by sedition, subversion, violence and the threat of violence, oblivious of the paradox that in so doing they have blocked their own self-determination
There’s only one way to ensure their self-determination: sit down with representatives of the rest of the people on this island, with whom, like it or not, they have to live, and work out a settlement.
No-one else can do it for them. Not the British, ‘honest brokers’ as Starmer says.
Only a unionist leader can take unionist destiny in hand, but the snag is there’s no agreed unionist leader.