Opinion

The DUP is a busted flush. It has nothing to offer its own electorate, never mind the rest of us – Tom Collins

Tom Collins

Tom Collins

Tom Collins is an Irish News columnist and former editor of the newspaper.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson with party leader Arlene Foster and deputy leader Nigel Dodds outside 10 Downing Street last month. Picture by Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson with then party leader Arlene Foster and deputy leader Nigel Dodds outside 10 Downing Street
By Tom Collins

Are you excited about the prospect of a return to a power-sharing executive at Stormont? No, me neither.

The DUP is a busted flush. It has nothing to offer its own electorate, never mind the rest of us.

From a nationalist perspective, the DUP has done all the heavy lifting towards the goal of a united Ireland over the past two decades or more.

OK, Donaldson, Foster, Robinson et al don’t really stand comparison with the visionaries who brought about Irish freedom. But they have worked assiduously to prove that Northern Ireland really is a failed political entity.

DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and former leader Peter Robinson arrive for a diner at Hillsborough Castle at the end of an international conference marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement
The DUP under leaders like Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Peter Robinson have proved that Northern Ireland really is a failed political entity

It has never really worked for nationalists. But look at pretty much every aspect of public life, and it is pretty clear that it doesn’t work for unionists either.

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The current Conservative government has trashed the economy, eroded health and education, filled the rivers with sewage and destroyed the UK’s international reputation – yet patients in England, Scotland and Wales are still better off than many suffering the same diseases in Northern Ireland.

Boris Johnson (right) and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak pictured last year at Fourpure Brewery in London. Picture by Dan Kitwood/PA Wire
The Conservative government has trashed the economy, eroded health and education, filled the rivers with sewage and destroyed the UK’s international reputation

And still the DUP does not recognise that its ‘scorched earth’ policy hits its own people where it hurts. High levels of poverty, educational under-achievement and ill-health are crippling communities across the north.

Does the DUP give a fig? Not at all.

Its MPs and peers in Westminster sit down to lavish lunches subsidised by you and me and wrap themselves in ermine and fancy titles – it cannot be too long before the king says, “Arise, Sir Sammy”.

Meanwhile, its voters are relying on food banks, hoping they get timely treatment following their cancer diagnosis, and seeing their children failing to achieve their full potential.

It beggars belief that the penny hasn’t dropped with the DUP electorate. But like the boy looking at the fabled emperor, everyone else can see that the DUP has no clothes.

The party says the union with Britain is its highest priority. Everything else, including quality of life, is secondary.

But even here, it fails the credibility test.

Let us put to one side the fact that the DUP only wants equal treatment with Britain when it suits them – which is not fine if you are a woman in need of reproductive health care, a Gaelic speaker, or if you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

On its own terms, the DUP had only one thing to do. Preserve the union. Yet its actions have done precisely the opposite.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson speaks during an anti-Northern Ireland Protocol rally in Ballymoney last year
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson speaks during an anti-Northern Ireland Protocol rally in Ballymoney

Its obduracy on power-sharing has eroded support for Northern Ireland among those in the nationalist community who were prepared to accept the status quo if it was delivering on quality of life.

There was a time, not long ago, when the ‘Castle Catholic’ was a significant grouping. It’s now an endangered species. If Castle Catholics were Giant Pandas, there would be a breeding pair in Belfast Zoo as part of a conservation effort.

But it’s not just the DUP’s reluctance to work with other parties for the betterment of society that has shortened Northern Ireland’s lifespan.

The decision to embrace the hardest of hard Brexits was even more stupid than the Little Englanders who pushed it. For unionism, it was a strategic miscalculation of monumental proportions.

If Castle Catholics were Giant Pandas, there would be a breeding pair in Belfast Zoo as part of a conservation effort

The DUP believed Brexit would once again partition Ireland – what folly. Anyone with an understanding of Anglo-Irish politics knew that would not be an outcome of any Brexit negotiations.

Even the loons – Johnson, Truss, Sunak – knew that it was politically unthinkable to bring back a border in Ireland. The border down the Irish Sea – giving physical form to the reality that Northern Ireland is a ‘place apart’ – was an inevitability.

They can call it whatever they like. But it is the DUP’s doing that, for the north, all has changed utterly. And when the time comes for a border poll, history teaches us that the DUP can be relied on to drive up the vote for a united Ireland.