The dangerous end of Northern Ireland’s Unionist Ascendancy

Unionists have lost their majority as the centrifugal forces of Brexit merge with the march of demography towards a united Ireland

It was intended as an act of defiance - an assertion of unionist power. Instead, this month’s decision by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to collapse the Belfast government was a measure of desperation - an inadvertent admission that, a century after Irish partition, power has slipped away. We are witnessing the end of the Unionist Ascendancy. This will be a painful, and dangerous, process. The familiar insecurity of the champions of the loyalist order is curdling into paranoia.

The staged resignation of the DUP first minister Paul Givan was scarcely a surprise. Jeffrey Donaldson, the party leader, had threatened as much many times in his vain attempt to force Boris Johnson to scrap the protocol that regulates Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trade with the EU. 

In truth, the DUP has reaped what it sowed. Northern Ireland voted to remain part of the EU, but Donaldson’s party was a vocal cheerleader for Brexit. Johnson’s version of the rupture was always going to create the customs border in the Irish sea that the DUP now denounces. Once Britain left the single market, preserving the open border with the Republic guaranteed by the Belfast peace agreement meant keeping the North within the EU’s regulatory ambit. That requires checks on trade with Britain. 

Donaldson can claim, I suppose, that he is at least being consistent. As much as unionists celebrate their “Britishness”, many have always lived in fear of “betrayal” by the British. Rightly so, some would say.  Northern Ireland is not over-endowed with friends at Westminster. As for the DUP, it has long framed its mission as the preservation of protestant rule. Any decision that marked out the province as constitutionally distinct from the rest of the UK or gave the Republic a say in its affairs has been deemed an assault on the union. 

Thus the DUP railed against Edward Heath’s ill-fated Sunningdale Agreement. It vehemently opposed Margaret Thatcher’s Anglo-Irish agreement. John Major’s Downing Street Declaration and the Belfast peace deal struck by Tony Blair were likewise denounced.

Donaldson, a politician scrabbling to retrieve a lost past, also has more immediate, tactical concerns. In May, Northern Ireland votes for a new assembly. The DUP has been languishing behind Sinn Fein in the opinion polls and faces a rising challenge from the more liberally-minded Ulster Unionists. On present figures, Sinn Fein will emerge as the largest party in the new assembly, handing Republicanism the role of first minister. For Donaldson, collapsing the executive was a last throw - kindling the embers of identity politics to persuade hard-line unionism to rally to the DUP.

It’s this coincidence of the centrifugal force of Brexit within the UK and the long march of demography that risks hardening neuralgic unionism into revived sectarianism. When boundary commissioners drew the lines of the island’s new political entity at the time of partition, it was estimated 62 per cent of the population counted themselves Protestants against 34 per cent owing fealty to Rome. For unionists, this was their right to rule. 

Now, a best guess would say there is nothing much between the numbers in the two communities. Many expect the latest census, due for publication later this year, will show Catholics a shade ahead. When Donaldson denounces the Irish protocol, it is against the backdrop of the end of the Unionist majority.

The mistake at this point would be to conclude that this means a united Ireland is now a short distance around the next corner. In reality, catholics cannot all be counted Irish nationalists, just as protestants are not universally supporters of the union. Among the young, catholic and protestant, the confessional divide is widely viewed as an anachronism. 

In any event, Irish unification cannot be a simple numbers game. Sectarianism still runs deep in sections of both communities. The DUP commands the support of a fifth or less of the electorate, but the moment is no less dangerous for that. The risk is that the loss of the unionist majority serves to empower extremists. One of the lessons of the violence that raged until 1997 was the capacity of sectarian hard-liners to wreck democratic politics. Unionism will struggle to learn how properly to share power. It will never happen if nationalism claims hegemony.

Thoughtful nationalists north and south understand well enough that they cannot build a peaceful, prosperous unified state on the basis of the snapshot provided by a referendum - a 52:48 per cent vote for unity, say. Consent will have to run much deeper among those who consider themselves British, even if it never quite reaches as far as Donaldson’s brand of unionism. If unification is not to engender a loyalist insurgency, Northern Ireland’s nationalists will have to show the generosity unionism denied them for most of the past century. 

The Republic has its own work to do. It could start by considering how the institutions of a united Ireland could be designed to accommodate the perhaps hundreds of thousands of new citizens who chose to remain British. A federal constitution? Entrenched rights for the unionist minority? And then how to find the billions in financial subsidies now paid to Northern Ireland from the UK Exchequer. Irish unity is taking on an air of inevitability. Perhaps that’s as it should be. But inevitable does not mean peaceful.