This weekend’s gathering will be about Peter Robinson putting his mark on the party, writes Dan Keenan
THIS WEEKEND’S DUP annual conference should be a new experience. For the decades of Paisley leadership the conference was a rally, a platform for the Doc to bask in the adulation he clearly relished, and an opportunity for some knockabout fun courtesy of conference clown Sammy Wilson at the expense of – well, everyone else.
With Paisley barely settled in his retirement armchair, things could hardly be more different under his former deputy, now leader.
Peter Robinson’s mammoth apprenticeship under the Doc already seems as old hat as the “Chuckle Brothers” era at Stormont when Paisley and McGuinness effortlessly laughed off opposition and criticism. That was merely five months ago.
The new times are marked by what Robinson told a visiting committee of Westminster MPs this week is a “businesslike” relationship with Sinn Féin, his co-equal colleagues in government. That relationship has clearly been devoid of any bonhomie, at least in public, and appears closer to the dire predictions of “a battle a day” between the lead parties of nationalism and unionism.
For four of those five months since Robinson ascended the DUP throne there has been no Executive meeting. The mood has soured as the rumpus over this weekend’s “homecoming” parade by the Royal Irish Regiment from Afghanistan has bitterly illustrated.
Nasty spats have erupted over the claims by various senior DUP figures that homosexuals can be “turned round”, that human activity has not contributed to climate change and that the earth is 6,000-years-old – an issue that ought to be taught in schools.
The party’s support for the British Labour government’s plan for 42-day detention of terrorist suspects (since defeated) showed that its relationship with Gordon Brown is probably more workmanlike than the one with Martin McGuinness, and a lot less wobbly than the courtship between Reg Empey’s Ulster Unionists and the Conservatives.
With efforts by some in the SDLP and Fianna Fáil to hold hands in public also seemingly halted for the moment, it seems that the promised evolution of new political relations which transcend Northern Ireland is going nowhere, in a hurry.
All of which probably suits Robinson rather well. His immediate battles are closer to home, perhaps a little too close.
Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), led by MEP Jim Allister who quit the party over its decision to go into government with republicans, continues to nag at the DUP.
What makes that a particularly uncomfortable experience is that Allister has outflanked his former party on the right, precisely the tactic that the DUP used so ruthlessly against Lord Trimble’s Ulster Unionists to reduce it to the Westminster rump it is today.
The DUP won an otherwise utterly inconsequential council election in Enniskillen last month, but only courtesy of the candidacy of Arlene Foster, a Stormont Minister with little need to dirty her hands in council politics.
Party sources, especially those in Belfast where the Allister factor is less prevalent, deny the electoral threat from the TUV is shackling the party and limiting its scope for movement, especially on the devolution of justice – the key issue behind the stand-off with Sinn Féin.
Progress on that issue will be made “in a series of baby steps”, said one source, not in a once-and-for-all leap of faith of the type that finally sank Trimble.
For all that, this conference will be about Robinson putting his mark on his party.
The Allister problem is also overshadowing the party’s efforts to name a European Parliament candidate to win back the seat the TUV now has. This conference was, at one stage, to be a platform for a high-profile candidate to be announced. That won’t be happening.