Diane Dodds took the final seat for the DUP much to the fury of former party members, writes DAN KEENAN.
THERE ARE silences and there are DUP silences – the latter being the more profound.
The hush was total following the announcement that Diane Dodds had won the final seat, sub-quota, with her party’s vote shredded.
Every Euro election result since the very first in 1979 had been greeted with a near biblical tumult from the ranks of DUP supporters.
Yesterday’s announcement was received by the party faithful with a silent horror. Never has the winning of a seat seemed like the opposite.
There was no hymn-singing Willie McCrea, there were no Paisleys.
But there was a quietly smiling Bairbre de Brún, a genial and beaming Jim Nicholson.
De Brún, topping the poll by a country mile, acknowledged her victory and her supporters as Gaeilge.
Supporters of Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister, union flags in hand, erupted in fury right on cue. Many staged a walkout.
Nicholson took the platform and delivered his rehearsed lines well.
“It’s great to be the first unionist elected,” he crowed.
How the Ulster Unionists loved that. Owen Paterson from the Tories stood and smiled contentedly among them – the first electoral outing of the new pact had succeeded.
“No more isolation,” roared Jim, his voice ascending in tandem with the roars of his supporters. “People wrote us off, but we are back!”
Dodds took the platform as one might expect to approach a gallows. Allister backers had reserved their best (worst?) for her. She said she “was pleased to have won a seat”, as if the words choked her.
“Bottom of the poll,” chanted the Allister fans. “Splitter, splitter, splitter!” She pressed on regardless, magnanimously thanking Jim Allister for his work in the last parliament.
“You didn’t say that in the campaign,” heckled one man, clearly possessed by loathing.
There is no greater crime within unionism than changing course.
“Thank your republican friends,” he persisted.
She said she would “fight for Ulster’s cause”, stoking up another crescendo. But that was as nothing to the roar that greeted Allister himself as he took the podium.
“We promised to stun and so we did,” he said to what was now the unionist equivalent of a Hill 16 roar.
His success was for every traditional unionist who refused to roll over before IRA/Sinn Féin, he said, sounding every bit the victor rather than the vanquished.
Never has a defeat seemed so much like the opposite.
He rounded off what was in reality a concession speech by striking a Churchillian note of defiance. He would fight DUP treachery on the beaches of the Paisley North Antrim heartlands in the Westminster election.
He would give his erstwhile colleagues in the party their P45s at the next Assembly election.
Borrowing from the book of Gerry Adams quotes, he cried: “We haven’t gone away, you know. Our day will come.”