The past year in Northern Ireland’s politics has been dominated by the effort to contain Covid, and the equally difficult fallout from Brexit. Underlying both is a dynamic that buoys up nationalism/republicanism and highlights the fissures within unionism.
Unionists see the protocol's regulation of trade, agreed then disowned by Boris Johnson, as undermining their Britishness and potentially demolishing the Union. Nationalists and an increasingly vocal centre-ground see instead an inevitable out-working of Brexit, in need of tweaks but of potential benefit to NI business.
The strains in unionism have told on the streets, in disorder well short of the violence unionists insisted they saw coming but still upsetting to people who saw Troubles flashpoints rekindled. The effect on already tense unionist politics saw off two leaders of the DUP in quick succession. To bolster his authority current leader Jeffrey Donaldson, who is based in Westminster, needs a Stormont seat that would bring him back to the centre of political action.
A DUP/Sinn Féin dog-paddle which some think is tacitly synchronised – both want to maintain political jobs and status – has kept Stormont afloat but scarcely moving. There is an occasional open clash, as over the recent DUP anti-abortion Bill presented as respect for the disabled and reverence for life. It was also, said the alliance that defeated it, unmistakably an effort to diminish the provision Westminster proposes and that unionists have blocked. SF's major block of 26 decided the vote, their position on legislation still not entirely clear. But the two Green MLAs, the single PBP representative, all but one Alliance MLA, half the Ulster Unionists, one third of the SDLP and Independent Clare Sugden surely resembles the non-sectarian centrism held up for decades as what normal politics in the North would look like.
Covid rates have been changeable, mostly worse than those across the border and varying wildly across the region. Unionists have by and large been more sympathetic than nationalists to business complaints, more resistant to restrictions, less inclined to mirror southern regulation, unnerved by Westminster’s self-absorption. Hospitals and ambulance service have declared repeated crises.
But southern assessment of Sinn Féin’s rise also feeds into the northern mood. The prospect of Sinn Féin taking the symbolically important position of First Minister after May’s Assembly elections could be what forces the unionist parties to come together, however temporarily.
But if the evidence of the past few years tells us anything, it is that while the politics of Northern Ireland is still framed as green vs orange, a large, growing and increasingly influential part of the North's population does not recognise itself in those reductionist categories.