Dissident republicans will go on threatening, but, on the other hand, TUV rejectionists look a spent force
IT MIGHT look from the distance like a contradiction, but is all of a piece. People in East Belfast delivered his cards last Thursday night to their veteran MP, who happens to be Stormont’s First Minister and DUP leader. But people all over the North, and notably DUP voters, declared themselves in effect content enough with powersharing at Stormont.
The outcome of the British general election, in other words, leaves the Northern peace as stable as it was. A boost on one side is balanced by a niggling concern on the other. Dissident republicans will go on threatening death and destruction, their strength ebbing and flowing depending on how successfully they are infiltrated. But the rejectionists of Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice took a third of the votes they drew last year, and look spent. Neither the DUP, nor what is left of Ulster Unionism, need any longer shiver at Allister’s grating reminders of how far both have travelled from traditional unionist refusal to compromise.
The niggle is a question over the David Cameron team’s sure-footedness, and lack of awareness about the implications of alliance with Ulster Unionism. It has to be hoped that power and direct responsibility will improve their judgment – though it may not be much influenced by the Lib Dem side of the new coalition, who have no track record on Northern Ireland, good or bad.
Rejection at the polls has yet to play out for two of the North’s main party leaders, Peter Robinson and Sir Reg Empey. In marked contrast, the leaders of nationalism had immediate cause to celebrate, though the whopping 70 per cent of the poll taken by Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams far outshone that of the SDLP’s Margaret Ritchie. For a new leader who had bad campaign moments, Ritchie could still chalk up her own victory as respectable, the overall result for her declining party as less bad than feared.
Adams probably knew how little he had to fear in his West Belfast fastness, but after a year of ferocious personal and political trials he must still have taken satisfaction in improving his vote share. The allegations about his handling of his brother’s past brought him more sympathy than blame, and he is not about to lose his pedestal, slightly weathered though it may be, because of an IRA past he denies. Enough Northern nationalists think the peace has relegated that past.
Then there is the DUP leader, still spitting tacks about media allegations as though it was television investigators who furnished one of his homes with the taste of a late Roman emperor, and print journalists who began to build him another, bigger and even more grandiose. The word from East Belfast doorsteps that few weighed correctly during the election campaign – unwilling to credit the scale of open hostility – suggested that the Robinsonian downfall began well before lurid tales of cheques for a teenage lover, with the expenses scandal and what it said about the family empire of Peter and Iris.
Robinson still fails to understand. He wound up devising electoral strategy that served his party well, but was rejected for his personal limitations. The colleagues are torn between appreciation and worry that by next year’s Assembly elections the leader’s unpopularity might become infectious. If there was a convincing rival among them, concern by this stage would have trumped gratitude. But there is nobody of ambition and ability who combines grassroots appeal with support among the elected.
Arlene Foster as first minister and Nigel Dodds to lead the Westminster eight is mooted as a compromise, which says it all about the party’s lack of choice. Foster’s ability and ambition cannot erase her origins as an Ulster Unionist; Dodds is believed to lack the will to lead, perhaps because he could not bring himself to share the first minister post with Martin McGuinness. So Robinson may get the stay of execution he craves, to thwart his imaginary single-minded media enemy, and perhaps to ward off a private life without the distraction of politics.
His Ulster Unionist, or Ulster Conservative and Unionist – New Force counterpart, is a sunnier chap, with no political future to speak of. Sir Reg might win cosy retirement in the Lords: the least the new prime minister can do, having helped kibosh UCUNF in its first electoral try-out, by telling Jeremy Paxman the North topped his public sector hit-list.
Sinn Féin’s solidity, the SDLP’s more settled nerves and an Alliance party boosted by Naomi Long’s triumph and a ministerial post for David Ford might have to carry shaken unionists for a period. There’s the unsettling awareness that Sinn Féin topped the polls last week for the second time, and a backlog of disagreement at Stormont. But its steeples look pretty solid.