Working-class unionists have been badly failed by a lack of political leadership

Seeing everything through the lens of winners and losers makes losers of everyone, writes Michael Kelly

“Them ‘uns have everything and we have nothin’” was the rather colloquial summary of a local Protestant woman when asked by BBC Radio Ulster why her young co-religionists were setting fire to their own communities.

The ‘them and us’ narrative is a damning indictment of a failure of political leadership in the unionist community, 23 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. It is also a depressing reminder that the mainstream voice of unionist – the DUP – has never actually subscribed to the principles of that agreement.

Having conspired – wittingly or unwittingly – to foist Brexit on the people of the North, that party now finds itself trying to re-assert dominance having lost the confidence of many disillusioned Protestants.

The former chief of staff to Tony Blair in No. 10 Downing Street Jonathan Powell this week pointed out an uncomfortable truth for Arlene Foster’s party: the DUP failed to speak out against the Irish Sea border when Boris Johnson was agreeing the Brexit deal with the EU.

He went on to question the party’s stance on the protocol, suggesting its vocal opposition is motivated less by principle and more by political fears of being outflanked by hard-line rivals.

He pointed to Theresa May’s determination to find a solution that would have avoided a border on the island of Ireland or the Irish Sea by keeping the whole of the UK in the Customs Union but “Boris Johnson threw that out of the window in 2019”.

Self-destructive

It was a self-destructive stance supported by the DUP – a fact not lost on Mr Powell, who was a key player in drafting the Good Friday Agreement.

“They’re raising it now partly, I think, because of the actual public anger at what’s happening in practical terms and the fact that opinion polls show the TUV and Jim Allister going up in the polls and them going down, they see they’ve got a problem, and they feel they have to get onto the issue,” Mr Powell told the BBC.

When looking for a scapegoat for the recent violence in loyalist communities, it is not Brexit where unionist leaders should look to but their own failure to chart a course towards a genuine shared future with parity of esteem for all who share the region.

Time and again when given the opportunity to promote the vision of a shared society, many unionist politicians have preferred the binary language of winners and losers.

Any advancement – perceived or otherwise – for the Catholic minority was (and is) portrayed as a defeat for the Protestant majority.

Certainly, the sense of alienation and deprivation that many working-class Protestants feel in the North is real. But it is not actually borne out by the facts on the ground. Official data from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) shows that 16 of the most deprived electoral wards in Northern Ireland are Catholic, while only six of the least deprived wards are Catholic.

When it comes to families, 22% of Catholics live in households experiencing poverty compared to 17% of Protestants. On youth unemployment, 15% of Protestants in the 18-24 year-old age group are unemployed but for Catholics in the same category the figure is 20%.

So while levels of deprivation are clearly stubbornly high in both communities, why are Protestants so likely to feel that they are hard done by?

Undoubtedly, some of it is historic. Northern Ireland was created a century ago as a self-consciously sectarian and supremacist state. Protestants – even poorer Protestants – were taught to believe that they were something akin to a chosen people.

The 1912 Ulster Covenant – signed by over 500,000 Protestants in the North opposing Home Rule for Ireland – is replete with Calvinist conceptions of the covenant, the chosen people and a ‘promised land’.

Peace talks

During the peace talks that led to the agreement, DUP walkouts were so frequent that many officials observed that the party only entered various phases of the dialogue with a view to walking out.

When David Trimble led his mainstream unionist party to support the accord, the DUP was waiting in the wings at every opportunity to undermine support for the UUP and demonise those who pushed for the agreement.

This is despite the fact that the leaders of loyalism – former paramilitaries themselves – supported the truce.

Ian Paisley never missed an opportunity to rubbish the agreement amongst Protestants insisting that every move towards parity of esteem was a “sell out to Papists”.

The ‘no surrender’ mentality eventually obliterated moderate unionism, and this allowed Mr Paisley to do the hitherto unthinkable and share power with Sinn Féin in 2007.

Finally Mr Paisley had achieved his aim: once the poor cousin of the Protestant establishment, he was now the closest thing Northern Ireland had to a prime minister since the collapse of the old Stormont.

While Mr Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness undoubtedly struck up a personal rapport, there is precious little evidence that the DUP ever really softened.

Marvyn Storey of the DUP said this week a fundamental unease in Northern Ireland is because “there is a party in Government which never apologised for terrorism”. He didn’t name Sinn Féin – but clearly means the party his leader shares power with.

While the blatant disregard Sinn Féin showed for Covid-19 rules around the funeral of Bobby Storey upset many people, the entirely unforgiving attitude the DUP took to the spectacle undoubtedly inflamed tensions among working-class Protestants.

Arlene Foster’s full frontal assault on the PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne insisting he must resign, was followed quickly by bricks and petrol bombs from loyalist youths. Mrs Foster has been trenchant in her criticism of the violence but it’s worth asking that at a time of heightened emotions would everyone have been better served if rhetoric was dialled down a bit?

Unionist leaders need to calm tensions in their own communities. They also need to embrace the vision of the Good Friday Agreement which envisages a Northern Ireland which is a good place for everyone to live and in which everyone has a stake.

A shared economy tackling deprivation in all communities is a key part in building that fairer society. Blaming deprivation in one community on the perceived advances of the other community is a recipe for endless mistrust and naked hatred – only the Good Friday Agreement contains the ingredients for a better future: 23 years on it deserves to be read again.