“ Have they[DUP] worked out that in a decade unionists will be in a minority in all but two and a half of the six counties and in both Belfast and Derry?”

DID you ever wonder what the DUP want? Not unionists in general. There’s no evidence for what they want since most don’t vote DUP and a substantial number don’t vote at all. No, you’ve got to deal with the DUP since they’re the largest unionist party and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.So what do they want? Leave aside stuff like flags and marching past Ardoyne. The Greeks had a word for that sort of thing: ‘adiaphora’ – indifferent things – not essential to law or morals. Fundamentally they’re not important enough to waste time thinking about. Either way they wouldn’t change the basics. The DUP can’t see the wood for the trees. Instead of presenting a policy on major matters they focus on inessentials. They raised the matter of parades at the Hillsborough talks in 2010 even though the talks were about devolving policing and justice. After December 2012 they added flags. Yet even if both parades and flags were resolved that still wouldn’t answer the question, what do the DUP want? It seems they don’t want to deal with Sinn Fein. They ignore Sinn Fein MLAs in corridors and in daily discourse in Stormont. They won’t pass the time of day. Every DUP speech contains an attack on Sinn Fein, either on a personality or on the party. So we know they don’t want Sinn Fein as partners in the north’s administration. In reality the DUP is refusing to operate the partnership arrangement at Stormont. We know they opposed the Good Friday Agreement. We know the St Andrews Agreement was a fig leaf crafted by the British and Irish governments to enable Ian Paisley to jemmy his party back into the north’s politics even though a substantial number of senior party members opposed it. The men, known as the ‘dirty dozen’, signed a letter of objection but hadn’t the guts to stand up to Paisley or resign. They’re still there and they haven’t changed their attitude.