When a Belfast boxing champion with a winning streak failed last week to be shortlisted for BBC Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY, ok?), the bogus and inflated ‘outrage’ looked a bit like darts – at least to this non-sports-fan.

Carl Frampton’s omission gave DUP attention-grabbers two favorite targets in one. They got to lambast the left-liberal-loving, insufficiently-British BBC for having no Northern Ireland judge, and ‘England’ for taking prizes at the expense of the other ‘countries’, aka ‘nations’, of the not-so-United Kingdom.

Make that three targets. Now that unionism in this post-Paisley age is no longer primarily meant to be Protestant first, identity in DUP minds is a bit blurry. There is still the compulsion to bang on about the status of the UK’s offshore region. Which they demand, as they have for almost a hundred years, to see acknowledged by all but particularly the local Irish as a distinct and natural political entity, despite, or maybe because of the fact that it inconveniently shares an island with an independent state.

Which state it must swiftly be said, inconveniently for the northern Irish, has called itself ‘Ireland’ for some time now. Older Irish pedants tell themselves that’s fair enough, even accurate to say ‘Ireland’ is the state, but never a nation. Though in the minds of sometimes younger, often unthinking and even hostile citizens of the Republic, it seems more and more that ‘Ireland’ is the natural title of a country that stops at the border.

But that takes us into the identity of the nationalists and Irish north, south, and west. For the purposes of this column, let’s skip away for now from that ball of wool, and stick with the significance or otherwise of recent noises from northern political players.

The country/nation/ anti-England/anti-BBC kerfuffle on the back of poor overlooked Frampton had usual suspects hitting familiar notes, with extra vigor because other serial kerfuffles beat them to the headlines. S Wilson outdid J Wells if only by ranting on two subjects, so Wilson’s Westminster colleagues N Dodds and G Campbell felt due airtime.

Gregory for some reason sounds nowadays as though he just phones it in, entirely lacking the spiteful spirit of his stand-up days. Maybe it’s being deprived of the Stormont stage. If Dodds still has a shred of ambition it must be to stick around long enough to graciously help T May out of a tight corner with DUP votes, while trying to stay in with hard Brexiters. Playing the anti-England card doesn’t fit. But all the same, even with 15 years at Westminster and hard-won Oxbridge in the CV, resentment of the snooty, pagan, metropolitan, soft southern English comes naturally to a middle Ulster mindset. Native ties bind, and more importantly there is a home market to remember.

Spoty splutters were accompanied by soft sounds from DUP people, followed swiftly by harsh sounds from DUP people. The effect of a notice box DUP minister kicking a Gaelic football over a goalpost and well over the heads of small children was probably canceled out by an older show-off explaining why he won’t try to intervene in a UDA feud.

Do a compassionate DUP woman and a gormless, repentant DUP man, given discreet support and cover by anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion provision leader Arlene Foster, add up to a liberalizing shift? Sinn Féin and the SDLP meanwhile less splashily join a debate on HIV, and a former SDLP hammer on social issues admits change is on the way ‘which I don’t welcome.’ Is this recognition that the ‘nationalist’, and younger, part of the population is shifting towards liberalism well ahead of unionism, and SF/SDLP better try to keep up?

But what is the DUP target market now? Whatever the significance of current sounds and fury, the plan as always is to drain votes from Ulster Unionism. If leaning away just a titch from fundamentalists might lure a few recruits, why not. Awkward, though, playing to UU liberals on social issues while tending your own hardliners; useful enough having Sammy to gulder.

Political parties are always reluctant to relax, though the next assembly election should be well over the horizon. A general election early next year is entirely possible. Time enough for all of them to jump forward, slide back and change tune repeatedly, before they next test the will of the people.