Shadow assembly a step backwards

Posted By: March 28, 2018

“The whole point of Ulster unionism was to avoid living on equal terms with the rest of the people on the island. What they need to be considering now is how to ensure in the near future they guarantee their position so they can live on equal terms with the rest of the people on the island.”
Shadow assembly a step backward

Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast. Wednesday, March 28, 2018

The DUP don’t want another Executive, at least not while they hold the balance of power at Westminster. And that dirty deal the desperate Theresa May did with the party has also altered the balance of power in the DUP and in The North, all for the worse.

Most of the DUP MPs were members of the dirty dozen who tried in 2006 to stop Paisley signing up to the St. Andrews Agreement which they correctly saw as a fig leaf covering their embarrassment for operating the Good Friday Agreement which they all opposed. Over the years from 2007,  Peter Robinson managed to offload from Stormont these yesterday’s men, these dinosaur-denying dinosaurs, as some Tory MPs call them, to Westminster. It didn’t count after devolution.

Who would have thought 2017 would see the release of the sequel, The Return of the Zombies? Naturally, they want to go back to the future. On a weekly basis, one or other of them will call for direct rule by which of course they mean ‘DUP rule’ since our current proconsul—surely the blankest political nonentity since Humphrey Atkins— shamelessly agrees to anything a DUP MP asks her.

A variant on the request for the direct rule is to repeat the disingenuous line that they are happy to return to an executive immediately ‘without preconditions’ by which they mean they want to go back to behaving the way they did that caused the collapse of the institutions in The North in the first place. They know it’s not going to happen because Sinn Féin couldn’t agree to it. That’s why they keep saying it,  yet few journalists here ever challenge its inherent nonsense. Both mantras are simply ways to avoid sharing power with Sinn Féin which the MPs never wanted to do.

The latest ploy to avoid sharing power is to ask for a Shadow Assembly. It’s a demonstration of the disgraceful compliance with the DUP that our proconsul even agrees to consider such nonsense. Apart from avoiding sharing power here, it’s an obvious attempt to avoid their MLAs losing £13,000 a year and their extravagantly subsidized nosh up at Stormont.

On previous occasions when northern secretaries agreed to unionist-inspired talking shops, the Prior assembly in 1982 and the so-called Forum in the now demolished Belfast Co-op building both Sinn Féin and the SDLP boycotted them. Why? They were both steps backward from power-sharing, and nothing can work in the absence of the representatives of the nationalist community, 41 percent of the voters in June last year. If you can have power-sharing in 1974, you can have it in 2018. It’s an outrage that a British proconsul should even contemplate anything less, especially to placate those refusing to share power.

In fact, there’s an argument that we’ve gone beyond talks about sharing power. The fact that the DUP’s dinosaurs control the party and, on last weekend’s conference performance, fit with their party leader’s tiny political world, means the DUP is incapable of considering the wider picture. One of the reasons for their emphasis on Westminster and refusal to do a deal in The North is that they are in denial, publicly anyway, about the real dynamic in The North; a political, social, economic and demographic change which we’ve begun to see in evidence in the last year.

Instead of talking about rules for running Stormont and managing the cruder manifestations of old-style unionist supremacy like flags, emblems and marches through Catholic districts,  Unionists should be sitting down to talk about their children’s future on this island, their relations with the Irish government as well as northern Nationalists.

As you’ve read here before it’s better, they do it now when they’re on almost equality in numbers in Stormont rather than when they inevitably slip into minority status. The whole point of Ulster unionism was to avoid living on equal terms with the rest of the people on the island. What they need to be considering now is how to ensure in the near future they guarantee their position so they can live on equal terms with the rest of the people on the island.

Clinging to Westminster only postpones the time when the real talks about future begin.