Neil McCarthy:​ DUP leader knows that the hybridity of Northern Ireland is a bulwark against an all Ireland

Just over a month ago, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson gave a little noticed speech in the richly symbolic terrain of Brookeborough, a place which probably holds a place in unionist hearts similar to what Stalingrad once did for communists.

He plainly stated that so inevitable was the incoming of swathes of European law via the NI Protocol that the decent and democratic thing for unionism to do was to get Stormont back up and running as the only institution which could withstand this deluge, and the only institution in which unionism can do politics. He performed a deft patriotic pirouette to offer unionism a way out of the place in which it has found itself as a result of the ‘protocol or power-sharing but not both’ rhetoric of Jamie Bryson et al.

Events in the meantime seem to have conspired to obscure this brave manoeuvre, although Sir Jeffrey’s constructive comments after Rishi Sunak’s visit to Belfast last month show that he has not deviated from a policy which clearly favours a return to Stormont even if the DUP does not obtain 100% success in relation to its ‘seven tests’. Not that that would be in any way obvious from the constant media stereotype of a recalcitrant DUP making life impossible for everyone in London, Dublin and Brussels.

The scale of the task facing Donaldson is apparent now that there is a pincer movement in Northern Irish politics between the type of infantile-sounding but ruthlessly strategic Hibernian nationalism which propagates the lie that the DUP’s boycott of Stormont is about a refusal to serve alongside Michelle O’Neill as first minister, and the Trotskyist antics of the likes of Bryson and Jim Allister who cite the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement whilst they actively work to subvert it.

Both the Sinn Féin Hibernians and the anti-Good Friday/Belfast agreement unionists seek a return to direct rule. SF know that green-tinged Westminster rule will be a huge victory after they have already banked abortion, an Irish language act, an amnesty for their Troubles murders, and a trade border down the Irish Sea over the heads and hearts of unionists.

The Bryson/Allister wing hope to achieve the destruction of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement and to ride on the coat-tails of a newly resurgent hard Brexit conservative movement in Great Britain led by Boris Johnson. An end to devolution which they see as only leading to rule by Sinn Féin, and a return to the kind of integrationist unionism last championed by Jim Molyneaux and Enoch Powell?

This vision for unionism fails to take cognisance of political reality. Johnson himself delivered a little noticed speech in Belfast in May 2022. It is a speech which those who follow Bryson and co need to read every day. In it Johnson spells out the consistent policy which has been followed by both main parties in Great Britain since Peter Hain talked about the unsustainability of the Northern Ireland economy in the absence of a vibrant all-island Irish economy with strong links to the EU.

Johnson said in that speech that “[there is no] perfect constitutional clockwork version of how the union should be” and that “Northern Ireland has always been a place in its own right, in which governance has been contested, broken, re-imagined and carefully nurtured”. He went on to celebrate “the Northern Ireland of today in which people look any way they want – north-south, east-west or both – depending on their identity, and their family and their economic interests” and underlined it all by saying that the British government’s policy was therefore to champion and capitalise upon this ‘hybridity’. Johnson further stated that “We told the Irish government that we would take special measures within the UK’s internal economy to protect their place in the EU single market… and we have done that”.

After the Supreme Court ruling on the protocol, only King Canute-like unionists will not see that non-entrenched laws like the Act of Union can be changed anytime that Westminster feels like it.

Donaldson understands that ‘hybridity’ can provide a political voice in a Stormont which can create a secure home for unionists in a territory which is in union with Great Britain, and communions with the Republic, the US and the EU. He further understands that well managed hybridity will act as a bulwark against any united Ireland imposed against the wishes of unionists. He needs support at this critical moment.