Ben Lowry: Unionists are more vulnerable to the fall of Stormont than republicans

He writes another article for us on page 15 today.

Monday’s piece was widely read online and drew three letters, including one from the former UUP and Ukip MLA David McNarry, who said it was wrong to give up on Stormont. Reform it instead, he said.

It certainly needs radical reform in its operation.

I did not hesitate much in backing the 1998 Belfast Agreement. I was in my 20s and felt that the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement had shown the frailty of the unionist position.

I felt that the removal of Ireland’s territorial claims on NI, the transatlantic acceptance of the principle of consent, and the republican acceptance of Stormont were huge gains.

It would have been difficult to get such buy-in from Sinn Fein without prisoner releases, but I thought releases should have been tied into decommissioning. Yet I know David Trimble’s view that there would never have been agreement if everyone had adopted a legalistic approach (a point worth remembering, now that critics of the UK in Brussels, Dublin and Washington talk as if the Belfast Agreement is a legally watertight deal that places NI between the UK and Ireland).

We can only deal with the information we have at the time. As I got older I came to see the validity of Robert McCartney QC’s critiques of the Belfast and St Andrew’s agreements.

The first thing that I began to see as a huge problem was legacy.

By 2001, when I was a daily news reporter on a Belfast paper, it was becoming clear to me how collusion was being grossly exaggerated to demonise the security forces, and retrospectively legitimise the IRA.

The second thing that became quickly apparent was the way in which the 1998 deal not just brought Sinn Fein in from the cold, but turbo charged them.

The northern nationalist repudiation of SF had been emphatic from the time of it first fighting elections in the early 1980s. The southern repudiation was almost universal.

Yet a campaign that was rejected even by those on behalf of whom it was said to be fought, and rejected entirely by the people of the state that the IRA wanted to subsume us, is now increasingly seen as legitimate by young people.

This is partly because, to build on points made by a letter writer Clive Maxwell this week (see link below), state schools in NI do not teach history that challenges the ‘sectarian statelet’ version of the province’s origins.

Stormont made statesmen of Sinn Fein.

But the really big problem now, the biggest of all, is that Stormont has at its heart a party that wants NI to fail. That is a legitimate Sinn Fein goal, however disagreeable it might be to most of us. The problem is that a party with such an aim has to be in power at all times.

The four main ruling parties in London and Dublin — Tory, Labour, Fine Gael, Fianna Fail — are in consensus on the overriding objective of placating SF. But this has been facilitated by unionists.

Arlene Foster once got annoyed once at the suggestion that DUP MLAs were conceding things to keep their jobs. But all normal politicians, like all normal working people, want to keep their livelihood.

The abnormal factor at Stormont is a party with a military mindset, SF, that tells its elected representatives to accept an industrial wage and which will endure lack of political posts for as long as it takes to get a cherished policy advance.

Each republican-led crisis, from decommissioning to spying to burglaries or killings, has ultimately led to a SF-led negotiation. Devolution of policing and justice became a crisis, as did welfare reform.

It is appalling that the RHI scandal ever happened, and so much money was wasted (by at best incompetence), and so gave SF excuse to collapse devolution. But it did.

By the end of that three-year collapse, I was one of the few voices saying that there must be no reward via a specific policy, be it an Irish language act or anything else.

The only way of breaking the republican pattern of exploitation of crisis was to ensure that Stormont was restored without any policy reward whatsoever for Sinn Fein.

If not that, then direct rule with the most minimal possible role for Dublin until it too learns not to be an advocate for nationalism.

The only surprise to me was the speed with which my view was vindicated, with SF in a pandemic demanding a date for implementation of a powerful Irish language commissioner above all other matters.

A DUP leader in effect acquiesced in that plan (albeit protesting), and a Tory secretary of state jumped to the SF tune.

What part of this pattern is not now clear?

This will recur so long as a party that wants Northern Ireland to fail can see how desperately those of us who want Northern Ireland to succeed are to keep the show on the road, at all costs.

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter acting editor

Owen Polley August 16: Devolution is a disaster for the Union and has always been

Ben Lowry: Bigwigs should realise that there is no holiday before retirement

Letter: State schools in NI promote a liberal ethos hostile to Protestant culture

Other articles by Ben Lowry below, and beneath that information on how to subscribe to the News Letter:

• Ben Lowry Aug 16: Exam grade inflation is rooted in sentimentality about education and school pupils

• Ben Lowry Aug 16: The collapse of Kabul to the Taliban will be seen as a sign of western weakness

• Ben Lowry Aug 9: Covid has been a bewildering and humbling pandemic

• Ben Lowry Aug 9: Now I understand those older people who want cooler summer weather

• Ben Lowry Aug 2: Three points to keep in mind when arguing against the NI Protocol

• Ben Lowry July 31: The last NI housing boom was disaster, and we need to beware a repeat

• Ben Lowry July 24: Republican terror atrocities are increasingly being partly blamed on the security forces

• Ben Lowry July 24: Hot weather ought to be welcome in NI but this is extreme

• Ben Lowry July 17: UK has tipped into an amnesty after a long approach to IRA that lacked bite

• Ben Lowry July 15: We should be honest as to how we have arrived at a Troubles amnesty

• Ben Lowry July 10: We will find soon if UK is for once going to criticise Ireland

• Ben Lowry July 10: I once always wanted England to lose, now I want them to win

• Ben Lowry July 3: The mild DUP response to the protocol will cause Boris little concern

• Ben Lowry July 3: The extreme heat in Canada shows why we might come to like Northern Ireland’s mild weather

• Ben Lowry June 26: Neither Dublin nor IRA have been put under any pressure on legacy

• Ben Lowry June 26: A slight sense of sadness as the days again begin to shorten

• Ben Lowry June 19: Somehow the appeasement of Sinn Fein got worse

• Ben Lowry June 12: Now above all, when unionists are winning the argument on the Protocol, is time to stand firm against it

• Ben Lowry June 5: It is clear that Edwin Poots is not taking the DUP in a remotely hardline direction

• Ben Lowry May 29: There is much confusion in unionism, so here are some suggested core pro Union principles

• Ben Lowry May 22: Instead of ‘moving on’ from IRA funeral, we still need proper answers

• Ben Lowry May 22: If Joel Keys, 19, wants to help unionism he should get a law degree

• Ben Lowry May 15: Edwin Poots and Doug Beattie will offer two distinct shades of unionism

• Ben Lowry May 8: Formal UK ideas for an amnesty are almost exactly 20 years old

• Ben Lowry May 8: Let us hope that the brilliant Eoghan Harris keeps on writing

• Ben Lowry May 1: Unionism can’t just be about managing long-term defeat

• Ben Lowry May 1: Arlene Foster was given huge opportunity by DUP after her exit helped ruin UUP

• Ben Lowry April 24: NI seems to rely increasingly on just one pollster for data on attitudes to a border poll

• Ben Lowry April 17: DUP still has to choose between managing this disaster or total rejection of it

• Ben Lowry April 10: His enduring marriage to the Queen was key to our understanding of Prince Philip

• Ben Lowry April 3: Radio grilling of UUP leader exposed folly of unionists blaming Simon Byrne for funeral

• Ben Lowry Mar 27: There should not be an Irish language act, but it is too late — the DUP has agreed one

• Ben Lowry Mar 20: We have made it through the worst of the dark, dreaded winter lockdown

• Ben Lowry Mar 20: MLAs lost control of abortion by rejecting modest law reform

• Ben Lowry Mar 13: Whatever future Boris Johnson adopts for Northern Ireland seems set to lead to a crisis

• Ben Lowry Mar 13: Scotland tunnel isn’t fantasy, but something kids of today might see

• Ben Lowry Mar 6: The cost of victims’ pension has ballooned without explanation as to why 


• Ben Lowry Feb 27: Unionists have fully turned against Irish Sea border because they’ve seen the scale of disaster

• Ben Lowry Feb 20: We still lack answers as to why IRA funeral got special treatment at Roselawn

• Ben Lowry Feb 13: Peter Robinson has long experience of what is and is not politically feasible

• Ben Lowry Feb 6: There is barely any unionist support for violence, despite justified anger at sea border

• Ben Lowry Jan 30: At last, clear reason for UK and unionists to stop being weak towards Ireland/EU

• Ben Lowry Jan 23: Lockdown sceptics have been undermined by crazy theories, but sensible criticisms haven’t gone away

• Ben Lowry Jan 16: The Irish Sea border was imposed because UK knew unionists would take it

• Ben Lowry in 2020: Last night unionists celebrated a move towards Irish unity

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Acting Editor