Dr John Coulter: If Stormont falls, is civil disobedience the answer?

​It should not be forgotten the storm created by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during a recent visit to Linfield’s Windsor Park who talked about a supposed window of opportunity to get Stormont restored.

If that opportunity was missed, said Mr Varadkar, “then I do think at that point we have to start having conversations about alternatives, about Plan B”. Is Joint Authority that so-called Varadkar Plan B?

In such a scenario, would a campaign of civil disobedience similar to the Union flag protests and Ulster Says No and Ulster Still Says No marches and protests of the mid-1980s produce a favourable result for unionism?

Next year will see the 50th anniversary of the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike which brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing Executive.

Whilst a campaign of grassroots unionist civil disobedience - supported by violence from loyalist terror gangs - was successful against the then Executive, political unionism had no workable alternative to Sunningdale.

Dublin government plans for Joint Authority as an alternative were met with the horrors of the no-warning UVF bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, which murdered 30 people and left hundreds more maimed.

This year also marks the 46th anniversary of the failed 1977 loyalist strike called by the late DUP leader Rev Ian Paisley in protest at the deteriorating security situation. Again, the strike was doomed from the outset because the DUP boss had no workable alternative to Direct Rule from Westminster.

Put bluntly, loyalist murmurings about using civil disobedience to protest against the Windsor Framework are doing the political rounds as the clock ticks down on the patience of London in reaching a solution which will allow the DUP to re-enter the Stormont Executive.

Given the failure of street protests in the past during the Union flag dispute and against the Irish Sea border, and that such a policy has always backfired on loyalism, the pro-Union community needs to find another way of defusing growing loyalist anger.

Could we witness a nightmare situation that if the DUP and London cannot agree a solution which kick-starts the Executive and Stormont is again mothballed as in 1972, that the loyalist hardliners will say - you unionist politicians have had your chance, now it is our turn?

Last year, Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s first minister designate, sparked a backlash from unionism for saying there was “no alternative” to the IRA’s armed campaign during the Troubles.

Ms O’Neill suggested the Provos, who killed about half of the 3,600 people killed during the 30-year conflict, had no choice but to shoot and bomb until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

“I don’t think any Irish person ever woke up one morning and thought that conflict was a good idea, but the war came to Ireland,” she told the BBC in an interview. “I think at the time there was no alternative, but now, thankfully, we have an alternative to conflict and that’s the Good Friday Agreement.”

What happens if loyalist hardliners take Ms O’Neill’s words to heart - that there is no alternative to democratically getting rid of the Irish Sea border and the only way is a campaign of violence?

There is a line of thinking in unionism and loyalism that the republican movement has achieved all its gains, not exclusively through the ballot box, but as a result of the PIRA terror campaign.

Loyalism still remembers how fast Dublin backed away from Joint Authority in 1974 following the Dublin and Monaghan bomb massacre.

Meetings of loyalists angry at the Brexit deal have already been held across Northern Ireland. Wild allegations of a new loyalist terror group are already circulating which will make the Republic pay for any perceived all-Ireland gains it gets from a Brexit deal.

The reality is that the loyalist bogey man is rattling his sabre; the practical political reality is, how can he be defused?

The solution within loyalism is brutally simple - the Christian churches must now step up to the mark and make it clear to their flocks that the ballot box is the only way forward for unionism.

The Christian denominations can no longer hide their heads in their Bibles, pulpits and pews. In the same way that Christian churches mobilised the Afro-American voters in the southern states in the civil rights era of the 1960s, the Northern Ireland churches must encourage their flocks to vote in future elections to show any potential loyalist militant group that democracy is the only way forward.

In hard political terms, if the Northern Ireland parties - and especially the DUP - cannot agree to reform the power-sharing Stormont Executive by the autumn, the Province will then face either another Assembly poll, Direct Rule from Westminster, or the dreaded Joint Authority via Dublin and London.

Likewise, the Protestant Loyal Orders have a moral obligation and public duty to play their part in keeping the lid on loyalism by emphasising the democratic solution.

Only then can the bogey man of civil disobedience be chased off the field and back into the depths of the woods, out of sight, out of mind.