Editorial: After a day of drama, the unionist divide is now here, and is indeed healthy

​In extraordinary scenes last night, a key DUP executive meeting was being relayed to the wider world by the loyalist Jamie Bryson.

It seemed that someone in the gathering, to help decide whether or not the party should return to Stormont, was perhaps using a phone that Mr Bryson could listen to externally. It was an illustration of the digital age and the near impossibility of privacy.

In a sense though, the method by which Mr Bryson got his information is incidental.

As this paper went to press last night, it was still not clear what had happened. Apparently EU law will apply, and apparently it is claimed that checks on 80% of goods will end.

Now we are at the point of the split. This has been obvious for a while. There are respected and established members of the DUP who will not accept NI alone being, in effect, in the EU single market. Who can blame them? It is, as the Cambridge economist Graham Gudgin wrote on these pages recently, a constitutional outrage.

At the same time, those who argue that a return to Stormont will be less disastrous than staying out have a plausible case to make.

The thoroughly one-sided way in which the DUP is being blamed for everything, including past multi-party Stormont mismanagement of both health and the wider sector, shows how Sinn Fein gets, and will get, special treatment.

We are hoping to publish details of the deal in the coming days. But the unionist division is now here, and is indeed healthy. There has to be a pragmatic unionist wing that is seen to be moderate and responsible. There has to be a unionist wing that constantly objects to the notion that unionists must perpetually concede to nationalists - a breach of the essence of the Belfast Agreement.

Whether or not a divide will actually be formalised after this drama is far from clear.