Editorial: The DUP must indeed keep its eye on the Irish Sea border
If you look at the picture on page six of today’s News Letter, you see a new generation at the helm of the DUP.
The image shows Paul Givan, Carla Lockhart, Gavin Robinson, Emma Little-Pengelly and Gordon Lyons.
They were all either born at the very end of the 1970s or in the 1980s.
The recent Westminster election saw the party lose three MPs, and almost lose another two. Change was inevitable in the senior echelons of a party that has had many leading lights who were famous in the 1980s.
Mr Robinson took over the DUP leadership after the sudden and shocking departure of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson at Easter. He has a very difficult job indeed to do.
It was hard enough without the traumatic circumstances of his predecessor’s departure. There had already been a change of several leaders in a relatively small number of years.
Then there was the backdrop of a three-way split within unionism, divisions in how to respond to the Irish Sea border, and major cultural changes in society that had put a party founded on religious fundamentalism at odds with much of the unionist population.
Even so, Mr Robinson has prevailed over a general election result that was by no means bad in the circumstances. While the TUV had a respectable showing, including a dramatic win in North Antrim, and the Ulster Unionists also picked up a seat from the DUP (easily), the DUP vote did not collapse, as it might have done.
Mr Robinson has an agreeable manner that is only likely to grow on the electorate. His party met at Shaw’s Bridge on Saturday, perhaps past its worst point.
It was good to hear the new DUP leader tell our political editor that the party had not taken its eye off the Irish Sea border, that as Owen Polley writes opposite is disastrous.
That might be the temptation when it scraped through July’s electoral contest, and does not face another election for three years.