DUP can be confident of the confidence of the unionist tribe despite having brought us to the verge of a constitutional crisis

The DUP is not loved by the English public and I fear that that dislike influences attitudes towards the rest of us here in Northern Ireland.

But ours is a tribal society and in all such cultures arrogance, fecklessness and mismanagement in government invariably go unpunished because loyalty to the tribe is paramount, in this case an imagined entity called the Protestant community.

So we ignore the opinions of others.

We disregard the fact that the Democratic Unionists were the only party in its totality who supported the invasion of Iraq in which thousands of innocents died and the havoc that war consequently caused in the Middle East exacerbated the refugee crisis which fed into the paranoia about immigration; we take no account of the fact that they were the only party in Westminster that campaigned for Brexit and was later exposed as accepting a hefty financial donation from the shady Constitutional Research Council to allow them to campaign unnoticed for Brexit in England.

So, given all this, and not to mention the cash for ash financial scandal, the DUP, despite having helped deliver a disastrous Brexit and having brought us to the verge of a constitutional crisis, can be quietly confident that the unionist tribe will continue to invest their confidence in them as they hurtle like the Gadarene herd towards the precipice.

Wes Holmes, Belfast BT14