Do not underestimate the significance of the Northern Ireland rejection of the Tories’ ‘stay alert’ guidance for coronavirus
The disuniting of the kingdom quickened pace this week, leaving the prime minister in freefall after his incoherent Sunday night speech, while the first minister of the Northern Ireland executive, DUP leader Arlene Foster, joined her Sinn Féin deputy first minister, Michelle O’Neill, and their counterparts in Scotland and Wales in deploying parachutes. No, they said, they would not be changing the message to the public to “stay alert” in response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. The message from Belfast would remain, “stay at home.”
The DUP’s gravitas on the crisis had been embarrassingly undermined when one of its MLAs was spotted shopping online for shoes during a crucial meeting of the health committee last week. (He apologised.) But Foster and O’Neill landed quite gracefully in the assembly chamber at Stormont on Tuesday where they delivered an agreed and detailed schedule for emerging from lockdown, with no set dates, and a proviso that the current rate of infection would have to reduce significantly before they would proceed with any changes.
Foster did try to blur her abandonment of the DUP’s formerly rigid adherence to its traditional stance that Northern Ireland is British and will behave accordingly. There would be “slight differences”, she said. Northern Ireland’s moves would be “nuanced”. But there can be no doubting the symbolic significance of what has happened. Even the staunchest of unionists can no longer follow a blundering leader willing to risk committing his people to disaster while chundering on about “good solid British common sense”.