Last month , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena. Over video link, he asked Gove to use his upcoming meeting with the vice president of the European Commission, Maroš Šefčovič, to ‘press on’ with arrangements to replace the Northern Ireland Protocol, which was damaging the union by ensuring that Northern Ireland remains part of the Single Market even though the rest of the UK has left. Paisley said Gove had claimed he was a unionist. ‘Indeed he even boasted once in my local paper that he could sing “The Sash”.’
‘The Sash’ is the ballad sung by members of the Orange Order as they march around Northern Ireland celebrating battles won ‘in bygone days of yore’. Behind Paisley’s head as he spoke was a painting of William of Orange on his white horse at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. One of the key achievements of the Good Friday Agreement was increased alignment between the North and the Republic. In order to avoid the return of a hard border, EU regulatory checks are now being made at Northern Irish ports on certain goods arriving from Britain: there is, in other words, a border in the Irish Sea. ‘The protocol is poison,’ members of the order wrote to the Belfast News Letter. ‘We owe it to the many brethren who paid the supreme sacrifice to keep us part of the United Kingdom to take a stand in this our time of threatened calamity.’
‘My right honourable friend is right,’ Gove replied to Paisley. ‘I do have a formidable singing repertoire. I can also sing “The Fields of Athenry” and “Flower of Scotland” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”.’ ‘The Fields of Athenry’ tells the story of an Irishman who steals corn to feed his family during the famine of the 1840s and is transported to Botany Bay. He tells his wife that he’s happy to martyr himself for the Irish cause and rebel against the crown: ‘Nothing matters, Mary, when you’re free.’ Paisley’s face quivered with rage. Gove could not have been clearer. He had a nationalist song for every occasion. The unionists weren’t special, even if he had once compared the Good Friday Agreement to the appeasement of the Nazis.
Paisley likened the Tories’ desertion of unionist concerns to ‘a slap on the face with a wet kipper’. The Conservatives’ alliance with the DUP, whose ten seats rescued Theresa May’s minority government after the 2017 election, had been forgotten. When Boris Johnson, at that point on the back benches, attended the DUP’s annual conference in 2018, he said what he knew the party wanted to hear. A border in the Irish Sea would turn Northern Ireland into an ‘economic semi-colony of the EU’ and damage the union. ‘No British Conservative government could or should sign up to it.’ There was every reason to disbelieve him, but the delegates stomped and cheered. He promised to spend billions on a bridge from Scotland to Co. Antrim – they believed that too.
After Johnson’s landslide election victory in 2019, the DUP became dispensable. They should have seen it coming. A YouGov poll from June that year showed that 59 per cent of Conservatives were in favour of Brexit, even if it meant losing Northern Ireland from the union. History, too, ought to have prepared them. After the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed in 1921, the unionist patriarch Edward Carson wrote: ‘I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power.’
Gove went straight from his exchange with Paisley to meet Šefčovič. They issued a joint statement pledging support for the protocol. Šefčovič said it had been the ‘only way’ to avoid a hard border in Ireland. Both men were keen to lessen tensions. In January, the EU had briefly invoked Article 16 of the protocol, which allows either side to introduce border checks in the event of ‘serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties’. The EU alleged that AstraZeneca was favouring the UK with supplies of Covid vaccines, while failing to honour its supply contract with the EU. By introducing checks along the Irish border, the EU could safeguard against pharmaceutical companies exploiting the free movement of goods between the EU and Northern Ireland as a backdoor route to get more vaccines into Britain. Following an immediate outcry from Dublin and Westminster – neither government had been consulted – the EU backtracked and apologised for triggering the clause. Naturally, the DUP seized on the EU’s act of ‘hostility’ as proof that the protocol was unjust.
At the start of the Brexit negotiations, Donald Tusk, then president of the European Council, said that if the UK’s proposals were unacceptable to the Republic of Ireland, they would be unacceptable to the EU. The Irish government, along with Remain voters in Northern Ireland (56 per cent in the referendum), saw the Good Friday Agreement’s softening of the border as something to be protected at all costs. It is particularly important to people in the largely rural border region, which comprises almost a third of Ireland’s 32 counties, five of the six that make up the North and five of the Republic’s 26. But the DUP held out for the hardest possible version of Brexit, three times rejecting May’s proposed deals, all of which, at the EU’s insistence, included a ‘backstop’ – an agreement that there would be no return to border controls between the North and the Republic. Inevitably, talk turned to a more manageable alternative, a border in the sea. Asked if that would be a red line for her party, the DUP leader, Arlene Foster, replied: ‘The line is blood red.’ ( read the full article at the London Review of Books)