Drive up the Shankill Road in west Belfast and you come to a series of billboards about the Troubles. As you would expect, they tell stories from a loyalist perspective, featuring atrocities committed by republicans.
nter the building behind the billboards and you find a well-curated display of loyalist prisoners’ experiences. There’s a realistic mock-up of a cell with a few home comforts, including rock LPs, an old Dansette-style record player and posters that would be at home in any boy’s bedroom of the 1970s and 80s.The artwork by the prisoners is also what you would expect: red hand and Union flags, and the UVF motto ‘For God and Ulster’.
In another room, you can, if you wish, sign a copy of the 1912 Ulster Covenant. The covenant is a statement that “being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship and perilous to the unity of the Empire”, the signatories promise to resist “using all means which may be found necessary” to defeat this threat to “our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom”.
On a recent visit, I talked over cups of coffee with former combatants, as they would describe themselves — articulate ex-paramilitaries well-schooled in the history of Northern Ireland, men used to explaining the subtleties of politics to tourists from as far away as Israel and America.
We talked, inevitably, about the Northern Ireland Protocol and the possibility of trouble if it isn’t changed or neutered. The men spoke of another generation of “young lads” from the Shankill or Rathcoole or Monkstown burning buses and stoning the police, or worse.
It made me think of my own teenage years in Northern Ireland. I was born in Scotland, but my family has roots in Co Antrim. The Eslers were Protestant refugees from the 17th century religious wars in Germany who settled in the west of Scotland. By the 18th century, three Esler brothers farmed land near Ballymena. By 1912, a dozen of my ancestors signed the Ulster Covenant, six with a cross. They were illiterate.
So, while I listened to these former combatants, men with robust views about Brexit, I was also thinking about my family; about the covenant and what my forebears undoubtedly thought was their “cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom.” It was certainly cherished. But was it ever equal?
To be clear, by “equal citizenship”, I am not thinking of the well-documented and shameful discrimination against Catholics. I am thinking about whether Protestant and unionist people, including my family, were sold an illusion — an illusion of equality exposed and exploded thanks to the incompetence of Boris Johnson’s botched Brexit.
In the room, the conversation turns to practical problems at Larne port and the irritating bureaucracy that Johnson agreed between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
I ask about the Democratic Unionist Party’s strange behaviour. They campaigned for Brexit, voted for it in the referendum, then voted against every possible version of it at Westminster.
‘Ulster Says No’ was a slogan from my youth. Would Ulster, or at least DUP, ever say ‘yes’ to something positive?
There is laughter in the room, agreement that the DUP have not handled things well, but insistence that the protocol must go because Northern Ireland is being treated “differently”.
Sure, I say, but Northern Ireland is treated better than the rest of the UK, because it’s in the European single market. Scottish fishermen, Welsh lamb farmers and English cheesemakers would love a return to frictionless trade with a market of 450 million people.
Besides — I’m warming up a little — being British means, for better or worse, accepting that the British government had a mandate to negotiate the Brexit agreement.
Lord Frost, the Brexit negotiator, boasted it was “excellent”. Johnson and the Conservative party claimed it as a negotiating triumph, especially for Northern Ireland.
In December 2020, Michael Gove wrote that the protocol “achieves the necessary protections for the EU single market, while at the same time, and more importantly, protecting the territorial and constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom as a whole, and upholding the Belfast [Good Friday] Agreement in all its dimensions”.
“Ah, maybe,” one of the men responds, “but it’s about this.” He puts his hand on his heart. “It’s about how we feel.”
I can’t argue. Unionists feel disconcerted, disappointed, destabilised, abandoned and, above all, unable to see clearly where their best interests may lie. Northern Ireland came nowhere on Boris Johnson’s Brexit priorities. All he wanted was to claim, wrongly, that he could “get Brexit done”.
Now it is being undone, unionists are left with the uncomfortable question of who their friends are in the British establishment, if there are any.
In the House of Commons last week, the DUP MP Ian Paisley accused Johnson’s government of not being unionists at all. They are, he said, “an English nationalist party”. He’s right.
The relative peace, stability and economic progress of the past few years in Northern Ireland, and the Union itself, are being put at risk by two factors. First, the DUP’s extraordinary blunders. Second, the Johnson government’s careless indifference and routine duplicity.
These two factors came together in October 2019, when Boris Johnson met the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in the Wirral, near Liverpool. The Prime Minister dumped 100 years of Ulster unionism into the Irish Sea by agreeing to a customs border between Northern Ireland and Britain.
I was in Belfast a few days afterwards and a unionist friend reminded me that “Mrs Thatcher said Northern Ireland was as British as Finchley”, whereas, as he put it, “Boris Johnson has made us as British as France”.
The consequent turmoil within unionism is immense. Then First Minister Arlene Foster insisted in October 2018: “There cannot be a border down the Irish Sea, a differential between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. The red line is blood-red. All along we have said, ‘No new regulatory alignment’,”
By January last year, she had discovered “a gateway of opportunity for the whole of the UK and for Northern Ireland” after Lord Frost’s deal, and that it was “important” to “take the opportunities that are there for all of our people”.
The then Ulster Unionist Party leader Steve Aiken responded that “the DUP’s blood-red line… was never a red line at all. It was washed away when the DUP supported Boris Johnson’s proposals for a border in the Irish Sea.”
Now, after repeated leadership convulsions in both main unionist parties, the DUP agriculture minister (and DUP leader for about a nanosecond) Edwin Poots announced this month that on “sound legal advice”, Irish Sea border checks would stop.
A High Court judge reversed that decision at least until a judicial review, but the utter confusion across unionism was written on the face of the DUP’s East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson appearing on RTE. In a clip that went viral, presenter David McCullagh said to him: “You backed Brexit, which made the border an issue again; you rejected Theresa May’s deal, which kept Northern Ireland in the same customs territory as Great Britain; you backed Boris Johnson, who agreed a border down the Irish Sea; and now Edwin Poots is in effect claiming that international agreements, signed by the UK government, don’t apply to Northern Ireland. Are you working for the other guys?”
The “other guys” — if we mean republicans — simply can’t believe their luck. Opinion polls suggest Sinn Fein is, on 25%, on course to become Northern Ireland’s biggest political party, eight points ahead of the DUP.
McCullagh’s clever question implies that the catastrophic alliance between Boris Johnson’s Tories and the DUP has undermined the Union more effectively than 30 years of IRA shootings and bombings.
Yet despite that sacred text of loyalism, the Ulster Covenant, it’s worth repeating that there was never “equal citizenship” across the UK. Northern Ireland had its own parliament for almost a century before Scotland and Wales achieved their devolved administrations. All of these have types of proportional representation; England doesn’t. Northern Ireland’s voters are always subject to Westminster governments from parties they did not vote for.
Perhaps unionists need to cheer up. There is equality at least in the carelessness with which the English nationalist impulse in the Johnson government treats other UK citizens, especially those in favour of the Union. One of the Conservative Party’s prominent ministers, Jacob Rees-Mogg, characterised the leader of the Conservative (and unionist) party in Scotland, Douglas Ross, as a “lightweight” whose views could be ignored. Some Scottish Tories now want to split from the London-run party.
The Welsh Labour leader (a unionist), Mark Drakeford, in March 2021 said: “What we have to do… is we have to recognise that the Union, as it is, is over.” Drakeford says that Westminster is so arrogant in dealing with devolved administrations, “we have to create a new union”.
Former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne claims that Boris Johnson could go down in history as the worst British prime minister ever, worse even than Lord North, who ‘lost’ the American colonies. In Johnson’s case, it is by “unleashing English nationalism” through Brexit. “Northern Ireland is already heading for the exit door,” Osborne said, because the UK may be about to “perform unexpected acts of national suicide”.
Whether Ulster unionists are consoled by the equality of Westminster condescension showered on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is doubtful. But they might benefit from thinking less about 1912 and the 1920s or even the 1970s, and concentrate on the 2020s. The Johnson shambles will eventually come to an end, but the discontent across the nations and regions of the UK touches on the failures of the Westminster system. It has allowed someone so clearly unfit for high office to reach Downing Street. The various parts of the United Kingdom will have to consider what it means to be ‘united’, if anything.
Northern Ireland unionists would do well to re-read the covenant and reconsider what “the material well-being of Ulster” might involve if Scotland leaves the UK. They might also consider whether trusting Westminster is a viable long-term strategy when, for reasons of political expediency, Boris Johnson moved the Irish Border into the Irish Sea and a few months later is trying to move it back again. Maybe it’s not just the DUP who seem to be working for “the other guys”.
Gavin Esler is author of How Britain Ends (2020), about the possible break-up of the UK
