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Upcoming Events
MONTHLY BUSINESS MEETING NEXT TUESDAY FEBRUARY 11th - 7PM @ ST. MICHAEL'S
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also on February calendar....
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from Virginia AOH Political Education Chair Bill Halpin....
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For unionists in Northern Ireland, Brexit has backfired badly
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The Guardian by Susan McKay Mon 3 Feb 2020 06.43 EST (edited for length by Halpin)
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They thought they’d be celebrating: instead, unionists feel betrayed. Nationalists, meanwhile, can sense an opportunity. The DUP feels betrayed by the British, and loyalists feel betrayed by the DUP.’ There had been talk among unionists of street parties to celebrate Brexit day. Flags and bunting and maybe even bonfires. A royal visitor. But it hasn’t turned out that way.
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Instead they got what loyalists and many other unionists of a less staunch stripe, who had other reasons to support Brexit, are calling the betrayal act. In the interests of keeping a soft border with the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland is to remain in closer economic alignment to the EU than the rest of the UK, and is to be separated from what unionists think of as the mainland by what is being described as “a border in the Irish sea”.
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The Brexit deal was unanimously rejected by the newly reinstated Stormont assembly last week. Boris Johnson doesn’t care. The glummest faces were those of the Democratic Unionist Party, which had with such enthusiastic arrogance sold its votes to prop up the Tories at Westminster in exchange, it thought, for power and a hard Brexit. Now the DUP feels betrayed by the British, and loyalists feel betrayed by the DUP. There is no more talk of “our precious, precious union”. And there are moderate nationalist SDLP and cross-community Alliance MPs taking their seats in Westminster, so the DUP can no longer claim to be the voice of Northern Ireland.
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Brexit has hastened the decline of the once dominant Ulster Unionist party (UUP), too. Steve Aiken, its new party leader, began the recent Westminster election campaign boldly declaring it was pro-remain and that it would stand in all of NI’s constituencies. Within days he had to retreat and the party returned no MPs.
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Both the UUP and DUP lost votes to the Alliance party, which opposed Brexit. Its leader, Naomi Long, has dispelled its old image as the “nice” party for the essentially apolitical. It appeals to those young people for whom the constitutional issue is not a priority. As the new justice minister at Stormont, one of her first moves has been to seek to extend to Northern Ireland UK laws protecting women from domestic violence.
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A century after the foundation of the Northern Irish state, unionism is demoralized. Brexit has backfired on them, and the English nationalists who drove it have not hidden their contempt for the most British of Britain’s subjects in this last fragment of the empire, now that they no longer need them. The parties in the north are in agreement that far less money has been provided from the Treasury than was promised in the deal that reopened the Stormont assembly and executive. The British secretary of state’s response was to retort rudely on Twitter that they’d better just get on with it.
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Sinn Féin has seized on Brexit as a way to pave the route to a united Ireland. Most nationalists and a growing minority of unionists can see the attraction, given that this would mean a return to the EU. Loyalists are harking back to opposition to home rule in 1912. Let’s just do that whole damned century over again but with a different ending. OK? Hands up. Anyone?
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In Friendship, Unity, and Christian Charity,
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