Over the course of 1921 and 1922, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, James Craig, was in constant contact with the Office of Works about the design of concrete fencing posts and other architectural features for the Stormont Estate, home to the state’s new parliament buildings. Such was his preoccupation with this that he also made numerous trips to London to discuss progress and insisted it was imperative “not to go along lines which would appear to the outside world as though we in Ulster itself placed a minor importance on our institution and felt that a small trifling and niggardly treatment of the subject was sufficient for the Ulster people”. Craig got his way.
Fifty years later, in 1971, the unionist leadership was again preoccupied with the status of Stormont and the relevance of its state; it was keen to adequately commemorate the golden jubilee of the parliament’s inauguration but the Troubles took the wind out of its grander plans. It failed to secure a royal visit or dictate the form the jubilee would take, suggesting it simply did not have the control it craved. The parliament was suspended the following year with the imposition of direct rule from London.
As the centenary of the creation of the state of Northern Ireland in 1920 looms, the DUP is insistent it “wants Northern Ireland to celebrate its centenary as a beacon of achievement within the United Kingdom. We want to normalise our institutions and political arrangements to demonstrate that democratic standards apply and fairness and equality of opportunity is the right of all”.
The DUP has been traipsing in and out of Stormont in all its grandeur, but there is no government there for it to lead due to its own and Sinn Féin's tribal intransigence
This is all very laudable, but the tensions during the week on the Brexit/border question and the breakthrough yesterday are also a reminder of the DUP’s vulnerabilities. While it has some leverage now due to the numbers game at Westminster, history would suggest that such influence will be fleeting. Since the foundation of the northern state, unionists have often struggled to convince others to take them as seriously as they feel is their due; to add to the examples cited above, in 1945, Northern Ireland prime minister Basil Brooke insisted that national service should be extended to Northern Ireland in order to, among other things, confirm the state’s constitutional status within the union, but when the national service bill was introduced at Westminster in 1946, Northern Ireland was excluded.
One of the reasons why some unionists occasionally floated the idea of a separate “Ulster Dominion” in subsequent decades was because of the perennial difficulty of getting British attention and the neglect generated a potent mixture of anxiety and arrogance, the same combination that has been on display in recent days and weeks. When Ulster was useful for British politicians for their own ends they exploited the connection, but they would eventually get to the stage where, in the words of Austen Chamberlain in 1924, they would prevent it being “a fatal influence on British politics”.
The DUP has been traipsing in and out of Stormont in all its grandeur, but there is no government there for it to lead due to its own and Sinn Féin’s tribal intransigence. The deadlock exists at a time when both parties should be intensely discussing Brexit’s implications, especially because a majority in Northern Ireland rejected Brexit. The DUP has been keen to congratulate itself on its “consistency” in insisting Northern Ireland cannot be treated as a special case in any Brexit deal, while also asserting that it wants no return to a “hard” border. This is contradictory and wilfully ignores the weight of troubled history that does indeed make Northern Ireland a special case, and the agreed text yesterday to facilitate a move to stage two of Brexit negotiations further underlines that uniqueness.
The DUP was given the opportunity to engage in Brexit dialogue with Dublin last year through the convening of a civic forum, on the grounds that, in Enda Kenny’s words “it is really important that we have all of the voices reflective of Ireland over a series of meetings”. It rejected that invitation and has loudly insisted that the issues at stake are an internal British concern, ignoring that the very agreements that allowed it to be the dominant party in the former power sharing assembly were driven by the acceptance by Britain that Northern Ireland is unique and requires special consideration and that its constitutional arrangements need to be worked out through partnership between north and south and London and Dublin.
The Irish Government will be happy with London’s reiteration yesterday of the primacy of the Belfast Agreement, despite the DUP insisting that it won “substantive changes” due to its rejection of the original text on Monday.
The DUP maintains it will keep its concerns to the fore in phase two of the Brexit negotiations, but this week has underlined that it is not in as strong a position as it might wish, and that the “Ulster Says No” mantra is hollow indeed.