Article by TUV leader Jim Allister
In this centenary year, whose very celebration is subject to the grace and favour of Sinn Fein – no centenary stone allowed at Stormont, not a single penny in the Executive’s budget to mark the centenary – it is folly to pretend all is well.
Those who foolishly believed feting SF in government would tame them – and I remember being told that by a DUP MP after the St Andrews Agreement – must be gravely disappointed. All it has done is embolden them to use its every opportunity to advance the republican agenda, as we saw recently when the folly of Edwin Poots delivered them Irish language legislation.
The simple but irreducible truth is that Sinn Fein never has been, and never will be, in government to make Northern Ireland work. Quite the opposite!
This devolution was always an intrinsic part of a process whose eventual outcome was designed to be Irish unity. If, as we are told, this is the only form of devolution attainable, then, for me, the inescapable question is ‘why would we want it?’
To make matters worse, the Protocol is in the same mould. Indeed, it delivers the greatest stepping stone, the evolving all-island economy – in tandem with fettering trade with our GB market, legislative alignment with ROI through subjecting us to the same EU economic laws and loss of democratic control. ‘Consent’, now an obstacle, has been jettisoned.
Hence the imperative of unstitching both. And, this is the challenge Sir a Jeffrey Donaldson needs to rise to.
Of course, to even say such is to draw the wrath of those invested in the process and whose nightmare is that unionism wakens up before it is too late.
Such awakening requires radical reassessment of aspiration and methodology. A return to the basics of unionism – one nation, one people, one Parliament – would be a good start. Such equal citizenship has compelling logic and, yes, loss of diminishing singularity that the theory of devolution provides. Everything has a down side, but where does the greatest downside for unionism lie – the Irish unity absorption process-assisted by devolution and the Protocol, or promoting the British absorption that the essence of unionism entails?