Sinn Féin is the larger party of nationalism and holds the office of First Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly. But this is not because there are more nationalists that unionists. It’s because unionism is more divided than nationalism
THERE is a powerful anomaly in Northern Ireland politics.
The basic structure is polarisation between nationalism and unionism with a middle ground that doesn’t wish to be identified with either side.
There are also divisions within divisions. The nationalist side is split between two parties, Sinn Féin and the much smaller Social Democratic and Labour Party. Both of them aspire to a united Ireland though the SDLP calls it a ‘new Ireland’.
Unionists are split similarly between the Democratic Unionist Party and the smaller Ulster Unionist Party.
In both sides the smaller party is the less ardent on the constitutional question and occasionally attractive across the divide to the tactical voter.
The anomaly is that the scale of the parties is not representative of the spread of thinking within the sides that vote for them.
Take unionism. Polling shows that a majority of people living in Northern Ireland would currently vote in a referendum to keep Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. Yet somehow the unionist parties are unable to translate that majority commitment to their cause into a majority of seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly or a majority of MPs going from there to Westminster.
That tells you that an awful lot of unionists don’t vote for the parties that most vigorously assert their own commitment to the Union.
And why is that?
One possibility is easy enough to deduce. A lot of British-identifying people in Northern Ireland feel perfectly secure. They see no actual threat to the Union that they need to worry about.
So political parties that are perpetually banging the drum about the Union and the need to preserve it are viewed as hot headed and irrelevant, overly concerned about constitutional politics and insufficiently concerned about the quality of government right now.
They see them as like end of days apocalyptics who worry too much and frighten the children.
Near my house in Belfast there is a Banksy that is fading away and gets little notice.
It depicts a rat with a protest placard that reads, ‘The End is Nigh’.
A big green cat is pouncing on the rat. I presume the green cat represents Irish nationalism.
The rat’s placard elides the apocalyptic faith of evangelical Christians with the fear of a united Ireland. This is clever because the two do overlap.
And then on another side of the fading picture is a white animal, like a mole or a large rodent. It has turned its back on the cat and the rat and is walking away.
This creature symbolises peace,
Maybe it is simply rejecting the quarrel between the cat and the rat. Maybe it simply doesn’t care if the cat kills the rat and Irish nationalism prevails.
Banksy’s cartoon could be read as a representation of the idea that a united Ireland is inevitable. There’s nothing that can be done to save the rat for truly, ‘the end is nigh’ for unionism.
I meet occasional Protestant unionists who do think like that. And that is another reason why unionist parties aren’t getting the votes from their base that the polls suggest they should.
Sinn Féin is the larger party of nationalism and holds the office of First Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly. But this is not because there are more nationalists that unionists. It’s because unionism is more divided than nationalism.
Ethnic, factional politics is working better for nationalists than for unionists.
Nearly all nationalists are from a Catholic background and nearly all unionists are from a Protestant background.
This factional coherence is apparently stronger among Catholics than among Protestants.
Nationalism almost never emphasises religion as a definer of identity, even though it canvasses votes almost exclusively from baptised Catholics, who live in the parts of towns and cities where Catholics predominate.
That secular approach helps. Sinn Féin endorsed the legalisation of abortion though the Catholic church regards that as warranting excommunication.
Unionism has strands within it which still appeal to religious faith and sentiment and the evidence of the decline of the parties suggests that that doesn’t work anymore.
The Orangemen parade through the streets, banging their drums and tooting on their flutes and proclaiming an affinity between their unionism and their faith.
An awful lot of British identifying people in Northern Ireland who will vote to preserve the Union when the border poll comes, perhaps in the next decade, have no interest in that carry-on. Granda’s Orange sash might be in a drawer upstairs as a memento, but for them that culture is dated and obsolete.
Unionism’s sensible option now is to liberalise and secularise and present an image of British identity as something more interesting than Protestant chauvinism. It is to give up anguishing about the future united Ireland, trust that people will make a sensible choice when the time comes, and join in with the middle grounders, leaving nationalists looking like the only ethnic party.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
