As Britain and Ireland have a long and sometimes fraught history, the unionist politicians' silence on the deep familial and cultural links between the Irish and the English undermines their case. MALACHI O'DOHERTY reports
One of the many marvels of Northern Ireland politics is that the unionists make such a poor case for the Union.
We see this starkly in July and August when the lodges of the loyal orders and their accompanying bands take to the streets to beat their drums and assert their Protestant pride.
Many, perhaps most, unionist leaders participate in this and the general impression is that this is the high point of the culture they assert and commit to defending.
Around this we have the bonfire culture.
This used to be kids gathering rubbish for weeks in advance and building a big ‘boney’ on waste ground. That tradition has evolved. Now different housing estates compete to have the highest tower built from pallets, and this is so much expected that there is little point is saying it is not traditional. It is traditional now.
And there might even be an argument for saying that it contains the energies of young loyalists and keeps them out of trouble.
But as a case for the Union it says only that the Union is Protestant and that is a failing strategy as demographic patterns tilt to favour Catholics/ nationalists and the secular tendency.
Many Catholics will continue to favour the Union but they are not going to associate themselves with a political culture which is emphatically Protestant. Very few are going to join unionist political parties though some may give a second or third preference vote in a proportional representation system to a moderate unionist candidate.
But there is another case for the Union that none of these parties are making.
You could say that the Union is organic, that much as Britain and Ireland for centuries have had a fraught, sometimes brutal relationship it has, nonetheless been a connection more than a rift.
But where is the unionist politician who would point to the Irish in England as evidence of deep familial links across the Irish Sea such as warrant the retention of the best possible relationships at commercial, cultural and political levels?
I don’t hear that voice.
I have seen Eamonn Holmes receive his OBE from the Queen and declare himself immensely proud. This from a Catholic boy from Belfast.
The names McCartney and Lennon are Irish names.
Elvis Costello’s adopted surname name is Irish but so also is his real name, Declan McManus,
Ant and Dec are Anthony McParland and Declan Donnelly.
Mick Lynch leads the railway workers and Fergus Murphy was the Wimbledon umpire who would take no cheek from Djokovic.
It’s extraordinary how many celebrities featured in Who Do You Think You Are? discover that they have Irish roots or, like John Hurt, are disconsolate on learning that they haven’t.
Without Ireland there is no England that most people would recognise.
Keir Starmer, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have all declared themselves to be committed unionists.
Boris Johnson designated himself Minister for the Union and the title has now passed to Rishi Sunak. I don’t know what he is actually doing to meet the responsibilities of that office but if I were a unionist politician I would be asking him.
Instead of celebrating and developing relations across the Irish Sea, unionists seem paradoxically concerned to emphasise Northern Ireland’s distinctness from Britain.
They rationalise that perhaps as preserving the values that modern Britain has lost sight of. So they resisted the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion.
Currently they are at odds with the British government and the EU over the Brexit settlement which produced a trade border in the Irish Sea having themselves campaigned for the hard Brexit that made that inevitable.
And currently the DUP is boycotting the power-sharing executive and simply refusing to govern the place in protest against what they see as inadequate compromises made with the EU to placate them.
What might they have done other than establish a kind of toad in the hole, little old chauvinistic, fantasy Britain on the top right hand corner of Ireland?
They might have done what Eamonn Holmes and others did and just chipped in.
Couldn’t they have run candidates in Scotland and other areas and involved themselves in British politics as Sinn Féin has done in the Republic?
Essentially both the hard unionist and hard nationalist traditions in Northern Ireland have engrained oppositional instincts whose usefulness is rapidly expiring. Sinn Féin currently seems to be managing the transition better towards modern values and responsibility. It can recognise a popular mood and go with it.
Its vision of a united Ireland has changed many times. Some will call that hypocrisy, some adaptability, some pragmatism. Unionism’s vision of the Union with Britain seems essentially to be out of touch with the Britain it clings to and offers it nothing.
And it doesn’t agonise about that.
Perhaps unionists feel that evidence of an organic link between Britain and Ireland actually undermines the case for Partition, the preservation of a non-Irish territory that is just as much non-British. What case can there be to section off a part of Ireland as especially British if both nations are already in a special relationship?
UMPIRE STRIKES BACK Fergus Murphy from Dublin faces down Novak Djokovic at the Wimbledon Men's Singles final (picture by by Visionhaus/Getty Images)