Are we witnessing the end of the DUP as the dominant unionist party in Northern Ireland? Tumultuous events in Belfast in recent days suggest as much.
The DUP gathered on Thursday night to ratify the appointment of Edwin Poots and Paula Bradley as the party’s new leader and deputy leader. A dull rubber-stamping it was not; the meeting turned into the most public display of discord and factionalism in the party’s 50-year history.
Rather than listen to Poots make his acceptance speech, Jeffrey Donaldson, the MP Gavin Robinson and both Nigel and Diane Dodds stood up and left. Dissatisfaction with how Arlene Foster was treated was given as the reason for the walk-out, with some party activists also resigning from their positions.
For long-term DUP watchers, this airing of dirty laundry was extraordinary given how the party had previously operated. A cult of personality was built around the late Ian Paisley. More recently, while pockets of dissent and ill-discipline broke out occasionally under the leadership of Peter Robinson and Arlene Foster, the line held.
Yet much like the Belfast Agreement broke the Ulster Unionists, allowing the DUP to sweep in, Brexit and the Protocol has broken the DUP and the fragile coalitions which existed within it. Those from the moderate wing who stayed to listen to Edwin Poots speak would have been treated to the greatest hits of dreary, old time unionism. For those drawn into the DUP over the years by the likes of Robinson, this denial of the political and social realities in Northern Ireland surely spells the end of it having any pretence of being a broad church.
While politics is the main thing in this schism, personalities are at play here. Ian Paisley Jr, Poots’ frontman, spoke of how his own father – ousted as leader by the party’s reformers – died of a broken heart as a result.
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