The decline and fall of the DUP

Along with death and taxes, life has only one other certainty: the DUP will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Fresh from insulting Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the annual St Patrick’s Day Washington jamboree as a man who needs to ‘read a history book’, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has now antagonised Downing Street, the EU, the Irish Government, of course, and President Joe Biden by his rejection of the Windsor Framework. Quite an achievement.

In the American polity, Ireland, and St Patrick’s Day, is a positive brand, not just the feast day of a small nation. The Irish Taoiseach, whoever she or he is, handing over the bowl of shamrock in the Oval Office is as regular a fixture in the White House calendar as the annual pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey. A can do, no-cost, grin-and-agree political Woodstock, fuelled by half pints of Guinness, black pudding canapés and green White House water fountains, where everyone can feel good about themselves and, since the Good Friday Agreement, the benign triumphs of American diplomatic power. The invitation extends to the DUP who turned up in record numbers this year but only to make new enemies and annoy their American hosts.

Paddy’s Day is a Washington ceremonial where even the British Embassy gets in on the act with a St Pat’s breakfast diplomatic reception. The advantage for the Irish government lies in the outsized influence it can bring to bear in Congress and the White House for its shifting agenda. No US politician ever lost votes either by claiming an extra Irish grandmother.

For Biden, whose secret service POTUS nom de plume is ‘Celtic’, the sentiment now has a bit more substance as part of his re-election campaign. Biden’s forefathers hail from Ballina in County Mayo and in his long career as senator, between 1973 and 2009, and vice-president he has always been closely identified with the Irish American cause. His proposed visit to Belfast, his first as President, for the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to be a presidential lap of triumph with speeches in the thronged Stormont Assembly Chamber, cheering crowds, lots of US network TV time, and elusive promises of further American investment gold for keeping up the good peace-making work.

But now the ugly DUP cousins have ruined Biden’s parade with their stonewall refusal to go along with the show. They have made obscurantist demands for further EU concessions on processed meats and green/red lane customs declarations. What sort of photo-op can Joe send back to the American electorate from Belfast now? 

Belfast’s loss might prove to be Ballina’s gain but Jeffrey Donaldson, for sure, is not winning himself any new friends in Washington. ‘Jeffrey is very soft spoken, doesn’t come across as hardline, but in the end, in American eyes, he’s sort of useless because he doesn’t have the strength to deliver his own team to the deal,’ said an observer on the Washington scene.

The dangers, too, of appeasing the DUP are swiftly becoming apparent to Rishi Sunak as his shiny Windsor triumph, even with the co-option of the King on the deal, has unravelled before his eyes. The ERG rebellion on the implementation of the Windsor Framework from a handful of Brexit hardliners in parliament is unlikely to shake the government. But it prolongs the unfinished Brexit trade deal agony when everyone else in Westminster wants Brexit to be dead and gone.

Beyond the DUP, how many care whether Asda lorries are spot checked for contraband sausages at the northern Irish border? To the exasperation of British civil servant negotiators in the Windsor Framework pre-talks they could never actually get their DUP counterparts to articulate out loud what would satisfy them. Perhaps because the DUP never knew themselves? 

Saying no, backing yourself into a corner and relying on others to save you from your own failures, only works if the other participants all agree that you are an essential player in game.

Unfortunately for the DUP those options are narrowing. The Windsor Framework will be imposed upon them and is unlikely to ever be substantially renegotiated regardless of some future fig leaf ‘renegotiation summit’.

However public their opposition, like a crab moving forward sideways, the DUP will, in the end – as they did with the Good Friday Agreement – have no choice but to return to Stormont defeated or else never return at all. Their days as vital allies in the Westminster parliament are long gone.

Time, and opportunity, is not on the DUP’s side. The demographics of Northern Ireland are running against them: Sinn Fein look likely to claim the role of First Minister for themselves as the biggest party in a future Stormont. Even as Donaldson landed on American shores, the US Friends of Sinn Fein took out newspaper adverts in the New York Times and Washington Post calling on the Irish government to ‘promote and plan for unity’. 

For the last three decades, Sinn Fein, under the recently deceased Rita O’Hare, ran its own formidable parallel Washington lobby machine garnering millions of dollars and many Congressional allies. Who was doing most of the murdering tended to be downplayed and history re-written. Such is Sinn Fein’s respectability now that former president Bill Clinton and Gerry Adams, the IRA’s political godfather, will be sharing their ‘reminiscences’ of the Good Friday Agreement on stage together in New York in early April. 

Election polls in the Republic strongly indicate Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald will be the next Irish Taoiseach handing over the bowl of shamrock to the US president in the Oval Office and that future Irish government’s lobbying message will merge with Sinn Fein’s. The DUP’s small voice will become smaller yet and talk of border polls, Irish Unity, louder still in Congress and the Oval Office.

Perhaps in his weakness, and given his fractious party brethren, it was always impossible for Donaldson to claim victory with the Windsor Framework, return to Stormont and move on. But it is a decision, like supporting Brexit, that the DUP is likely to rue. In the cruelty of politics, one party’s lost opportunity can so easily turn into another party’s gain. 

And of course Sinn Fein do have their own novel solution to the Northern Irish Protocol. Once Ireland becomes one sovereign nation then of course you instantly solve all your Brexit problems.