The DUP Makes Britain’s Governing Coalition More Representative, Not Less

When my mother died, I found among her effects a pamphlet by one Maurice Burke entitled ”Britain’s War Machine in Ireland.” The pamphlet probably raised a lot of money “for the Falls Road boys” in its day. My mother was a bit of a hardliner when it came to Irish nationalism. She was more nationalist than my Irish father. Of course, it was easy for an Irish-American to be a hardliner. George Orwell wrote about how people often show more patriotic fervor for other nations than for their own, because they aren’t as familiar with those nations’ faults and foibles. Besides which, Ulster’s Protestant paramilitaries never bombed anything near my mother’s hometown in in suburban New Jersey. They did bomb my father’s Dublin.

Eventually, I took up her passion for the cause. While working an after-school job in a small supermarket, I followed the Northern Irish peace process by reading the New York Times during my lunch breaks. Blood recognizes blood, I suppose. I was a wannabe-Irishman and bag boy. My best friend, a wannabe-Scottish soccer hooligan and deli-worker, regaled me during the same breaks with tales of the vicious street fights between Celtic and Rangers supporter in Glasgow. Catholic and socialist, he made a natural “Shinner” and loved Celtic, even though their best player was an Italian fascist. My sympathies were largely the same, save for the socialism.

Like most people my colleague Kevin Williamson calls muppets, I believed that while the peace process would make temporary celebrities of the hardliners, the world would soon be done dealing with men like Martin McGuinnes and Ian Paisley. Ha, ha. The extremists on both sides have flourished in peace, while everyone else on earth used it as an excuse to forget about Ulster. I remember being baffled by news that the process was stalling a decade ago. Sinn Fein wouldn’t agree to the IRA’s having its decommissioned weapons photographed. Why? Was this some nonsense about preserving their “never defeated” line? No. Gerry Adams and company simply didn’t want these photographs to be made public, lest they end up on Christmas cards advertising the Democratic Unionist Party.

It was with some amusement, then, that I noticed the entire Anglophone media had started reading the Wikipedia pages about Northern Ireland and the DUP last Friday, after it became clear that the DUP was going to be called upon to give the Tories and Theresa May a working coalition in the House of Commons. The DUP opposes same-sex marriage and abortion. And that’s where most of the outrage is located. Their history of anti-Catholicism and anti-Irishness is used to flesh out the main complaint about their social conservatism. No one would care about their sectarianism if they had become good secularists. The headlines read this way to me: Did you know that Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom and that there are all these disgusting Presbyterians in it?

At some point in the past few years, I realized that no one really wants Ulster Presbyterians in their country. They may be the safest people in the Western world to loathe openly in polite society. The British find Ulster’s imperial-stout patriotism off-putting, and the Orange veneration of battles from Boyne to the Somme dangerously militant. On the other side, the Irish government silently dreads the prospect of one day policing the July bonfires itself. In some ways, British society now treats Ulster’s Protestants with the same contempt it used to treat all Irish claims to self-governance, as a kind of sick joke. These people? Governing themselves? Gross.

You can pour scorn on Ireland’s Presbyterians for their views on gay marriage and abortion, and for their community’s sometimes shaky attitude toward those who snitch to police. But none of these views are foreign to multi-cultural London. In fact, they’re very much on the rise. There are fewer than 350,000 Presbyterians in Northern Ireland, and their primary political party opposes same-sex marriage. There are roughly 1 million Muslims living in London now, and half of them take the more extreme position that homosexuality should be criminalized. London, because of its new Islamic population, is now more socially conservative than Northern England and other parts of the country. Like Ulster’s Presbyterians, British Muslims report a stronger attachment to Britain than the average citizen. The great irony is that the Tory government in coalition with the DUP is now more representative of modern London’s diverse social attitudes, not less. Much to the chagrin of the DUP, I’m sure.

The DUP’s historic rhetoric against popery has mostly been discarded, only to be picked up and polished by progressives.

The DUP’s historic rhetoric against popery has mostly been discarded, only to be picked up and polished by progressives. Today it is secularists who see the dread hand of Romish theocracy and bigotry whenever nuns are found providing hospice care and practicing their faith with the protection of the law.

It is also a political mistake to treat the DUP as Ulster’s exaggerated version of the Tory party. They are as likely to drag the Tories to the center as to the right. While the DUP is fanatically pro-Brexit in the sense of wanting to restore Britain’s political sovereignty, they are for a “soft Brexit” that would keep trade and commerce across the entire island of Ireland unobstructed. They also have the power to threaten May’s Tories with an election that would likely bring Jeremy Corbyn to power if they don’t get what they want from her. Given that this wish list includes an end to austerity and a beefed up social-services budget, even many Irish Republicans in the North are now cautiously hopeful that some of their common interests will finally get a serious hearing in Westminster. (These Republicans do, however, dread the price that may be attached to that hearing: a re-authorization of sectarian parades.)

In any case, even if the DUP are not “my people” — not yet, anyway — I’m glad that Northern Ireland is back in the news. Ulster’s pathologies and its progress both need a second look as the Isles deal with Brussels and the questions of what unionism, republicanism, and sovereignty will mean from now on.

READ MORE:

A Colossal Political Disaster for the Tories

Corbyn or ‘Soft Brexit’: Choose One

Editorial: Theresa May Must Go

— Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer for National Review Online.