From Unity, 13 February 2010

Media page

Is there a modern form of unionism?

by W. Owl

In his weekly page in the Irish News on 6 February, Patrick Murphy indulged in a critique of unionism tinged with the odd bout of satire.
     He started off, satirically, with a question posed by a child. “Daddy, Daddy, what are unionists?”
     “Unionists, my child, are a loose assortment of Irish people who, for more than 100 years, have known what they are against but who have not yet worked out what they are for.”
     Whilst some may view that as a rather harsh critique, he writes, others may see it as not harsh enough, judging by how protracted the recent negotiations have been. Some of the more backward elements of unionism may take exception to their being classified as Irish, although even Ian Paisley dispelled that nonsense some time ago.
     Murphy goes on to write that there is “little doubt that unionism is in disarray,” adding: “The once powerful political force, which governed the state of Northern Ireland with an iron fist, now finds itself not just divided but inherently divisive.”
     He then follows this comment with a question as to how unionism “got to this state,” and then, “what is its way forward?”
     The first part is probably easy to answer by anyone with a fair knowledge of Irish history, although it is questionable whether unionists, or some of them, would accept the conclusion. The second part is probably as difficult as picking winning lottery numbers.
     Murphy does give a potted history of unionism, stating that it was traditionally based on a “conditional” loyalty to the Crown, which he claims was expressed “in terms of negatives—no surrender, no Pope, not an inch.”
     They opposed home rule for Ireland “to the point of military mutiny,” but then used violence to enforce home rule for Northern Ireland.
     They opposed direct rule and equally a devolved Stormont, “if it involved power-sharing.” If they favoured power-sharing, policing was not part of it.
     Now they do support policing as part of power-sharing—“or do they?” Murphy asks.
     The “absolute power” of unionism over the years has “generated an intellectual laziness,” claims Murphy, which has prevented it from “reaching, and reacting to, the changing political mood in Ireland.” He cites the example of the civil rights movement, “which demanded the reform of the state, not its destruction,” blaming the then Stormont government for allowing Ian Paisley “to lead the state” into confrontation with that movement, thereby allowing him to set the unionist agenda for the next forty years.
     The “absence of any great body of political theory on unionism” allowed Paisley to fill the philosophical vacuum, “with the notion of unionist purity and to convince two generations of working-class Protestants that unionism meant intransigence.”
     Successive unionist leaders failed to challenge this perception, he writes, meaning they missed the opportunity “to define, or even find, political beliefs that required more than a flag to define them.”
     He names O’Neill, Chichester-Clarke, Faulkner and Trimble as leaders who all waved the flag—“and they all fell because they had not waved it to Paisley's satisfaction.”
     He blames what he describes as the “inward-looking nature of unionism” for failing to spot the changing republican tactics in the late 1980s, “and the challenge of peace.”
     Whilst not wanting to “trivialise the human suffering of the Troubles,” Murphy writes, “it would appear that politically, unionism was more comfortable during 30 years of violence than 15 years of peace.” Murphy doesn’t say it, but if this was the case then those who argued that the republican military campaign played into the hands of unionism were correct.
     How else could unionism justify its intransigence ?
     The peace process as it stands exposes them to the world, and they either move on to an accommodation or face the consequences.
     But what for the Protestant section of the working people?
     If they stay with unionism they have a choice: the DUP, with all its problems, the UUP and its Tory friends, or the good old unionist intransigence of the Traditional Unionist Voice.
     The question they must ask themselves is, is there some modern form of unionism out there? But if there is not, what then!

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