Sadly, tribal allegiances will prevail and the DUP will succeed again in spite of its dreadful record

DAVID Dimbleby smirked as he said they were like salamanders who “have remained unchanged for millions of years”. Jon Snow remarked, “They’re one of the most extreme political entities in the British Isles”. In March, an article in The Sun opined that, when “flexibility and imagination” were needed to save Brexit, “our destiny is governed by intransigent bigots, who care nothing for the wider interests of the UK”.

The DUP is not loved by the English public. And I fear that dislike influences attitudes towards the rest of us here in Northern Ireland.

But ours is a tribal society and in all such cultures arrogance, fecklessness and mismanagement in government invariably go unpunished, because loyalty to the tribe is paramount; in this case, an imagined entity called the “Protestant community”.

So, we ignore the opinions of others. We disregard the fact that the Democratic Unionists were the only party, in its totality, who supported the invasion of Iraq, in which thousands of innocents died and the havoc that war consequently caused in the Middle East exacerbated the refugee crisis, which fed into the paranoia about immigration. We take no account of the fact that they were the only party in Westminster

that campaigned for Brexit and was later exposed as accepting a hefty financial donation from the “Constitutional Research Council” to allow them to campaign unnoticed for Brexit in England.

So, given all this (not to mention the “cash-for-ash” scandal), the DUP, despite having helped deliver a disastrous Brexit and having brought us to the verge of a constitutional crisis, can be quietly confident that the unionist tribe will continue to invest their confidence in them.

WES HOLMES Belfast