Good manners make for kind neighbours, Leo...
EUROPE’S most enduring contemporary cultural success, Abba, had a prophetic take on the DUP’s Arlene Foster in the chorus of their haunting hit song in 1980: ‘The winner takes it all The loser’s standing small Beside the victory That’s her destiny.’ Maybe on Friday the Taoiseach hummed the song that was topping the Irish charts when he was just a year old as he saw Ms Foster diminishing in his rear-view mirror.
He was also multi-tasking: sublimating an urge to celebrate a political victory confirmed by a soaring opinion poll, while trying to pretend that the vast majority of Irish people don’t despise the Democratic Unionist Party.
Everyone else in the Brexit crisis – the other EU members, modernists in the United Kingdom et al – were also trying hard to forgive the DUP for holding them hostage last week.
Mr Varadkar disregarded the DUP’s vituperative insults like a busy doctor ignoring an elderly patient’s paranoia, while the EU designated Nigel Dodds’ rants as an internal family problem for British Tories.
Every major drama needs a scary villain and the DUP popped up right on cue last week. Their unforgiving fundamentalism has cast the party as the bogey man lazy parents invoke to threaten naughty children. But the DUP really don’t care if everybody hates them. Former Stormont MLA Eamonn McCann says DUP members remind him of the notorious chant of Millwall Football Club supporters: ‘Everybody hates us – but we don’t care.’
My late mother had a soft description for tough people like them: ‘Hard children to love.’ The DUP are not cuddly or sentimental; neither are they quick to smile nor the first to the bar. The DUP’s combative contempt for anyone who does not share their worldview is frustrating but, politically, unionism prospered from Britain repaying its debt to them. Just as the moderate SDLP were swallowed by a predatory Sinn Féin, the DUP’s fire and brimstone consumed the less pugnacious Ulster Unionist party.
Ms Foster keeps the home fires burning at Stormont but not all unionists or Protestants agree with her ferocious anti-EU stance. Yet propping up a Tory government exiting the EU is a sacred calling for the leader of the DUP’s 10 MPs in Westminster, Mr Dodds.
Sadly, the DUP’s only friends in Westminster are high Tory Brexiteers, a rare breed of basically English nationalists who patronise their Northern Ireland brethren as an exotic curiosity. Paradoxically, the DUP encourage blood kin hillbillies in the US Rust Belt who support US President Donald Trump.
IT WAS humiliating for the DUP when a British government needed to secure prior approval from Ireland before their leaving of the EU could proceed in an orderly fashion. And no matter how hard Mr Varadkar works to win their respect, the DUP will always use his sexual identity to designate him a sinner.
There were casualties: David Davis, Britain’s chief Brexit negotiator, who begins each day with six teaspoons of sugar and two paracetamol tablets, appears to have lost his ambition to replace Theresa May. But paradoxically, the hapless prime minister’s position is probably more secure after last week’s monumental incompetence than at any time since her cursed decision to call an election last June. One of the few nuggets we learned last week is Jeremy Corbyn is the ultimate bogey man for the DUP – and they willingly sacrificed a lot to delay his advance on 10 Downing Street.
Now the Irish Republic finds itself as a key player in Britain’s exit from the EU so it’s not the ideal time to ask the DUP to be less confrontational and more accommodating to their neighbours.
Many unionists voted with their children’s feet and sent their teenage offspring to university in England or Scotland – knowing almost certainly that they would never return to live in Northern Ireland. And neither are many of the DUP as impressed by intellect or emotional intelligence as they are by a biblical student reciting by name and order the books of the Old Testament. Unionism, even at its most elemental in the DUP, has been searching for its place in the modern world for the past generation.
THEIR winner-takes-itall philosophy played well for more than two generations after the Free State left the union in 1922 but their intractable dilemma must be faced in the next decade: Is some form of a United Ireland without losers or winners inevitable, if not desirable? How realistic is the ultimate unionist fantasy where the Irish Republic sees the light and takes its place again in the United Kingdom?
More than at any time in recent history, the Irish government has a moral and political duty to reassure unionists that the Irish Republic does not seek to coerce or consume them, politically or culturally.
Cancelling a self-congratulatory press conference last Monday, before hubris led to monumental embarrassment, was a close call for the Taoiseach. But after such a traumatic week for everyone, Mr Varadkar may want to reassure the British government that, as their closest neighbour, the Irish Republic will be their most generous friend. The EU has been telling May for more than a week now that whatever makes him happy is acceptable to them. On Friday, an opinion poll told him that the Irish electorate believes he is currently on the right side of history.
His media consultants may now want to remind themselves of Robert Frost’s 1914 poem Mending Wall, in which he said: ‘Good fences make good neighbours…’ I think good manners make for kind neighbours – an apt Christmas message for the DUP and Sinn Féin.