Robbie Dinwoodie:

HALF a lifetime ago I first set foot on Irish soil within a few hours of Bobby Sands’s death to report, in the no doubt ham-fisted way of a young outsider, on “the Troubles”. A few days later, on the day of the hunger striker’s funeral, feeling like a veteran already, I ended up in the Europa Hotel. Here’s what I wrote: “At one end of the bars of one of Belfast’s main hotels, an Irishman named Kelly assured me that I was surrounded by ‘the only people in this community who don’t give a f*** what religion you are’.”

I had found myself among a group of gay men who were under siege. Both the Catholic Church and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party were hounding this despised minority and fighting to keep the law criminalising them on the Northern Ireland Statute Book.

Save Ulster from Sodomy was the campaign then and now, 34 years later, it seems that change has been glacial; except you can’t even use that term since many of those who rail against homosexuals also disbelieve the geological evidence, holding hard to the Biblical record that the earth was created only 6,000 years ago, and that fossils and indications of Ice Ages must have been left here by God to test our faith.

Why this trip down memory lane? Suddenly it all feels relevant again, not just because the Republic of Ireland is going through its own fierce debate on gay marriage but also because in the North the DUP, now the dominant force in Ulster Unionism, is still riddled with homophobia.

And if the Conservatives are to be narrow winners over Labour in the General Election next week, and the rump of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrat Party is insufficient to take David Cameron back through the door of Number 10, whom will he turn to?

You guessed it, the DUP, who may well add to their eight seats.

This week, the Stormont health minister, Jim Wells, resigned a few days after telling a hustings that children of a same-sex couple were more likely to be abused.

First he denied it, then a blogger produced video evidence, so he blamed his comments on stress from his wife being gravely ill, which he then used as his pretext for stepping down.

As minister, he also held the view that abortion should be denied even to victims of

‘‘ Had Nicola Sturgeon, or any other SNP parliamentarian, come out with the utterances of some in the DUP you would never have heard the end of it

rape. His predecessor as minister of health, social services and public safety was Edwin Poots, who used the position to ban gay people from giving blood and fought attempts to bring gay adoption laws into line with the rest of the UK.

He was Environment Minister when he proclaimed his “young earth” view that our planet is 6,000 years old. Scientists put earth’s age at 4.5 billion years.

Why does this matter? Well compare and contrast these two politicians with Holyrood’s two female SNP health secretaries, Shona Robison and Nicola Sturgeon, the latter going on to be First Minister and “the most dangerous woman in Britain” after performing strongly in the televised leaders’ debates.

Had they, or any other SNP parliamentarians, come out with the utterances of some in the DUP you would never have heard the end of it.

The SNP, regardless of your views on the constitutional question, is in the mainstream of Northern European social democratic parties.

You simply cannot say that about the DUP, which grew out of an evangelical church and the role of Ian Paisley, its charismatic Loyalist leader in the Troubles.

It has a strange admix of policies, ultra-Unionist, socially conservative, pro-defence, pro-border controls, but hostile to benefit cuts.

It has espoused “equidistance” between Labour and the Tories but, in reality, it is far closer to the latter and has refused to be part of any voting bloc that includes the SNP.

Westminster DUP leader Nigel Dodds and party leader Peter Robinson have both been critical of the Tories for tactics they regard as playing into the SNP’s hands.

Mr Cameron has rarely been put on the spot about whether he would accept DUP support and yet he has constantly asked the same question of Ed Miliband in relation to the SNP.

While Labour used to be able to rely on the SDLP for support, that party has fallen to just three MPs because of advances made by Sinn Fein.

It has five MPs but, as abstentionists, they will play no part at Westminster.

So the squeeze in Northern Irish politics towards Republicans and the DUP only matters to Westminster in the case of the latter.

Fossils sent to test us, you might say.