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Nicolas Šustr is the city development and transport editor for the German newspaper formerly known as Neues Deutschland now known as ND.
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We’re going to have a new leader of the DUP. Leaders of the DUP are generally not anyone’s favourite person, unless that anyone happens to be a DUP supporter. As an aside I have to say that much of the criticism of Arlene Foster on social media that I see has more than a tinge of sexism, but that’s a story for a different day. And, if you are looking for things to criticise Arlene Foster over, there is surely enough to say without having to scrape that barrel.
Anyway, the next leader is likely to be Edwin Poots, he’s the north’s Minister of Agriculture, Environment, and Rural Affairs and he’s the MLA for Lagan Valley. And he’s a member of the Free Presbyterian Church.
The Free Presbyterian Church is a tiny organisation, the membership in Northern Ireland is about 10,000, about half of one per cent of the population; it’s the church founded by the late Ian Paisley senior, also the founder of the DUP, and this church dominates the DUP, despite the fact that it doesn’t represent the overwhelming number of its voters. Arlene Foster is a member of the much larger, and much more mainstream Church of Ireland; that was perhaps one factor that isolated her in her party.
Edwin Poots, and the rest of the Free Presbyterians believe in what is called young earth creationism, which means that they believe that the bibcal story of genesis, with Adam and Eve and the talking snake is literally true in every aspect and happened six thousand years ago. They have objected to, among many other things, geological information about the Giants’ Causeway posted in the visitor centre there, because that it says that the rock formations were formed by natural processes hundreds of thousands of years ago rather than by God and the flood of Noah.
Needless to say, they don’t hold very liberal views on … oh, I’m not going to list them here, they don’t hold very liberal views on anything. They believe that the Pope is literally the antichrist mentioned in the bible.
Now, when British journalists try to make insightful comments about Irish politics, north or south, it’s not generally a pretty sight. I’m reminded of David Davis accusing Leo Varadkar of being anti-British in 2018 because he wanted to win votes from Sinn Féin in his bid for re-election as president in that year.
So when Robert Peston, the ITV political correspondent tweeted that Edwin Poots as DUP leader would drive unaligned voters to Sinn Féin, there was a predictable pile-on from Irish Twitter-ers ridiculing his misunderstanding of the politics of what is theoretically part of Peston’s patch as pol cor.
In fairness to Peston, he didn’t say that DUP voters would be pushed to Sinn Féin, he said that Poots instead of Foster as DUP leader would make Alliance and Green voters switch to Sinn Féin, which really is just as daft, at least in the short term…
But on another level, on a different time scale it might not be that daft at all. Now, the typical DUP voter, or the atypical DUP voter or any other type of DUP voter would be more likely to limbo-dance naked down the M1 to Dublin than they would be to switch their vote Sinn Féin. But here I’m not strictly talking about DUP voters, I’m remembering that politics in the north is intensely tribal, and the expectation, the correct expectation for the last century, is that the community that people are born into is a perfect predictor of their voting intention.
But think the section of the population under 35. Young, but starting-a-family young, not swiping through TikTok at the back of the maths class young.
People under 35 have no memory of the troubles. None. And many of them have different political priorities. They are no less affected by the major single-issue social and environmental issues than people in other areas of the western world.
If you wanted to design a cartoon villain to be a nemesis for young voters like that, then Edwin Poots might be a good model. Now I’m certain that not one DUP supporter will be put off by Edwin Poots being the architype of evil for young liberals, but we must remember one important thing that the DUP voters are doing.
They are dying.
Now, about five or six per cent of the electorate dies between each election anyway; they are replaced by young people reaching the voting age, though DUP voters are considerably older than average so the shadow of the reaper looms a bit larger for them. In the normal course of events that would not matter much because in tribal Northern Ireland they would just be replaced with younger voters.
But I’m not that sure that all of the people who were born into the DUP are going to be such loyal loyalists as you might think. That’s not to say that I expect a huge number of them to defect, but the reality is that in a demographic situation as tight as the north is becoming, any leaking away of support could be hugely significant.
A lot of this has happened already. When those 35-year-olds were born, the 1987 UK general election had returned three SDLP MPs and one for Sinn Féin, with the other 13 seats going to various unionists. Now nationalists have exactly half the 18 seats, with unionists in a minority.
Part of that is the result of a demographic shift, but I think that we can’t ignore the effect of the children of DUP voters becoming Alliance or Green or People Before Profit voters. And, in some cases, Sinn Féin voters. The path that I’m thinking of here is not so much a full reversal from unionism to nationalism, instead reordering of priorities. If sovereignty is less important than social and environmental issues, why support a party that fly Trump flags, deny the existence of climate change and evolution, and tick every other crazy fundamentalist box they can find?
And one last point here; for the people who are enthusiastic for a United Ireland – you will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. The path to any United Ireland worth having is paved with charity and understanding, not with gloating over bombings and singing Wolfe Tones’ songs.
