Last Monday, RTE’S flagship current affairs programme the Claire Byrne Show was devoted to an examination of Sinn Fein.
It seemed to be based on the premise “why you should not vote for the Sinners ”.
Just five days later, the DUP’s Sammy Wilson was booed and jeered at an anti-protocol rally in Markethill, Co Armagh.
You can be left with egg on your face if you attempt to read too much into what are unrelated events but bear with me.
In the Republic, the old established political parties are definitely rattled by the rapid rise of Sinn Fein. The legal and media establishment aren’t exactly overjoyed either. So, presumably, the idea in RTE was to do a programme which would expose this unease.
Anyway, whatever the reasoning, it backfired with a vengeance. What came across – as hundreds of social media postings pointed out – was a patronising, out of touch elite seemingly attempting to tell the electorate they knew best.
If Sinn Fein’s Matt Carthy was supposed to be the political equivalent of Daniel in the lions’ den then it was the cats who got gobbled up.
Far from being an extremist, either economically or politically, he was moderation itself.
What the establishment doesn’t seem to get is the whiff of cordite that an Adams or a McGuinness once used to bring to such occasions is long gone. It’s a different era now.
Put it like this, by the time the credits started to roll it was clear the mood in the studio was very much with Carthy.
It was a very different scenario in Markethill. Once the very idea of any unionist or loyalist community booing Sammy Wilson would have been for the birds. Sammy always says it like it is, doesn’t pull his punches and his plain speaking made him a man of the people, a sure fire winner.
On Friday night his address was often drowned out as crowd members accused the DUP of totally botching up the Brexit process.
Not even Sammy’s track record as a hardline, uncompromising defender of unionism was enough to save him from the wrath of folk standing in the blizzard. They were clearly really angry.
Some weeks back Sir Jeffrey Donaldson called for unionist unity to give an unequivocal message to Boris and Brussels that the Protocol had to go or, at the very least, be greatly amended before it would be acceptable to his community.
If Friday night’s encounter is anything to go by, he can forget about that.
There is little or no unity in unionism.
In fact since the Markethill rally relationships seem to have fractured even further with Wilson attacking the TUV’s Jim Allister accusing him of “whipping up anti-DUP sentiment”.
This prompted the combative Mr Allister to hit back with angry allegations of “unwarranted personal attacks”.
The picture I am trying to paint here is really a very simple one – thanks to Brexit and the Protocol Sinn Fein doesn’t really have to do anything north of the Border.
It doesn’t even need a strategy. By way of contrast, thanks to those same factors the DUP in particular and unionism in general badly need a strategy, and quickly.
As I said earlier, predictions can leave you with egg on your face but I’m hardly betting the family fortune in saying the DUP is in diffs, that Markethill meeting clearly indicating Sir Jeffrey’s party is out of touch with the mood in the street.
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