The Democratic Unionist party pulled the plug on post-Brexit Irish Sea border checks this week and then resigned its joint leadership of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive. These were dramatic gestures. They are a reminder of the chronic instability that has continued to dog Northern Ireland governance, in spite of the Good Friday agreement. They are also a reminder of the particularly destabilising effects of Brexit for Ireland as a whole.
But they are, above all, a sign of DUP political weakness, not strength. They are a foolish gamble that the DUP can get its way in a Brexit argument to which compromise is, in the long run, the only solution. In the short term, however, the DUP’s action has been provoked by electoral fear. An assembly election is due in Northern Ireland in three months’ time. The DUP’s positions as both the dominant unionist party and as the largest party in the assembly are under threat amid the anxieties triggered by Brexit. The party has been losing support to more moderate and more fundamentalist rivals alike.
All this has fuelled, and has been intensified by, bitter internal clashes. These led to the removal of Arlene Foster as party leader last May, and then of her successor Edwin Poots a month later, when he was replaced in turn by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. Splits inside the DUP and within unionism are helping to provide an electoral gift to Sinn Féin, which may be poised to become the largest party, with the right to nominate the new first minister.
This instability is fuelled by the Brexit settlement, under which a trade barrier in the Irish Sea was conceded by Boris Johnson as the price of maintaining a soft border between north and south. The DUP supported Brexit in 2016 but has proved incapable of dealing with its consequences. Sir Jeffrey came to power with a reputation as a DUP politician whom others could do business with. Early on, he talked of removing the flaws of the Northern Ireland protocol. But hostility to the protocol has increasingly become a litmus test of hardline unionist identity. Nowadays, Sir Jeffrey talks only of scrapping it.
The party is now gambling that a more intransigent stance will restore its ascendancy among unionist voters and within Northern Ireland politics more widely. This is why Mr Poots, as agriculture minister, ordered the border checks to cease (a court stayed his decision on Friday) and why Paul Givan quit as first minister the next day (though other DUP ministers remain in place for the time being). It is possible that such stunts will prove a vote-winner when the election comes. But they also imply that power-sharing will not be resuming any time soon, before or after the vote.
The DUP’s actions are not designed to make a settlement of the protocol dispute any more likely. The UK and the EU may nevertheless be edging slowly towards finding a solution to their differences. Any such settlement would clearly fall far short of the scrapping of the protocol that the DUP is demanding. But the DUP is out of step with majority opinion in Northern Ireland on Brexit – and always has been. Mr Johnson should not give in to its threats. Instead, he should reach a sensible compromise with the EU of the kind that the majority in Northern Ireland have shown they would be likely to support.
