Northern Ireland: hardening borders and hardening attitudes

In this year's general election it was perhaps Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party that had the best result of all. The DUP took ten of the eighteen seats in Northern Ireland (up from eight in 2015), and roundly defeated their main unionist rivals to consolidate their position both as the largest party in Northern Ireland and as the largest unionist party. Now that Theresa May has been forced to agree a supply and confidence deal with them, many people are scrambling to figure out who and what the DUP are-and are by turns expressing surprise, horror and incredulity at what they discover.

The DUP have so far been the main beneficiaries of the triumph of the extremes over the centre that has been a feature of Northern Ireland's consociational model of governance.¹ And it is the combination of this trend and Westminster's first-past-the-post system that has now given the DUP its current pivotal role in the UK as a whole.

Sinn Fein, the DUP's erstwhile 'enemy' and now partner in the Northern Ireland Assembly, also increased their tally of MPs at the general election (from four to seven), and also thereby defeated their nationalist rivals, the Social Democratic and Labour Party.² In this, the two ethnic champion parties of Ulster were continuing a dynamic that had begun in the spring 2017 Assembly elections, when each increased their number of MLAs at the expense of their intra-community rivals.

Ever since the much lauded sectarian power-sharing Executive of 2007, power in the Assembly has been effectively 'shared out' between SF and the DUP. Indeed Northern Ireland appears to be heading towards a Janus-faced system in which each of the dominant parties publicly appeals to their sectarian base for electoral power by blaming the 'other' for all the Assembly's faults, while privately collaborating with the very same 'other' to ensure they remain the dominant powers in the political process. This model has been further complicated, though by no means disturbed, by the fall-out from Brexit. Thus SF, who habitually opposed the European Union and did not campaign in the referendum, now claim to be the leaders of the anti-Brexit movement, while the DUP, who campaigned for a hard Brexit, now quietly counsel the Conservative Party for a soft Brexit.

This trend towards sectarian polarisation has resulted in a geographically based division of Westminster seats: the DUP now represents the eastern part of Northern Ireland, from East Londonderry to Strangford, while SF represents the border counties and the nationalist redoubt of West Belfast. Indeed, the (relative) pluralism of the Assembly-reflects the complex and rich diversity of the Northern Ireland population more accurately than its representatives at Westminster: the DUP and SF between them hold 55 seats out of 90, but there also MLAs from the UUP, SDLP, Alliance, Greens and People before Profit. The polarising effects of the FPTP system can be seen most vividly in the South Belfast constituency, which in March 2017 elected five MLAs from five different parties, but in June returned only one elected representative-from the DUP.

The Assembly election in spring 2017 (called to solve the deadlock after the resignation of Martin McGuiness following the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal) was notable in that Sinn Fein won only one seat less than the DUP (27 to 28). Perhaps even more significantly, the combined Unionist parties (DUP, UUP, TUV), for the first time were no longer a majority in the Northern Ireland Assembly (and the DUP's loss of MLAs meant they no longer had the power to issue a petition of concern, used to stop reform of social policy, such as same-sex marriage or abortion). This was interpreted as a 'warning' to unionists that they needed to mobilise and get the vote out. This was a consistent theme of the Westminster election campaign, and it contributed to the greater sectarian atmosphere: the DUP convinced unionist voters to back them as the strongest unionist party to 'take on' Sinn Fein.

Here one must understand the two...