Geoffrey Bell introduces his new book The Twilight of Unionism: Ulster and the Future of Northern Ireland, published by Verso Books.

 In 1976 I wrote in The Protestants of Ulster that the community of the title was the most misunderstood and criticised in western Europe.

Little seems to have changed. Today, unionists of Northern Ireland are being condemned afresh by their political rivals and newspaper columnists because the community’s leading political party, the Democratic Unionists, refuse to return to power-sharing in Northern Ireland’s executive.

This is accompanied by threats of largescale violence from loyalist paramilitaries if things do not go their way. They recently heavily hinted that no southern Irish government minister will be safe if they dared to visit Northern Ireland.

Here is a culmination of a recent history which began with Theresa May forging an alliance with the DUP to keep her in power after the June election pf 2017. Then too the DUP, and by implication the Protestants of Northern Ireland, were called names.  Most famously, the Daily Mirror dubbed them “crackpots”. For its part, the DUP boasted that after the May alliance they were “at the heart of government,” in the UK.

That influence did not last. Along came Brexit, the Irish Protocol and the DUP being overtaken in popularity in Northern Ireland by Sinn Féin. These factors led to the DUP walking out of the power-sharing executive in February and refusing to re-enter after Sinn Féin won the election for the Northern Ireland Assembly in May.

This is not a sudden abstentionism. The DUP has often refused to attend meetings of all-Ireland institutions. It has strenuously opposed other provisions of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) such as equality legislation and the promotion of the Irish language. This is consistent with their long term opposition to the GFA, which they did not sign. Because of this stance, they became the most popular unionist party. They argued the GFA betrayed unionists’ traditional ideology, and history.

In many ways that was true. Unionism in Ireland, especially in the northeast, was based on what today we call exceptionalism. This version was that the English were morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the Irish, and therefore had a right to rule them; and that within Ireland the Protestants – whose ancestors came from England and Scotland – were superior to the Catholic native Irish. These notions were promoted at length in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by English politicians and repeated by their fellow unionists in northeast Ireland.  During this time, they were even used by Tories to threaten civil war if Ireland was granted self-determination.

They proclaimed that while the Irish majority might want to rule themselves, their backwardness did not give them that right. It was a classical colonial argument, used by the British in many other countries besides Ireland

Such was the basis of unionism in England and northeast Ireland, and it was a view that persisted within unionism after Ireland was partitioned in 1921 and when the old Unionist Party, now in government in Northern Ireland, discriminated against Catholics for over fifty years. So too did the large employers in shipbuilding, engineering, and aircraft manufacturing: Protestant workers not only had the best jobs, often it was the only jobs.

The GFA threatened this ascendency, and a growing number of unionists objected. They also complained that the GFA did away with their beloved and Protestant-dominated police force; and restricted marches of the Orange Order and on flying the Union Jack. They objected to reforms in a woman’s right to choose and marriage equality, which went against many Northern Ireland Protestants’ literal reading of the Bible. Then came the prospect of Irish republicans assuming the leadership of their Northern Ireland, and their old Tory friends creating a border across the Irish Sea.

So, there is a logic in the attitudes of these “crackpots”: it is summed up in the old unionist phrase of “what we have, we hold”. This retention is based on privilege, granted to them by British governments. But the world has changed. The British ruling class is unlikely to rush to the old Orange cause as it once did. There remain many Tories and some Labour politicians who retain a colonial mentality towards Ireland, but others are dubious that this now serves their interests. The sensible British capitalists of the Economist have voiced support for a 32-country Ireland.

Unionism in Northern Ireland has been and remains deeply reactionary. But it is important to understand why the Protestant masses have supported it.  This is what The Twilight of Unionism attempts to do. A different future now beckons. What that will be is now becoming the dominant dialogue in Ireland, but, as ever, it helps to know where we are and were, to clarify where we are going.

The Twilight of Unionism by Geoffrey Bell is now available from Verso – click here to purchase your copy now.

Book launch

The Twilight of Unionism will be launched at the London Irish Centre, Camden Square, London NW1 at 7.15 pm on November 24^th, with special guests Jeremy Corbyn MP, Sinn Féin MP Michelle Gildernew and Nadine Finch, Chair of Labour for Irish Unity.