Objective: to sabotage the Brexit protocol on Ireland
A stale nationalist like Edwin Poots will this week take the reins of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland, after having defenestrated Arlene Foster, no less nationalist than him, but in a less abrupt manner. Foster is also due to step down as Ulster's first minister at the end of June. Her successor has already dismissed her with a display of old-fashioned machismo: "Don't mourn the end of your political career," he said, "after all, your most important job in life is that of wife, daughter and mother.
The decisive Protestant party's main objective is to boycott the Brexit protocol with the European Union, which established the sea border and the corresponding customs controls in Northern Irish ports. The new DUP leader believes that, in fact, the EU continues to dominate the scene through the application of this control procedure, which in his opinion does not in practice consolidate the UK's full independence from the EU, while at the same time, if this situation were to continue, the nationalists' desire for Irish reunification would be fuelled. Poots vows that a referendum on Irish reunification will never take place as long as he can prevent it.
The most extreme unionists already provoked the first protests and riots against EU customs controls in April, incidents that have helped British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to demand the repeal of the exit commitment with the EU. A demand that for Brussels is an insurmountable line. All this at a time when there has been a notable deterioration not only in institutional relations between London and the EU capital, but also in the personal vicissitudes suffered by many European citizens, suddenly transported to the status of foreigners, and not exactly first-rate foreigners.
Speaking to the BBC, Edwin Poots says he has no intention of bringing down the current Stormont [regional] Parliament, seeing it as a tool to put pressure on Westminster to reaffirm Ulster's attachment to London, if necessary by riding roughshod over agreements with the EU.
The evident radicalisation of the DUP by its new leader, still Ulster's agriculture minister, even leads him to threaten to return to the old tensions that marked the life of its six counties and 3,500 dead in the last fifty years. The apartheid to which Protestants subjected Catholics, punctuated by terrorist attacks by the IRA and DUP extremists, ended happily in the Good Friday Agreements of 1998. That Poots seems to have no objection to reliving the tensions and suffering of those times before the formation of integration governments demonstrates the fragility of those governments, and is evidence that racism and religious fundamentalism want to re-emerge from the ideological depths of the country.
Poots does not fundamentally accept equal rights for Ulster citizens, and his veiled threat that he will overturn the institutions if Sinn Féin becomes the majority force in Northern Ireland at the ballot box is corroboration of this. The polls actually give the nationalist party an electoral support of 24%, much higher than the 18% attributed to the DUP. The latter, founded by the first uncompromising, then pragmatic Reverend Ian Paisley, is even being threatened by an even more radical Protestant party, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), which believes that nationalist Catholics are taking jobs that have always been held by Protestants, and capturing much of the new economic sectors, both in Belfast and in the larger towns.
The picture thus shows that stale, nostalgic and ultra-religious Unionism has not disappeared from Ulster, and that Poots and his supporters have not only learned nothing from their years of EU integration, but dream of a return to its supposed essence. As he himself said after being appointed the new leader of the DUP: "We are the victims of a permanent attack on Christian principles, ethics and values, which have been the basis of our society". A denunciation that encompasses everything from his rejection of equal civic and labour rights for women to the "regrettable" recognition of those rights for homosexuals.
It remains to be seen whether or not a return to the past will be imposed in Ulster, with the necessary consent of London. And whether or not the political dinosaur morphology displayed by Poots is shared by the majority of modern-day Northern Irish citizens.