There’s a growing sense that tomorrow belongs to Sinn Fein

Where can Ulster Unionism go now? If it were a person, it would be someone in the grip of a long depression, whose occasional bursts of anger mask the fact that they so often feel despondent and betrayed. The widespread reaction to the latest Northern Ireland census, in which Catholics narrowly outnumber Protestants for the first time, is unlikely to give it a reason to be cheerful. A jubilant Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Fein vice-leader, was quick to claim that ‘historic change is happening across this island’, while other party members called for a referendum on unity. The rallying cry of Sinn Fein has long been ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’, which translates as ‘our day will come’. In the zero-sum game of Northern Irish politics, to Unionist ears it also translates as ‘your day is over’.

As with most things in Northern Ireland, of course, the census results are more complex than they seem: the fact that 45.7 per cent identify as Catholic or from a Catholic background, next to 43.5 per cent from Protestant and other Christian backgrounds, doesn’t directly correlate to a majority for a United Ireland. The number of non-believers is growing, recalling that old joke: ‘Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?’ Nor do all Catholics necessarily want a united Ireland, particularly one in which a visit to the GP costs €60. National identities are becoming blurrier, too, with people variously identifying as British, Irish, Northern Irish or bespoke combinations of the above: for a sizeable number, their border preferences are anyone’s guess.

Nonetheless there is a prevailing sense that – with a fragmented Unionism in the North, and rising fury at the establishment in the South – tomorrow belongs to Sinn Fein. In the last Assembly elections, it was returned as the largest party for the first time, meaning that O’Neill, its Northern leader, is now designated First Minister of Northern Ireland, with the Democratic Unionist party’s Jeffrey Donaldson as Deputy First Minister. The Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly is also a Sinn Fein politician, Alex Maskey, as is the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Tina Black.

This was the set-up which greeted the new King Charles III on his flying visit to Northern Ireland in the aftermath of Queen’s Elizabeth II’s death, and even a royal visit held few of the usual consolations for Unionism. O’Neill and Maskey met the King with notable graciousness, expressing gratitude for the late Queen’s peace-building in Northern Ireland. For those of us who still remember those terse paragraphs in An Phoblacht in the 1980s, reporting icily on the doings of ‘Elizabeth Windsor’, it was quite a ‘vibe shift’, as young people say. But it was also a sign of Sinn Fein confidently working the levers of Northern Ireland. No longer are we the disgruntled rebels, sniping at authority, it said: we are the authority, and we’re fully capable of being the authority in Dublin as well.

Equally remarkable was King Charles’s response. Approaching them with the royal charm on full beam, like the headlights on an Aston Martin, he thanked O’Neill for speaking so kindly about his mother, before publicly verifying what he already knew: ‘You are now the biggest party, are you?’ ‘We are indeed,’ confirmed O’Neill. ‘Don’t be telling Jeffrey that now!’ added Maskey jovially – within earshot of Donaldson, who was standing stiffly in line. Everyone laughed, except the DUP leader. ‘All this skill and ingenuity…’ said Charles admiringly of Sinn Fein. Then he turned to Donaldson, the headlights dimming. ‘I have seen you occasionally,’ he said, with studied uncertainty. ‘In the past.’

It’s a common quirk of the human psyche, and perhaps particularly of the English upper-class one, that it is more exciting to make friendly conversation with people who not so long ago wanted to kill you than with those who have always revered you but with whom you may feel little in common. It may also have been a sign that Charles disapproves of the DUP’s current obstruction of the power-sharing Assembly in protest at the Northern Ireland Protocol (although Sinn Fein also boycotted the devolved government for three years, from 2017 to 2020). But the Queen would not have made her preferences so plain, and Ulster Unionists – perhaps her biggest fans anywhere in the UK – find themselves genuinely bereft by her loss. She was a living link to the last time that London seemed to appreciate them, during the shared sacrifices of the second world war.

Since then, the British government has proved, at best, an unreliable ally. The first great modern blow to the Unionist psyche was struck in 1985 with the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which granted the Irish government a consultative role in Northern Ireland’s affairs. The full weight of Unionist fury fell on the unfortunate Northern Ireland Secretary Tom King, whose name was frequently expelled from the Reverend Ian Paisley’s capacious lungs with an added flourish of derision: ‘Tom Caaaat King!’

More than 100,000 Unionists of all shades protested publicly against the Agreement, to no avail. The Agreement was followed by the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, which openly stated that the British government had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’. In Unionist eyes, the Northern Ireland Protocol has shifted the grounds of the relationship once more, this time from tacit indifference to open humiliation. In Boris Johnson’s rush to get Brexit done, he signed up to this act of economic amputation which placed a hitherto unthinkable customs border in the Irish Sea.

The DUP’s boycott of the devolved Assembly in response means that it has been suspended since February with no imminent prospect of return. The grim outcome is that Northern Ireland is now devoid of an executive, drifting into an autumn and winter defined by an escalating cost-of-living crisis, in step with a worsening health service exacerbated by a shrinking number of GPs. Meanwhile the Protocol is subject to an ongoing legal wrangle between the British government and the EU.

Political stagnation is allied to cultural poison. Both the orange and green manifestations of sectarianism have proved as stubborn as Japanese knotweed. Most people are rightly repelled by the orange variety, with its murderous sectarian slogans and celebration of loyalist killers, but it is mainly confined to those areas of Northern Ireland most influenced by the still-active loyalist paramilitaries. The green strain is spreading into more territory, however, and becoming respectable among middle-class nationalist youth across Ireland.

The slogan of ‘Up The ’Ra’ is often chanted at concerts and sporting events, mainly by young people who never experienced the Troubles. The electorally buoyant Sinn Fein regularly commemorates dead IRA volunteers in proudly romantic terms, regardless of what human destruction they unleashed. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Northern Irish nationalists also seem ready to grant the IRA campaign a legitimacy in retrospect which they denied it at the time: in a recent LucidTalk poll, nearly seven out of ten nationalist voters agreed with O’Neill’s statement that there was ‘no alternative’ to the IRA’s campaign of violence. Yet during the Troubles, the majority of nationalists voted for the peaceable Social Democratic and Labour party, whose leader John Hume wrote in 1989 that ‘there is not a single injustice in Northern Ireland today that justifies the taking of a single human life’ and that ‘if I were to lead a civil rights campaign today, the main target would be the IRA’.

Those of us who hoped for a future Ireland in which mutually inflicted pain could be more honestly acknowledged on all sides now see that prospect slipping further away. It’s clear that if Unionist politicians wish to convince a broader electorate of the benefits of the union, they will have to make a more positive, secular case for it: the DUP’s current woes have partly resulted from its own tribal thinking and political miscalculations. But if Irish nationalists really wish to persuade Unionists into a united Ireland, then their growing tendency to rewrite the past seems an illogical one. A narrow nationalist majority in any border poll – if combined with an internationally isolated, nervous Unionist community whose own suffering has been either dismissed or celebrated – would make for a volatile transition.

Many people in the Republic of Ireland instinctively understand that and are clearly worried by it. But they often tend to be the older folk, who can still remember what it meant to hear a news report of a man shot dead in front of his mute and terrified children; a bomb explosion at a cenotaph; or a young mother murdered for collecting census forms.