The failure of Unionism is being played out in Northern Ireland

The fury among Northern Ireland Protestants is unimaginable but it has nowhere to go other than a regressive descent into the violence of the past. As a full week of violence stumbles on to the mainland news channels ­Boris’s Brexit Britain is in perilous, and much predicted decline.

As the Prime Minister sits in a cafe in ­Cornwall for a photoshoot sipping a ­cappuccino and ­looking affable police used water cannon for the first time in six years in Belfast; ­armoured Land Rovers and officers with helmets and shields were deployed on Thursday on the road that separates the nationalist Springfield Road from the loyalist Shankill Road.

Whilst the blame for the crisis lies squarely with Boris Johnson’s brazen and cavalier attitude to Northern Ireland, it has its history not just in the Conservatives’ disgusting attitude to Ireland throughout the process, but in the DUP’s moronic wrangling too. This is what Dark Money buys you.

But if there’s dark irony in the outcome of black ops the reality, too, is that the violence erupts from deeper roots. Northern Ireland’s youth have little future and are “governed” (nominally) by politicians mired in ­opportunism and bigotry.

As Peter McColl has said: “The situation is on the face of it a combination of the Brexit settlement and the DUP stoking tensions about policing. When combined with an ­underlying failure to build a future based on deeper needs than retail therapy and a huge number of ­disenfranchised young people this is a tinder box.

“The DUP leadership is cynically exploiting this because it is the only way that can win the next elections. It’s a faraway land of which the British know little. But it’s important for those who live there.”

The sense of despair is palpable and the ­current crisis has roots that are much deeper than first appear.

Andrew Cunning is the Director of Left Side Up (“theology for the whole person”) ­convened a session to gather the views of ­Belfast youth ­workers. Many spoke of institutional and ­systemic failure – of parties, churches and ­organisations incapable of responding, and a deep failure of political leadership. Many spoke too of youth work being used as a sticking ­plaster and left to decay underfunded and fatally undervalued.

Cunning writes: “The truth is that people in the margins, those who have been ­forgotten by their leaders, have more in common with one another than they do with their ­political ­representatives or the churches in their ­areas. And it is a heartbreaking thing to see ­marginalised young ­people cut off from hope, turning on one another. Churches can be ­beacons of hope. But they simply have to stop caring about their image, or what people might say. Throw open those doors and demonstrate the grace that holds your faith together.”

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It may seem ironic for some that faith can be both the root problem and a solution but Ireland is nothing if not riddled with contradiction.

Councillor Brian Smyth, a counsellor for ­Lisnasharragh said: “We are dealing with ­multiple crises at the minute. Sectarianism and a divided society, Stormont was out for three years and now we have a failure of leadership.

“We’re dealing now with Brexit and the ­Protocol and all the ramifications of that. And now we are struggling with Covid-19. ­

“Northern Ireland is a traumatised society and we are ­dealing with layers and layers of trauma, and we have never got around to unpicking that. Twenty three years on from the Good Friday Agreement, suicides have now taken more people than were murdered in the Troubles.

“We have particularly failed working class communities. They are facing generational ­unemployment, there is just no hope. We have failed to invest. And it’s not just in loyalist ­areas, look at what happened a few years ago in Derry with the murder of Lyra McKee.

“It all goes back to a failure of leadership from the top down. There is a huge gap between Stormont and working class communities right across Northern Ireland. Irrespective of whatever flag is on the lamp post, politicians are so disconnected from communities.

“We are dealing with systemic poverty and people’s dignity being stripped back. You look at terms like ‘working poor’ and the use of food banks. It’s almost like we‘ve given up.

“The challenge for us is how do we reinvigorate ourselves. And we have to put young people at the heart of the decision making, because we’re passing all of this onto them.”

READ MORE: Belfast: What's happening in Northern Ireland and why?

If looking to youth workers and people of faith might seem odd, what alternatives are there? Johnson’s government is incapable of leadership when venal and carnal gains are available ­instead (the two often inseparable) and ­politicians in Northern Ireland seem clinched in an eternal act of performative blame and shame. For many politicians the answers are flags and water-cannon fused with intra-generational trauma and victim-blaming.

AS Britain descends further in its terminal decline, this void of leadership – moral, political, spiritual – is critical. But if the crisis was sparked by British intransigence and delusions it also speaks to a failure of Unionism.

Sarah Creighton, a lawyer, writer and political commentator from Northern Ireland has written: “The violence in Belfast is about a lack of Unionist leadership. On a broader scale, it’s about the collective failure of politicians in Northern Ireland to tackle paramilitaries and the conditions that allow them to thrive.

“The violence, even though it is on a small scale, speaks to the uneasy position of ­Unionism and loyalism in Northern Ireland. Unionists and loyalists feel betrayed, angry and let down. Some feel unrepresented by the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and the Ulster ­Unionists. There is a disconnect between members of the legislative assembly and the people on the ground. The majority do not support violence. However, the situation is delicate, and it could get worse if solutions aren’t provided.”

The mirror of Unionist failure across the Irish Sea is obvious. Unionist stuckism has nowhere to go. It is entrenched in its own endlessly ­repetitive narrative: nothing must ever be allowed to change; the past is glorious; and the answer to everything is the Union Jack. It’s such a dire prospectus, one soaked in blood and hopelessness, staunch bitter and completely ­irrelevant.

READ MORE: Brexiteers bear sole responsibility for the chaos in Northern Ireland

On top of decades of political failure we now see a society pressured further by lockdown and poverty. As many of us look forward to “emerging from lockdown” and trying to imagine a post-pandemic future it is difficult to see what that could look like in Belfast and beyond.

But if it seems that nothing ever changes that’s also not true.

Reviewing Malachi O’Doherty’s Fifty Years On: The Troubles and the struggle for change in Northern Ireland Richard English writes: “Brexit has of course made Northern Ireland once again famous, and it has unquestionably reinforced its divisions”.

Indeed, O’Doherty presents the current ­condition as one of enduring polarisation: “We still have a divided society that seems to want to divide wider issues between sectarian factions. So Unionists now oppose abortion, same-sex marriage and support Israel while nationalists, broadly speaking, support abortion, same-sex marriage and Palestine.”

If Northern Ireland seems broken and ­distraught this spring the extraordinary changes that have manifested south of the Irish border challenge the old arguments of Unionists against a United Ireland have effectively been reversed.

When once they railed against joining what was effectively a theocracy, the DUP now fears the Republic for being an excessively liberal challenge to their own sanctimonious ­obstructionism.

There’s hope in that weird reversal after all.