I have been listening to a most interesting Irish Times podcast with the Northern Ireland commentator and former Ulster Unionist press officer, Alex Kane, about the political impact of the court judgement last month that found former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson guilty of rape and sexual abuse of two very young girls (and reading a follow-up article by Kane in that newspaper).¹

Kane detailed Donaldson’s astonishing list of sins, quite apart from the rape and abuse conviction, calling him “a thoroughgoing hypocrite” who, while “cloaked in evangelical Christianity” condemned homosexuality, drunkenly wandered around the Houses of Parliament slugging wine; ‘projectile vomited’ over the Mayor of Beijing during a visit to China; frequented gay saunas; added the purchase of porn films to his parliamentary expenses claim form, and had a number of extra-marital affairs (one of which led to his wife bugging his car).

Turning to politics, Kane recalled the DUP’s support for the Conservative governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson on the basis that any post-Brexit agreement with the EU would ensure that Northern Ireland would remain “unequivocally and unambiguously inside the United Kingdom.” As we know, that didn’t happen, with the Northern Ireland Protocol (amended by the Windsor Framework) setting up an Irish Sea ‘border’ for goods, thus keeping the Irish border open and the North partly in the EU. In response, the DUP collapsed the Stormont institutions.

In January 2024 unionists were shocked and surprised when Donaldson brought the DUP back into the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly without any major change in the Protocol. At the time, many DUP members, and most vociferously Jim Allister, leader of the small, ultra-conservative Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), wondered what had changed his mind.

Kane says Allister now thinks he knows what caused Donaldson’s u-turn: blackmail. In a statement following the court’s verdict, Allister said: “For unionism, a very chilling and troubling issue arises, namely how far did his troubles give rise to his sell-out on the Protocol? To me it is inconceivable that the government was unaware of his proclivities and the idea of such being used as leverage is far from fanciful. Was he on a mission of attempted self-preservation in the hope, no matter how deluded, he could stave off the fate that has now befallen him?”

Kane put it more bluntly: “Did the 2024 agreement come about because Jeffrey Donaldson was being used by the intelligence services who said ‘get this deal done or we’re going to spill this story?”

In 10 months there is a Northern Ireland Assembly election. Kane says this will be the biggest test for the DUP since the post-Good Friday Agreement election in 1998. He says much of the DUP’s core base, made up of deeply conservative evangelicals, will be shocked to their roots by the appalling things Donaldson has done.Their support for the DUP “might just disappear overnight” he said.

He added that at least 50% of DUP supporters “would not care if the Assembly disappeared tomorrow.” They would have a new home: the anti-Good Friday Agreement, anti-Assembly, anti-power sharing Traditional Unionist Voice. In the latest opinion poll – before the Donaldson verdict – the TUV share of the unionist vote was was running at 11-13%. This was compared to a 7.6% of the total vote, giving the party one seat, in the 2022 Assembly election.

If the TUV benefits from disillusioned DUP voters – and maybe even some desertions from disillusioned DUP MLAs – and wins seven or eight seats, the very foundations of the Good Friday Agreement institutions could be in danger. “If they bring down the Northern Ireland Assembly, the British prime minister [almost certainly Andy Burnham] will have to make a key decision,” said Kane. “Does he want to be lumbered with Direct Rule, or does he say: ‘you’re forcing my hand. You’re bringing down the one thing that gave you some semblance of government, where you were allowed to do things for yourselves. We’re going to test the water with a Border poll.”

“That would be catastrophic for Ulster unionism,” said Kane. Speaking as an “unembarrassed, unapologetic unionist”- and a very well-informed one – he knew that unionism was not at all prepared for a Border poll.

Kane wrote in his follow-up Irish Times article that he was not convinced that Donaldson was blackmailed. However [he said in the podcast] “if that is true – and a lot of unionists believe it. If that is true, then they have to face the one consequence of that. It means there is no length to which a British government would not go to unsettle unionism. You can’t have it both ways . You either trust your own government or you don’t trust your own government. If unionism keeps pushing its own base towards a situation where you cannot trust anyone, you make it much easier for those who say ‘Well, if you don’t trust anyone, you don’t trust your own government, you don’t feel secure, let’s have a [referendum] vote and see what happens. Maybe more and more unionists would say: ‘Stuff it, let’s be 20% in a united Ireland rather than 2% in a United Kingdom.”

Personally I don’t believe we’re anywhere near a Border poll (quite apart from the fact that unionists in a united Ireland would be more like 11-12% of the total population rather than 20%). But the scenario Kane paints is not impossible. He said that on three occasions since Brexit, the British Government had chosen to take steps that angered unionism, and since the prorogation of Stormont in 1972 one would be “hard pushed to find an example of the British government having done anything favourable to unionism…And that is unionism’s major problem. The clash is between what they want and what the British government’s long-term intentions may be.”

Kane is one of Northern Ireland’s most knowledgeable commentators, but he doesn’t always get everything right. In 2017 he told me of his belief that there were 150,000 ‘soft’ unionists who were persuadable of the merits of Irish unity, and he expected to see that outcome in his lifetime (he was then 61). A month later he wrote: “Irish unity will be the last big political story in my active writing lifetime.” Nine years later we are no significantly closer to unity.

However I’m sure Sinn Fein are rubbing their hands in glee to see the disarray in unionism. A deep lack of trust between Ulster unionism and the British government can only play into their hands.

Let me finish by raining on that party’s parade a little.In a depressing but insightful article on the eve of the 12th July celebrations, the Irish Times‘ Mark Hennessy wrote about how the village of Drum in County Monaghan – often described as the most Protestant place in the Republic – was the target of a torrent of sectarian trolling following the revelation that the husband of Heather Humphreys, Fine Gael’s candidate in last year’s presidential election (and a Presbyterian), had been in the Orange Order, like so many Border Protestants.²

Angela Graham, for many years the highly-regarded manager of the nearby Clones Family Resource Centre, and a leader in her Monaghan Protestant community, spoke of being “shocked to the core” at the “blatant sectarianism – it hurt so much”. Humphreys was portrayed as “an Orange bitch” and unworthy of being the state’s first citizen because of her background. Graham asked why Taoiseach Micheál Martin, outgoing President Michael D. Higgins and incoming President Catherine Connolly had not spoken out in support of her community, contrasting this with President Mary McAleese’s invitation to Aras an Uachtaráin “as part of the Orange family.”

She went on: “People like me, who were open to a conversation about a united Ireland, would now not be interested in having that conversation. How could we say to our unionist neighbours or friends that this is a very welcoming place to live, faced with a minority who engage in this terrible racist and sectarian behaviour and stirring up hate?”

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald is always full of pious platitudes about how welcome Northern unionists will be in a ‘new Ireland’. “I believe Irish unity is the best solution for all of our people, including our unionist brothers and sisters”, she said on assuming the party leadership in 2018. Unfortunately the remnants of an ugly old Ireland for whom unionists and Orangemen are hate figures showed their faces in Monaghan last year, and I suspect that not a few of them came from the Sinn Fein family.

“In my view the South isn’t prepared for what Northern Ireland being reunited with the rest of Ireland is going to mean”, the former head of the NI Community Relations Council (and former Alliance Party chair) Duncan Morrow, told political scientist Padraig O’Malley in 2023. He gave the example of “conversations around symbolic issues” [including Orangeism] which he says will be “brutal, difficult, endless and emotive, as they have been for 20 years in Northern Ireland.”³

¹ ‘How the duplicitous double life of Jeffrey Donaldson threatens the future of unionism’, Irish Times podcast with Hugh Linehan, 2 July; ‘Was Donaldson blackmailed by the British government?’, Irish Times, 6 July

² ‘Border Protestants still reeling from abuse of Heather Humphreys’, Irish Times, 11 July

³ Padraig O’Malley, Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, p.305