It should not be forgotten the storm created by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during a recent visit to Linfield’s Windsor Park who talked about a supposed window of opportunity to get Stormont restored.
If that opportunity was missed, said Mr Varadkar, “then I do think at that point we have to start having conversations about alternatives, about Plan B”. Is Joint Authority that so-called Varadkar Plan B?
In such a scenario, would a campaign of civil disobedience similar to the Union flag protests and Ulster Says No and Ulster Still Says No marches and protests of the mid 1980s produce a favourable result for Unionism?
Next year will see the 50th anniversary of the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike which brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing Executive.
Whilst a campaign of grassroots Unionist civil disobedience - supported by violence from loyalist terror gangs - was successful against the then Executive, political Unionism had no workable alternative to Sunningdale.
Dublin government plans for Joint Authority as an alternative were met with the horrors of the no-warning UVF bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, which murdered 30 people and left hundreds more maimed.
This year also marks the 46th anniversary of the failed 1977 loyalist strike called by the late DUP leader Rev Ian Paisley in protest at the deteriorating security situation. Again, the strike was doomed from the outset because the DUP boss had no workable alternative to Direct Rule from Westminster.
Put bluntly, loyalist murmurings about using civil disobedience to protest against the Windsor Framework are doing the political rounds as the clock ticks down on the patience of London in reaching a solution which will allow the DUP to re-enter the Stormont Executive.
Given the failure of street protests in the past during the Union flag dispute and against the Irish Sea Border, and that such a policy has always back-fired on loyalism, the pro-Union community needs to find another way of defusing growing loyalist anger.
Could we witness a nightmare situation that if the DUP and London cannot agree a solution which kick-starts the Executive and Stormont is again mothballed as in 1972, that the loyalist hardliners will say - you Unionist politicians have had your chance, now it is our turn?
Last year, Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s first minister designate, sparked a backlash from Unionism for saying there was “no alternative” to the IRA’s armed campaign during the Troubles.
Ms O’Neill suggested the Provos, who killed about half of the 3,600 people killed during the 30-year conflict, had no choice but to shoot and bomb until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
“I don’t think any Irish person ever woke up one morning and thought that conflict was a good idea, but the war came to Ireland,” she told the BBC in an interview broadcast last August. “I think at the time there was no alternative, but now, thankfully, we have an alternative to conflict and that’s the Good Friday Agreement.”
What happens if loyalist hardliners take Ms O’Neill’s words to heart - that there is no alternative to democratically getting rid of the Irish Sea Border and the only way is a campaign of violence?
There is a line of thinking in Unionism and loyalism that the republican movement has achieved all its gains, not exclusively through the ballot box, but as a result of the PIRA terror campaign. Remember the maxim from a senior Sinn Fein official - the Armalite in one hand and the ballot paper in the other?
Loyalism still remembers how fast Dublin backed away from Joint Authority in 1974 following the Dublin and Monaghan bomb massacre.
Cynicism is a very useful attribute to possess as a journalist, especially after 45 years of covering the political scenario in Ireland. That cynicism allows you to question when radicals, extremists and hardliners make outlandish statements or begin sabre-rattling, particularly during an election campaign.
But when the person warning about a campaign of civil disobedience is a respected Presbyterian cleric and senior Orangeman, then my ears take note. This happened in 2019.
It was with some alarm when I heard the Rev Mervyn Gibson, a former RUC officer turned Presbyterian minister and now also the Grand Secretary of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland warn on the BBC that a campaign of civil disobedience could be called for given the anger among the loyalist community at then Tory PM Boris Johnston’s Brexit deal.
Okay, that was in 2019 and as we enter the final official month of the 2023 marching season, that campaign of civil disobedience has thus far not materialised.
If there is one clear conclusion which I have drawn from my 45 years as a journalism in Ireland, it is that loyalism does not do civil disobedience well!
This is a theme I have warned about in the past as to how dissident loyalists might interpret any Brexit solution:
It also poses the startling question if Right-wing Unionism still has a future role in Ireland, given the centre ground Alliance ‘bounce’ in past Assembly, local government, European and Westminster elections, and the perceived increasing liberal trends within both the Ulster Unionists and DUP - again, an issue which I explored in the past.
The core of the problem for loyalism is that when it initiates civil disobedience, it cannot control its ultra fringes on the street; in short, it lacks the same discipline which the Provisional IRA had over its street rioters.
In this respect, you can point to the ability of the IRA to turn on and off the tap of violence during the hunger strike riots in Northern Ireland in 1980, but especially in 1981. Loyalism lacks this discipline.
Inevitably, loyalism has failed to grasp this fault historically and civil disobedience always backfires on the pro-Union community.
Indeed, loyalism lacked the discipline to stop the civil disobedience of ordinary Unionists against Sunningdale in 1974 from being hijacked by UVF hardliners, especially those allegedly linked to the notorious Glenanne Gang.
That gang of loyalists was investigated by former Bedfordshire Police chief Jon Boutcher over allegations of collusion, given that it is the supposed Glenanne Gang which is blamed for the Dublin and Monaghan attacks in 1974.
Just over a decade after those atrocities, the then British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, attempted to break the political deadlock in Ulster politics by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985.
In expected - and predicted - true Unionist style, loyalists again took to the streets with their Ulster Says No and Ulster Still Says No campaigns. Those campaigns spawned new groups within loyalism, including the Ulster Clubs, Ulster Resistance and the pro-independence Ulster Movement for Self Determination (MSD).
But the crunch for the campaign of civil disobedience came in March 1986 when supposedly united Unionism staged a Day of Action against that Agreement, also known as the Hillsborough Accord and the Dublin Diktat.
I covered events that day as a News Letter reporter. I watched as loyalist farmers - against the wishes of the Unionist organisers - drove their tractors at speed into a loyalist housing estate to confront the then RUC. Across Northern Ireland, similar loyalist civil disobedience was descending into open violence with the security forces.
The net result was that respectable middle class Unionism walked away from the civil disobedience campaign in disgust at the violence. As in 1974, so in 1986, Unionism had lost the moral high ground.
As Northern Ireland digests the results of yet more ‘crunch’ council elections where Unionism again found itself as a minority ideology in seat terms, the boogie man of civil disobedience is once more raising its head in loyalism, especially with equally important General Elections looming in both the UK and the Republic.
The poor showing for the pro-Union community in the 2019 General Election - dropping from 11 of the 18 MPs to eight - will only further fuel the aims of that boogie man, especially with the DUP losing two more of its MPs and Ulster Unionism unable to win back Sinn Fein-held Fermanagh/South Tyrone.
Meetings of loyalists angry at the ‘Boris Brexit’ deal have already been held across Northern Ireland. Wild allegations of a new loyalist terror group are already circulating which will make the Republic pay for any perceived all-Ireland gains it gets from a Brexit deal.
The reality is that the loyalist boogie man is rattling his sabre; the practical political reality is how can he be defused?
The solution within loyalism is brutally simple - the Christian Churches must now step up to the mark and make it clear to their flocks that the ballot box is the only way forward for Unionism.
The Christian denominations can no longer hide their heads in their Bibles, pulpits and pews. In the same way that Christian Churches mobilised the Afro-American voters in the Southern States in the civil rights era of the 1960s, the Northern Irish Churches must encourage their flocks to vote in future elections to show any potential loyalist militant group that democracy is the only way forward.
In hard political terms, if the Northern Ireland parties - and especially the DUP - cannot agree to reform the power-sharing Stormont Executive by the autumn, the Province will then face either another Assembly poll, Direct Rule from Westminster, or the dreaded Joint Authority via Dublin and London.
Likewise, the Protestant Loyal Orders have a moral obligation and public duty to play their part in keeping the lid on loyalism by emphasising the democratic solution.
Only then can the boogie man of civil disobedience be chased off the field and back into the depths of the woods, out of sight, out of mind.
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Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter Listen to commentator Dr John Coulter’s programme, Call In Coulter, every Saturday morning around 10.15 am on Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. Listen online. |
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