I suppose we could quote the popular secular proverb, one swallow does not make a summer.
Skeptics of that specific opinion poll showing a steady rise in support for the TUV could say there’s still almost two years to the next expected election in 2027 in Northern Ireland, and the only poll which matters is the results of the ballot.
After all, in a previous Assembly election, the TUV notched up an impressive 66,000 first preference votes - yet only had one MLA to show for this.
It would be all too easy to simply dismiss the TUV as vote splitters as if the party was the political equivalent of the Monty Python satire, the Popular Front of Judea in the irreverent movie, The Life of Brian.
But let’s not forget when the TUV first appeared on the electoral scene in a council by-election in the Dromore area of the then Unionist stronghold of Lagan Valley. It was the TUV’s intervention which allowed the UUP to win what the opinion polls suggested would be an easy DUP victory.
Spool the political clock forward a few years and there are worries in both the DUP and UUP camps that TUV candidates could be costing the pro-Union community seats.
Was Jim Allister’s victory in North Antrim in the last Westminster General Election a sign of his personal popularity, a sign of Ian Paisley Junior’s unpopularity, or a significant shift in Unionist thinking towards the ideology of the TUV - or a combination of all three?
For those who dare to dismiss the TUV as just an irritating flash in the pan which will disappear when Jim Allister calls it a day in his political career, think again as history may be about to repeat itself.
I think back to the late 1960s. Ulster Unionism reigned supreme at Stormont. Captain Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister and Ulster Unionist Party leader, held the rock solid UUP Stormont seat of Bannside. My late dad’s church, Clough Presbyterian, was situated almost in the middle of the Bannside constituency in Co Antrim.
Through his connections with the Loyal Orders, dad was on first name terms with O’Neill. The photo with this story records one such meeting with my dad, Rev Dr Robert Coulter MBE, on the left in his Royal Black Institution collarette, and O’Neill on the right in his Orange Order sash.
As the UUP prepared for the February 1969 Stormont General Election, there was already unease with O’Neill’s policies to modernise the Northern Ireland body politic.
Dad tried to warn O’Neill that the PM’s pace of change was moving too fast and that he needed to bring the Unionist grassroots with him. O’Neill seemed almost dismissive of a certain Rev Ian Paisley, who was standing against O’Neill for the Bannside seat representing his minuscule Protestant Unionist Party.
Ironically, a generation later, it would be then UUP leader David Trimble - later Lord Trimble - who would politically gallop ahead with his vision on implementing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement without bringing the traditional UUP voter base with him, which would result in his downfall and defeat in the polls.
But Dad was not just sabre rattling with O’Neill. In the early 1950s, dad had been a minister in Paisley’s fledgling Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which Dr Paisley - later Lord Bannside - had founded in 1951.
Dad had been minister of Mount Merrion Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast and knew at first hand, the potential political capabilities of the person Big House, upper middle class Unionism dismissed as just another irritating and troublesome fundamentalist firebrand.
At the time of the 1969 election, I was a mere skinny, specky-four-eyed pupil in Clough Primary School. When our teacher, affectionately known as Baldy McCarroll, was out of the classroom, we pupils would usually taunt each other about rival football teams.
But that particular day was different in the run-up to the election. It was not scarves which were waved, but ‘Vote Paisley’ posters! The more unusual thing was that a working class Church of Ireland lad was waving the same Paisley poster as a middle class farm boy from a fundamentalist denomination.
When I told my dad about this incident, I believe he tried to contact O’Neill. What seemed like a silly classroom prank was proof that the Protestant Unionist Party candidate was supposedly doing something which O’Neill appeared incapable of doing in 1969 - giving a voice to both Christian fundamentalists and working class Protestants.
Okay, so O’Neill held his Bannside seat in 1969, but saw his majority slashed to under 1,500 votes on an almost 80 per cent turnout in the Unionist stronghold.
Just over a year later in two Stormont by-elections, Paisley took Bannside with a 1,200 vote majority, while his fellow Free Presbyterian minister William Beattie took the South Antrim seat with a majority of just over 950 votes.
The Protestant Unionists had arrived with a bang. Later in 1970, Paisley added to his tally of Bannside by winning the supposedly safe UUP Commons seat of North Antrim in the Westminster General Election.
The following year, the Protestant Unionists changed their name to the Democratic Unionist Party. And in 2003 and 2005, the DUP eventually took over from the UUP at both Assembly and Commons levels as the lead party in Unionism.
How some Unionists laughed when I recalled my tale of my Paisley poster-waving chums in that primary school classroom in 1969. They were not laughing by 2003.
Just as some Unionists dismissed the Protestant Unionists in 1969 as a mere flash in the pan politically, so too, are some Unionists dismissing the impact of the TUV in 2025.
They may not be laughing come 2027 - or even sooner if British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s row-ridden Labour Party loses a Commons vote of confidence, sparking an expected snap General Election.
Put bluntly, has the TUV of the late 2020s the ability to become the new Protestant Unionism of the late Sixties? Has the TUV the capacity and strategy to mobilise a section of the pro-Union community which has become not just disillusioned with the DUP and UUP as parties, but also the ballot box in general?
Talk of Unionist unity, co-operation, working together, mergers, agreed candidates has always focussed on the DUP and UUP. Okay, it may only be one opinion poll, but has the time now come to give the TUV a seat at the top table of any pro-Union unity talks?
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| Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. |
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