On 3 February Paul Givan of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) resigned his post as first minister of the Six Counties in the north of Ireland. The resignation of the first minister automatically triggers the removal of the deputy first minister, Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, and means the Northern Ireland Executive in Stormont is defunct. DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has been threatening to force the collapse of the Stormont executive since September 2021 in an effort to appease Loyalist anti-Protocol voters. The Northern Ireland Protocol is the part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, agreed by Britain and the EU, that puts a trade border between Britain and the Six Counties. The DUP finally followed through on its stunt just ahead of the Northern Ireland Assembly election on 5 May.
DUP pushed right
For the first time since the creation of the Northern Ireland statelet 100 years ago a nationalist party, Sinn Fein, is expected to return the most votes in the upcoming election and fill the position of first minister. It can only take up the post within the power-sharing executive if a unionist party accepts the post of deputy first minister.
Neither the DUP nor the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which is polling as the second biggest unionist party, has said whether they would take the post. Neither party resists the rightward push from the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), which has stolen Loyalist votes away from the DUP since it split from the Party in 2007.
The TUV has been at the forefront of anti-Protocol protests. Under the Protocol, checks on goods travelling from Britain to the north of Ireland take place at ports in Belfast. Loyalists see this as undermining the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and their position in it.
An estimated 40% of unionists, particularly in business and agricultural sectors, voted Remain in the Brexit referendum. They are not opposed to the Protocol in principle – they just want it rejigged to give them easy access to both British and European markets. As the President of the Ulster Farmers’ Union, Victor Chestnutt, put it: ‘we want to land in a sweet spot where we have the best of both worlds. What we need is a softening of actions to land in that spot.’
This was the DUP’s position too, until last year. It is now taking a hard line on the Protocol as it chases Loyalist support. The DUP’s focus on appealing to Loyalist workers to stem the flow of votes to the TUV undermines its position as the ‘principle unionist party’ and risks pushing other unionist voters towards the UUP and the ‘unaligned’ centrist Alliance Party.
Loyal – for what?
More than twice as many unionists (34%) rate the health service as a more important issue than the Protocol (13%), according to a recent Queen’s University Belfast poll. The Six Counties has a chronic health crisis and the longest health service waiting list in the United Kingdom. While 300,000 people in England have been waiting over a year for surgery, the figure is 66,000 people in the Six Counties for a population around 3.5% the size. In England, such proportion would amount to around 1,850,000 people waiting more than a year for surgery.
This is the kind of issue that underpins what Loyalist reaction and the crisis in unionism is really about. Though it has taken the form of opposition to the Protocol, it is in essence about the loss of privileges associated with the heyday of industry, state investment and social security. In the late 1960s when British capital could protect the unionist capitalist markets of linen and shipbuilding in particular, a Loyalist worker could enjoy skilled employment on wages comparable to Britain and was more likely to have a job than a worker in England. Catholic workers experienced unemployment at two and a half times the rate of the Protestant worker.
Loyalists were rewarded for their support of British imperialism with a better standard of living, including better health outcomes, than nationalists in the Six Counties and the population in the 26 Counties in the south of Ireland. In the 1960s child mortality and infectious disease rates were lower in Protestant areas compared to Catholic areas in the Six Counties, where people had access to a free world-class national health service. People in the 26 Counties faced expensive bills for medical treatment.
Today the situation is different. The two-tiered health system in the 26 Counties still means only around 30% of the population there has access to free or subsidised healthcare. The Republic of Ireland is the only country in Western Europe that does not offer universal coverage of primary care. But it is difficult to judge whether it is much worse than the colossal underfunding of, and protracted waiting for access to, the health service in the Six Counties. Some of the most run-down hospitals in the Six Counties today are in Protestant, not just Catholic, areas.
Since the late 1970s the crisis in British capitalism, the decline in profitability in industry and British imperialism’s cultivation of a nationalist middle class to maintain its occupation of Ireland have meant that today in nearly every indicator the material rewards that once existed for Loyalists have almost disappeared. The relatively well-paid skilled jobs they relied on in the manufacturing industry have more or less vanished. Where 35% of the population were employed in manufacturing in 1971, by 2020 it was only 11%.
As Loyalists lost their relative privileges the nationalist middle class grew. Loyalist workers see the growing Catholic population, set to outnumber the Protestant population within the next year or so, as an existential threat and a step towards a united Ireland. On 25 March Loyalist paramilitaries orchestrated a hoax bomb threat to disrupt an event where the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Ireland, Simon Coveney, was giving an address in the Six Counties. At an anti-Protocol protest that evening, prominent Loyalist Jamie Bryson attacked the government of the 26 Counties as trying to ‘hold us hostage in an economic united Ireland’.
Article 16
Britain is determined to ignore the current frictions in the Six Counties. Boris Johnson didn’t even comment on Givan’s resignation as first minister and the collapse of Stormont. But the unpredictable and often unhinged behaviour of Loyalists provides a useful justification for Britain in negotiations with the EU.
Egged on by the Eurosceptics in his Party, in November 2021 Johnson was preparing to trigger Article 16 – the part of the Protocol which allows Britain or the EU to suspend elements of the agreement. The Johnson administration was ready for retaliation from the EU in the form of a trade war, but did not anticipate the repercussions from the US. The US delayed a deal to remove the Trump-era tariffs on steel and aluminium to Britain, reportedly over fears of Johnson unilaterally suspending parts of the Protocol. Johnson retreated. He was elected on a promise of striking a deal with the US by the end of 2022. The war in Ukraine takes the prospect of unilaterally suspending the Protocol and entering a trade war with the EU off the table, for now.
With the Protocol unlikely to go anywhere before the May election, the DUP has shot itself in the foot. It has collapsed the executive and without it the government cannot pass the 2022-2025 budget – which included an expected 10% uplift for the Department of Health. The DUP says it will be ‘difficult’ to return to government without the Protocol issues resolved. Meanwhile, outside the parliamentary process, Loyalist frustrations will continue to grow.
Ria Aibhilin
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 287, April/May 2022
