THE more theologically minded members of the Democratic Unionist Party in Ireland hold as doctrinally sound the proposition that the Lord created the universe in six working days.

A mere 6,000 years ago, Edwin Poots holds, the Lord created the celestial vessel on which we all dwell.

This is not the only delusion that dominates the thinking of the DUP’s dinosaurs. 

Another — most often expressed in raucous tones by heavily booted loyalist marchers — is the sense that the Bishop of Rome takes a detailed and daily interest in the affairs of Northern Ireland and is on an hour-by-hour mission to destroy its “Britishness.”

But the most recent was the idea that Poots — as the newly elected leader of a deeply divided party — might be able to propose as first minister in the devolved government his fellow DUP assembly member Paul Givan without first securing the agreement of his party colleagues.

However, the basic DUP error — shared by all factions — is its failure to recognise that the government of the imperial state to which it proclaims a special loyalty now regards its connection with the Northern statelet as a tradable asset, and the border which partition carefully crafted 100 years ago as impermanent as the morning dew.

This is the problem faced by the new DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP, who now must find a way to dispose of his Westminster seat and find a perch in the assembly. 

Not easy given that his own Lagan Valley base is represented at Stormont by … Edwin Poots and Paul Givan.

With tongue in cheek, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis made the British government’s approach pretty clear, offering to work with Donaldson “and the whole Northern Ireland Executive, ensuring we deliver on the shared interests of all the people of Northern Ireland.”

When a DUP spokesman told the BBC Today programme audience last week that Sinn Fein gets everything it wants from Westminster, you could hear the sound of pennies dropping.

The actual issue is the proposal for modest state support for the Irish language. 

For those who thought they saw a division in the DUP demarcated along lines of political realism and a willingness to embrace a “more confident unionism” — and content for their fellow citizens to take state-sponsored lessons in the Irish language — the Stormont coup is a reminder that the whole loyalist political formation is grounded in a sense of entitlement now shot through with grievance.

Sinn Fein is far from the direct beneficiary of British government beneficence, and it is not that the Westminster government is the willing instrument of the now very respectable and responsible Sinn Fein leadership. 

Rather it is that both parties proceed from very different starting points to the shared conclusion that the present set-up in Northern Ireland is impossible to sustain in perpetuity.

For the British Establishment as a whole, its rather harmonious settlement with the European Union, and its grander global ambitions, mean that Northern Ireland can be more easily be seen as a problem to be disposed of rather than an asset to be treasured at all costs.

In this centenary year of the partition, it will probably come as a shock to unionists still exiled on an historical fantasy island, but the idea of a united Ireland as the eventual resolution of Britain’s Irish problem was held even by Sir Edward Carson — the man who headed up the armed (and essentially disloyal) opposition to a Home Rule Bill proposed by a government of which he was supposedly a loyal subject had a more realistic grasp of the long-term political and economic realities than the DUP leadership.

The 1920 Government of Ireland Act created two territories both still under the crown. 

The eccentric entity that was Southern Ireland became the Irish Free State after the war of independence and remained economically entangled with its imperial neighbour which itself was still the centre of a global empire.

Entangled Ireland still remains but the colonial empire is long gone. And, in a clear demonstration that capital is constantly in search of new opportunities, the scale of all Ireland trade has grown significantly as the beach became the new border. 

Meanwhile the value of Irish food and drink exports to the UK has grown by €1.9 billion or 16 per cent since the UK voted to leave the EU. 

Irish exports to Britain in 2020 totalled €12.4bn while the value of imports from Britain was €17.8bn.

The implosion of the DUP, which itself is a product of the earlier disintegration of Official Unionism a generation ago, illustrates just how the basic sectarian and discriminatory basis of rule in this statelet precludes a purely internal settlement or even normal politics. It demands an all-Ireland solution.

The very establishment of Northern Ireland as a partitionist project proceeded on the basis of a sectarian head count with the border drawn to guarantee a unionist majority. 

At the time even a section of unionism thought the exclusion of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan from the new statelet made no political or economic sense, but the inexorable logic of the head count crowded the schismatic state into an equally eccentric six-county construct.

Since then Northern Ireland as an entity in itself has ceased to be of critical significance to British capitalism while the withering away of the industrial base of shipbuilding, engineering, aircraft products and manufacturing has destroyed the job banks from which the Protestant part of the working class could claim privileged access.

Along with the gradual desegregation of employment in the public services and administration, the marginal privileges available to Protestant people have declined, leaving the institutions which managed these life transactions emptied of their economic significance.

The orange sash that their fathers wore has become a tattered remnant of the past and membership of the Orange Order a redundant claim to a vanished privilege.

The Good Friday Agreement established a new system of devolved government subservient to Westminster in all key respects and itself was predicated on a sectarian head count again.

Violence has abated and orange sectarian rule has been replaced by a bizonal distribution of Westminster largesse.

Faced with the steady erosion of its electoral base that turns on the distaste of ever greater sections of the population for the sclerotic politics, institutionalised discrimination, bigotry, violence and and repression of the sectarian state, the DUP has chosen to ramp up division the better to consolidate loyalism.

It is a losing game. The DUP is like a desperate polar bear drifting on a steadily melting iceberg.

This is not the last moment for unionist politics in Ireland, but it does mark a further stage in its disintegration and reveals to its electorate its manifest irrelevance to the problems of modern life.

The inevitable consequence of the DUP’s sectarian bid to shore up its diminishing base is its further marginalisation as people shift their preferences to a warmed-over Official Unionist Party or the Alliance Party, while some migrate to the even wilder shores of loyalist schism.

Sinn Fein would like a border poll — as is in the gift of the British government and permissible under the Good Friday Agreement — but given their cautious advance to government in the Republic perhaps not quite yet. It is conceivable that Sinn Fein is the biggest party both sides of the border.

An recent opinion poll for the Sunday Times revealed that 51 per cent of 2,392 people surveyed in Northern Ireland backed a referendum in the next five years with 44 per cent opposed and 5 per cent not having an opinion.

More significantly it found that voters in the North were divided 48 per cent to 44 per cent in thinking that a united Ireland will come into being within a decade.

It is becoming increasingly clear that a strategy based on the presumption that the political institutions of Northern Ireland have anything but a very short shelf life is a route to irrelevance.

When in 1848 Karl Marx said of capital: “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere,” he anticipated his argument with the observation that “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. 

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

For the people of Northern Ireland that moment is under way. The DUP’s train of 400-year-old prejudices and opinions are being swept away. 

The once solid unionist bloc is melting, science profanes scripture and unionism is compelled to face the real conditions of life in the world of globalised capitalism.

Once upon a time Britain’s Irish problem could be viewed by the Irish people through the single vision of British colonial rule. 

When, in the years following the Great War, a disloyal “loyalism” mustered 100,000 for an Ulster Volunteer Force to defend the union against home rule, the divisions in the British ruling class gave it a strategic advantage.

The political geometry today is vastly different and Northern Ireland is changing at a fast rate.

Over 20,000 people migrate from Northern Ireland every year while a larger number migrate in. 

A 2021 Belfast Telegraph poll showed that while 51 per cent of over-65s identify as British, only 17 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 share this sense of themselves.

All-Ireland economic activity is increasing while the Covid-19 crisis has made clear the necessity for an all-Ireland health service and this understanding is gathering ground especially among medical professionals. 

Thousands commute across the border every day for work. The education system remains substantially segregated but secular and integrationist sectors are growing, and since selection at 11-plus was reformed, denominational schools are becoming more mixed.

A third of Northern Ireland’s GDP is made up of a Westminster subsidy and this could be a powerful bargaining tool in fostering political realism along with an all-Ireland dimension to government and policy formation.

Ireland as a whole is changing and it is becoming increasingly clear that the British government, which is keen to avoid direct rule, needs to signify a clear intent to further disengage and foster rational solutions to the problems of Ireland as a whole — but the labour movement in Britain can’t simply leave it up to a British government. It needs to actively promote and push for such a strategy. 

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.