THESE lines are written with a clear view across Co Down to where, as the song has it, the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea. Television viewers might know this delightful port town from the Hope Street series, set in a fictional Ireland far from the reality.

On the southern edge of Donagadee stand two flag poles. One carries an increasingly tattered union flag, the territorial marker of loyalism and the union. The other, an equally bedraggled flag of the Israeli settler state which, no less than the butcher’s apron, tells us much of what we need to know about the loyalist mindset.

The two most unionist-minded newspapers in Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph and the Newsletter, are exemplars of well-thought-out newspaper design and serve their largely partisan readership with a mixture of news and comment perfectly tailored to what is a diminishing proportion of the population in Britain’s oldest colonial possession.

Last weekend both filled their opening pages with extensive coverage of the royal visit to Belfast with pictures of the two leading politicians, First Minister Michelle O’Neill and Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly flanking Queen Camilla.

Sinn Fein’s leader in the North is the first non-unionist to head the government of the Northern Ireland statelet since the colonial power partitioned Ireland a century ago. And Little-Pengelly is the first unionist leader to fill the deputy slot in a constitutional set-up that imprisons both in a straitjacket of submission to colonial authority.

The official rhetoric, cloaking this new departure with the suggestion that the Democratic Unionist Party’s decision to permit the assembly to reconvene constitutes a return to normal politics, is a polite fiction.

The simple, and profoundly undemocratic, reality is that under the Good Friday Agreement the DUP — the largest of the fractured unionist parties vying for leadership of the unionist-minded minority — has wielded a veto on the re-establishment of local administration from the moment the electorate decided the DUP were the losers.

This brought to a head the long-maturing crisis of local unionism which sees itself as the guardian of British values and interests in Ireland and, as such, the only legitimate government. Its crisis lies precisely in the fact that big business and the British ruling class don’t see it quite that way.

The election of a republican first minister does severe damage to unionism’s sense of entitlement and reflects the changing relationship between imperial Britain’s interests and an Ireland that no longer resembles the country once partitioned to give colonial capital a decisive role in its affairs.

In fact, a republican in the first minister’s office in Stormont has strengthened the role of the British state in the management of local affairs.

The DUP collapsed the assembly several years ago in a fit of angst over the EU’s post-Brexit deal with Boris Johnson and the resultant protocol. 

We then had the peculiar situation of a unionist party making the government of Northern Ireland impossible (something the IRA tried hard to accomplish) while Sinn Fein wanted to make the British-sanctioned system of governance work more perfectly.

The DUP is in a fit of confusion over what to do — its leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson having coaxed it in — now that it is playing second string to Sinn Fein. And just last week Stormont’s vassal status was confirmed with the publication of new British legislation which will give the Secretary of State the power to take control of the implementation of the protocol rather than locally elected ministers.

The EU’s prerogatives remain unchanged but Stormont will have diminished power to scrutinise decisions the UK government takes either singly or within the terms of its agreement with the EU.

Spelled out, the Windsor Framework (Implementation) Regulations 2024 remove the power of Stormont politicians to compel British ministers, or the Northern Ireland Department, to report information to Stormont if it concerns decisions taken by London in implementing the Windsor Framework.

In finally permitting Stormont to assemble, the DUP bowed before local pressure for a return to the basics of normal administration. With public-sector pay frozen at pre-pandemic levels, health services in crisis and local government semi-paralysed, the local trade union movement was united with large sections of public opinion in demanding an end to the administrative lockdown.

But the realities of political power were spelled out by leading Northern communist John Pinkerton, writing in the CPI’s Socialist Voice: “There were those who called on the January 18 strike to be against the DUP whose return to the Assembly would release the money being withheld by the Secretary of State. The trade unions insisted that … the Tory Secretary of State [was] the target of the strike action.”

He went on to argue that “...the trade unions, in furthering their members’ disputes over wages and conditions, with widespread public support, were taking on the British government and dragging local politicians behind them.”

The overarching power of the British state conditions every political debate. Where there is much local speculation that a border poll might give expression to a majority in favour of a united Ireland, the power to call such a poll rests, under the terms of the Good Friday agreement, with the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

The economic realities run counter to any illusions that the fix for Ireland’s problems lies in a simple constitutional change.

The minority party in Stormont, the DUP, has a marginally privileged position in that the British government has bestowed upon it an agreement, “Safeguarding the Union,” that makes clear that the the aim of the two signatories is “the cementing of Northern Ireland’s integral place in the United Kingdom’s internal market.”

This is buttressed with an assurance that “The [UK] government will provide statutory assurance that Northern Ireland remains an integral part of the United Kingdom. The government will legislate to affirm Northern Ireland’s place in the union.”

Diehard unionist illusions that the statelet could exist as a seamless part of the United Kingdom fall apart in the face of the demographic, political and economic realities. 

Fine Gael, the big business party of neoliberal economics in the Republic’s coalition government, has just elected a new leader but its political base is declining and in the Republic Sinn Fein has a leading position in the polls that parallels its standing in the North.

In its pursuit of profit capital has little regard for unionist comfort blankets. In her visit just last week Rain Newton-Smith, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said Northern Ireland companies now have fresh optimism thanks to a “foothold and unique position” with dual-market access to the rest of the UK and EU.

Writing in the Belfast Telegraph the perceptive (and mischievous) journalist Sam McBride anticipated the St Patrick’s Day visit to Genocide Joe Biden of Sinn Fein’s two leaders — party vice-president Michelle O'Neill, and all-Ireland party leader Mary Lou McDonald — with the prediction that this would annoy Sinn Fein’s electorate. 

And when the Sinn Fein duo were photographed arm in arm with the US president, his Belfast Telegraph colleague, the estimable Suzanne Breen, wrote: “It’s the triumph of plastic politics over principles. Surely nobody who believes that what’s happening in Gaza is genocide could in good conscience go to the White House and party with the president overseeing it?”

The loyalist knuckleheads who see in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land a metaphor for their own situation are out of step with the great sweep of local opinion. 

The combination of unionist disarray and Sinn Fein’s political degeneration makes for a confused politics. Ireland’s subordination to US imperialism and its junior partner, Britain — compounded with the Republic’s truncated sovereignty that for smaller EU states is the extra price they pay for membership of the federal superstate — makes an all-Ireland strategy the vital prerequisite for working-class advance.