Ben Lowry: Election result makes likely a return to Stormont, perhaps hastening a realignment within unionist politics

(Scroll down for link to Ben Lowry talking about working on Fleet Street and Belfast’s equivalent)

Support for Northern Ireland staying in the UK remains high, but support for the unionist political parties gets ever lower. That is all the more so this week, after a poor election for the unionist parties but a failure of the combined nationalist vote to rise – in 25 years.

When I wrote my column late last Friday night (see link below), unionism was slightly ahead in the total number of votes cast, and it seemed it might remain so – but as I also wrote, the tally was changing by the hour and might move the other way. It did. For the first time ever in a province-wide election, nationalism outpolled unionism. The total Sinn Fein/SDLP/Aontu vote was 41.5%. The total DUP/UUP/TUV/PUP vote was 38.4%.

That is, frankly, bad news for unionism. I had thought that there might be more unionist independent candidates than nationalists (for example, there were two unionist independents in North Down alone who got 3,000 votes). But the commentator David McCann has analysed the smaller candidates and says that in fact there were more nationalist independents and votes than unionists.

What does all this mean? I believe that it means that a conversation about the future alignment of the various unionist parties will happen. There have been high-level rumblings about it for months, long before the election. This cannot be, as some suggest, a unionist forum with all the groups that are traditionally associated with unionism (although needless to say all such groups must have their say on the future). Any movement that emerges with all of the paraphernalia of traditional unionism is certain to result in a further shrinkage of the unionist vote. A growing number of voters who are pro Union, dislike, even despise, such associations.

The election result also means that a return to Stormont is unavoidable. I wrote that such a return was likely weeks ago and it went down badly in among some intelligent unionists who are robust on the Irish Sea border, and dismayed about the way in which the Windsor Framework enshrines it, albeit with some easements. Such a return will make some people in the DUP unhappy and might hasten a realignment within or between the parties. But we need to be candid that arguments against the Northern Ireland Protocol have had only limited success. Commentators seem afraid to admit the complexity of the trade frontier lest they seem ill-informed, but the fact is that few of people understand regulatory and customs borders or constitutional law.

Unionism is now about to suffer from something that nationalists have suffered from for a century – the status quo. From its earliest days there were people in Northern Ireland from a Catholic background who were relatively happy with NI being part of the UK, and this increased as the state became embedded within the UK and the Catholic middle class grew. The coming status quo is NI being largely in EU trade structures, and if that means a barrier with the rest of the UK which most people can’t see.

Unionism has not even come close to discussing Brexit and its disastrous impact on Northern Ireland’s place in the Union and the utter failure of the key leaders of the Brexit project on the mainland to give us meaningful support. They huff and they puff and intermittently, often for political reasons, proclaim their support for the UK but at every key juncture a full departure from the EU has been more important to them. I plan to write about this in the coming weeks because it can no longer be denied. The Irish Sea border is the biggest republican advance in a century.

So Stormont will come back with an emboldened republican/nationalist/Alliance majority. Given that Alliance does not share the fears that some of us have about the way in which legacy probes are distorting people’s understanding of the past, and thus vindicating the IRA, or the way in which Gaelic culture will be used to change the feel of Northern Ireland to such an extent that it ultimately has constitutional impact, or the way in which links to the UK are being undermined and supplanted, and not just on trade, this then is a massive challenge for unionism.

It has also been worrying to hear unionists talk about the return of Stormont in the context of money, reinforcing the idea that unionists can always be bought. Yet support for the UK seems to remain high. On Radio Ulster yesterday I predicted a border poll within 20 years. But it isn’t guaranteed – if polling stays as it has done in recent years, it will be hard politically for a secretary of state for Northern Ireland to call such a plebiscite, even if sympathetic to one.

This newspaper in the coming weeks will look at such challenges for unionism.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

Ben Lowry: My memory of Fleet Street and Belfast's equivalent, Donegall St, which the Irish News has now left