In 2003, five years after the Belfast Agreement, I hit the canvass with various candidates in the Northern Ireland Assembly election campaign. One was a slip of a 38 year old called Edwin Poots.
Sharing the car was a courteous, Cambridge-educated ex-army man called Andrew Hunter, a 60-year-old Tory MP from Basingstoke turned DUP candidate. Presenting his leaflet on the doorsteps, he would point to the photograph – “That’s me, the fat one on the right.”
No one asked what in the name of God had taken him to a Northern Ireland council estate with his gammy knee and two full-time PSNI bodyguards.
But the pair had a unique selling point. The DUP was commonly referred to in British media as “Ian Paisley’s anti-agreement party”. Poots had been down to a Trinity College Dublin debate in which he compared the Belfast Agreement with the putrefying contents of a baby’s nappy.
Five years after the agreement, they were still trenchantly opposing the “appeasement” of the men with guns and the absence of “demonstrable” acts of completion, a view shared quietly by many on every side but grimly accepted in the absence of any sane, possible or practical alternative for peace.
As ever, the DUP were looking for a unicorn. They wanted “an agreement they could live with”. A renegotiation.
Jeffrey Donaldson, not yet in the DUP – and, since Tuesday, Poots’s rival for the party leadership – also had sterling anti-agreement history. He walked off the Ulster Unionist Party negotiation team for the agreement mainly in protest at the absence of a link between Sinn Féin’s free ticket to government and IRA decommissioning.
Poots’s Scotland the Brave ringtone has been long since deleted no doubt but the DUP’s rhetoric around the NI protocol is little different from 20 years ago. The surgical attachment of the word “pragmatic” to both Poots and Donaldson in recent commentary is almost comical. Pragmatic on whose terms?
Unionist triumph
Poots’s father Charles was a DUP member of the assembly that brought down the Sunningdale Agreement – “though they brought it down in 11 months. It took us 3½ years”, young Edwin added cheerfully, as if the whole Sunningdale effort in 1973 was reducible to a unionist triumph.
In fact it was an embryonic Belfast Agreement – a power-sharing executive with a cross-Border dimension – that eventually buckled under unionist violence, barricades, intimidation and a general strike organised by loyalist paramilitaries and political bedfellows such as the DUP.
By the time the agreement collapsed in May 1974, the death toll had reached 1,000 and the IRA was shifting its “operations” onto the British mainland. Another 2,000 lives and more would be lost in the decades to follow.
On the canvass, Poots’s brand of humour was weirdly entertaining providing your Catholic sensibilities were not too tightly wound. At the suggestion that his family of four children sounded more like an old-fashioned Catholic brood, he chortled: “Ah yeah, you’ll see more of that now. The Prods have caught on. The Catholics will never pass us out now!” All good, clean fun – until you realised that he probably meant every word.
As recently as October, Poots felt bound to declare that Covid-19 was six times more common in nationalist than in unionist areas, making it sound like a Catholic disease.
Has the mindset shifted at all? Back in 2003, Poots sensed that the united Ireland frighteners once deployed on Northern Protestants were no longer effective. “The big bogeyman used to be religion but the goalposts have been moved now for unionists. And another one was unemployment . . .” What big sticks were left in 2003? Taxes and health he said – and why would they move from the fourth most powerful economy in the world to an emerging one, he asked.
Fear and paranoia
This week, 20 years on, young unionists from a Portadown housing estate gave a chillingly different answer when asked by Channel 4 how a united Ireland would make them feel. “I would feel under threat all the time walking down the street . . .” “The Catholics will try to take over and the people from the South they’ll just think they run the place – they’ll try to run our culture into the ground.” “They’re just going to steal everything from us, all our freedom; if that happens the Troubles would start up again.” “They want our culture away already . . .”
These young adults, who unlike their grandparents have all the information in the world at their fingertips, are listening to . . . who exactly? More than 20 years on from the Belfast Agreement, politicians must be prepared to accept some responsibility for this fear and paranoia.
Poots’s bigoted, misogynistic, science-free pronouncements and policies while NI minister of health and of culture have set Northern Ireland apart from the UK more effectively than any shared island movement.
No adjective in English literature could make the two candidates look like leaders with the passion, intellect and outward gaze to forge a new vision for Northern Ireland, still less in the context of a Brexit they were duped and bribed into delivering and which has delivered the NI protocol.
Yet here they are, like two bald men fighting over a comb, not a woman among them. And to what purpose? As lifelong politicians what is their legacy to the young people of Portadown ? What have they to offer them now?