AND so, the campaign for next month’s Northern Ireland Assembly election is prefaced by a bomb scare during a speech by the visiting Irish Foreign Affairs Minister at a peace-building event and has already been marked by the burning of election posters and threats to candidates. Plus ca change, you might say.
But, actually, this May’s election to Stormont may well mark a significant change in this particular corner of the UK. Which in turn will prompt questions for the rest of it (and for Ireland too, come to that).
Because the polls suggest that Sinn Fein is on course to emerge as the largest party. That would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Now it looks almost inevitable. Another part of the UK in which the largest party wants to leave it.
Not that that means a united Ireland is only a referendum away. That still seems like wishful thinking from those in favour of such an outcome.
Even so, if a Sinn Fein First Minister does come to pass, what, you have to wonder, will that do the Unionist psyche? What’s the next step up from a siege mentality?
Unionism has frankly been its own worst enemy over the last few years. The DUP’s strategy around Brexit has been woeful; signing up to a project that was always going to lead to problems in Northern Ireland around its implementation; undermining Theresa May’s attempts to solve the issue and then believing Boris Johnson’s lies when he told them there would be no border in the Irish Sea.
Jeffrey Donaldson’s party collapsed Stormont in February over the issue of the Protocol and now look like losing its position as the biggest party in the new Parliament. If that happens, where does that leave it? How can it spin that as an endorsement of its position on the issue?
And what happens if, going forward, the Protocol remains in play for all the Westminster Government’s mutterings against it and the DUP’s protests? Will the latter pull out of Stormont again a couple of months down the line?
Of course, that requires the DUP to return to Stormont with Michelle O’Neill as First Minister in the first place. And some DUP voices have already suggested that they shouldn’t.
Northern Ireland remains a divided, marginalised place. Paramilitaries remain a virus in their communities. Last year riots over the Protocol broke out just weeks before the country’s centennial. There are no guarantees there won’t be more this year.
But it is not the same country I left to come to Scotland 40 years ago. Culturally, socially, you could say it is now, to some degree at least, a post-Troubles country.
For all the strides forward of the Alliance Party, you cannot say the same when it comes to its politics, however.
The question is what will be the lay of the land after the May 5 election? How will things change? And if they do, will it be for the better? The odds are long, I suspect.
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