IT is a truth universally acknowledged that a political party which wishes to succeed must be in need of razor-sharp economic minds. And there is a short video doing the rounds on X (formerly Twitter) which validates this notion. 

In it, three big beasts of the DUP speak, during the Brexit campaign, of the  need to vote Brexit.

First Ian Paisley Jr: "This is a really important campaign – it’s  the only real chance to change the direction and the destiny of our nation, therefore we should seize it with both hands."

Next, the wisdom of Nelson McCausland: "An exit from the EU would very much be to the benefit of NI... We would be free from the dictatorship and the bureaucracy of Europe, we would be free to make our own decisions."

And finally, Sammy Wilson: "It [Brexit] would benefit people in NI in a lot of ways…Instead of giving £10 billion a year to the EU – which never comes back to NI – we will have that money available for services in NI…They’ve far, far more to lose than we have." 

The amazing thing is that these men appear to believe what they’re saying. Maybe they should have had that short video clip playing on a big screen during the strikes last Thursday. But alas, finger-pointing at the DUP had to be kept to a minimum, as several of the trade unions contain DUP members. So the line was that SoS Chris Heaton-Harris was in possession of £3.3 billion and he should hand It over and give the workers of NEI a break. Admittedly a short one, but a break nonetheless.

As they laboured mightily back in 2016 to ensure that Brexit happened, the DUP were in the news; today they’re in the news again. They’ve refused to return to Stormont because they say the Windsor Framework is edging NEI out of the UK. There was a huge rumour at the end of last week that they were going back in, but as I write this it hasn’t happened yet. They will, of course, have to return shortly, even if it is without gaining the seven points on which it said the British government would first have to satisfy them. The world and its mother knows the British government will do nothing of the sort; it will more likely tell the DUP: “Are your intimate parts so big that £3.3 billion won’t be a big enough fig leaf to cover them?”

There’s a danger in all this of getting overly excited about the particular while ignoring the general. That the DUP actions have made life harder for the people of NEI is a truth universally acknowledged by everyone (okay, okay, by everyone other than the DUP). But consider this: in the first 50 years of NEI’s existence, the unionist administration in Stormont engaged in mass discrimination, gerrymander and sectarianism. That was followed by thirty years of violence in which over 3,000 people died. And after that we had the Good Friday Agreement, which promised so much but  failed to deliver reconciliation or even sustained local government. And now we are where we are today – NEI  workers struggling to put bread on the table, doctors, teachers, lorry-drivers, you name it, all with their backs against the wall. 

Isn’t it time that all hands, especially unionist politicians, faced up to the hard truth which Charlie Haughey pointed out decades ago and which unionism still resents: NEI is a failed state. Unionist domination, violence, power-sharing – they’ve all been tried and all come up short. So it’s probably time we stopped strapping electrodes to the corpse and getting excited because a jolt of electricity made the corpse jump.