'It's over.'

WorldbyStorm

February 2

Not a huge fan of the Guardian's reporting on Ireland but thought this interesting:

"I don't think there ever will be a unionist first minister in Northern Ireland again. It's over," said Jon Tonge, a University of Liverpool politics professor and authority on unionism. "It's not that the union is over but the unionist state is over."

Tonge notes that O'Neill shuns the name Northern Ireland in favour of the "north of Ireland", a jab at partition. "It's astonishing that Sinn Féin can ascend to such electoral heights while still refusing to recognise Northern Ireland as a political entity."

The republican party will continue to lobby for a referendum, which only a secretary of state can call, and project a sense of inevitability about unification.

Whether as Rory O'Carroll writes in that piece the following is entirely correct is a different matter.

But to sustain support – and to show voters in the Irish republic it can be trusted with power – it must focus on improving Northern Ireland's economy, public services and infrastructure. To show, in other words, that the state it wants to abolish works.

One might look at the example of the SNP in an admittedly less divided polity (in some ways) to see how nationalist parties can continue to seek changes to the dispensation they oversee. But be that as it may, is Tonge correct. Is the very thought of a Unionist First Minister now out of the question? It might explain just why it took the DUP so long to get to this point.

What though does that imply for Northern Ireland? Presumably with a Republican First Minister for the foreseeable future, how does that dissonance work? How does Unionism, both capital 'U' and small 'u' respond? The state which established for them is now no longer theirs, and has not been for quite some time. So what is the North for? The obvious answer is the people who live in that area. But that doesn't quite address the contradictions - made manifest every day. Can Unionism prove sufficiently flexible to underwrite the aspects of the dispensation sufficient to tamp down the aspirations of those who seek to move beyond it? Because it will require some effort on their part - not least on North/South aspects to do so. The first indications are not hugely positive (see here for example for one element of the latest deal that may be problematic further down the line - particularly with reference to infrastructure that has an NI/ROI component to it, but also where does Intra Trade Ireland fit into it?).

And one further thing, some in loyalism are talking about 'blocking roads' today around Northern Ireland. Will be interesting to see how that goes.