The DUP has wildly exaggerated the harms done by power sharing – and now Northern Ireland is slipping out of its grasp
The Democratic Unionist party had a front-page ad in the Belfast News Letter yesterday. “This union works,” it declared. “Lets build for the #next100.” As the first minister and leader of the DUP, Arlene Foster should have been leading this week’s celebrations for the centenary of the establishment of the Northern Irish state. Instead, the DUP has gone to war with itself. Foster has been humiliatingly ousted and the future of the “precious union” has been put at risk, not by republicans, but by Northern Ireland’s self-proclaimed most loyal sons.
Last Tuesday Foster made a rare visit to a youth project on the Shankill Road. In this west Belfast loyalist heartland, hundreds of families now rely on food banks, and children were recently sent out with petrol bombs to riot by protesters whose politics were expressed when they attacked a press photographer and called him a “fenian cunt”. A reporter asked the first minister what she made of reports that individuals within her party were plotting to move against her. She brushed him off with trademark arrogance.
