Alliance Party and the Unionists

Last week there were two events that highlighted what unionists care about or, more accurately, what they fear. First, the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), a loyalist paramilitary party linked to the Ulster Volunteer Front (UVF), Billy Hutchinson, gave an interview in which he said that he did not regret the two murders for which he was convicted and served time in prison because they helped prevent a united Ireland. The murders were of two Catholic teenagers, picked out at random and killed for being Catholic. Both the UVF and its smaller satellite Red Hand Commandos and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had a strategy of killing random Catholics as reprisals for republican terrorist and guerrilla actions on the theory that this would put pressure on ordinary Catholics to not cooperate with republican paramilitaries. Here is some nationalist reaction to the interview.

A few days later Anna Lo, the Alliance member of the Assembly for South Belfast and its candidate in the upcoming European Parliament elections, gave an interview in which she said she was in favor of a united Ireland and that she saw Northern Ireland as an "artificial colonial entity." Guess which of these two interviews was more upsetting to unionists?

A Big Four without the UUP?

Traditionally Northern Ireland/Ulster party politics has been described in terms of the Big Four since the early 1980s thirty years ago: the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the Democratic Unionists (DUP), the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Fein. The first three had been active at least since the early 1970s; the UUP had been active since before World War I and had been the ruling party from 1922 to 1972 when London initiated direct rule. 

The UUP traditionally represented the interests of the wealthy upper class in Northern Ireland: the landed gentry and the manufacturers. In 1969-71 they were suddenly challenged from two directions at once. First, by the Alliance Party in April 1970, which had started out a year before as a pressure group pushing for more liberal and inclusive policies that would take into account the interests of the nationalist population, and from Ian Paisley's Protestant Unionist Party, which was opposed to that very inclusiveness and wanted that traditional unionist rule but with a fundamentalist Evangelical fervor. 

The Future of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

Alliance Party leader David Ford opened a new political can of worms when he attacked the sectarian politics of the province at his party's general assembly this weekend. This is an old theme with the party, which was founded in order to end sectarian politics.  Although the bulk of Ford's criticism was directed at the ruling duopoly of the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein, it was the other two Big Four parties, the Ulster Unionists (UUP) and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), that reacted most fiercely to the criticism. Why is this?

The DUP Moves to Consolidate

Two items of recent interest in Northern Ireland. First, the DUP and Sinn Fein got together and agreed to abolish the one department controlled by Alliance in the Executive, as of right. Presently Alliance controls two departments, Employment and Learning (DEL) and Justice, with the first being on the basis of the d'Hondt distribution and the second because when Justice was devolved to Northern Ireland the Big Two could only trust giving it to Alliance. Employment and Learning has been divided between two other departments (Education, probably Regional Development). Both the UUP and the SDLP only have a single ministry and they both have many more Assembly members (MLAs) and councillors than Alliance.

Now Justice Minister and Alliance leader David Ford is seeking a guarantee from the Big Two that his ministry will remain in Alliance hands for the remainder of this Assembly's life. This may seem like he is going a tad too far. But it should be remembered that the first time that Alliance was in a power-sharing government, back in 1974, the DUP and the Shinners--or rather the armed wing of the Republican Movement (as the Republicans refer to it or SF/IRA as the unionists refer to it)-- de facto colluded to bring down that government. The IRA went on a bombing offensive and the three main unionist parties cooperated with the Loyalist Association of Workers to bring down the government through a general strike. Former UUP leaderDavid Trimble and his former IRA advisor Sean O'Callaghan used to reminisce about how they both operated against the power-sharing government of 1974. So it may be natural on Ford's part to doubt the veracity and good intentions of the Big Two.