Ulster Unionist Council - still clueless after all these years

Brian Feeney on unionism's inability to deal with the modern world:

Who would have thought it? The once mighty Ulster Unionist Council conducted its centenary commemorations at the weekend in circumstances which resembled a wake. They staggered on their zimmers from Belfast City Hall, once northern protestants' Valhalla, visible symbol of their industrial wealth and prosperity, to the actual UUC meeting where they rattled about the Waterfront Hall, an over-ambitious venue for a party in much reduced circumstances: there might have been 400 people present, mostly geriatrics. From the fleeting camera shot it looked a pretty sparse turnout.

What a contrast with the glory days when millionaire industrialists presided. What a contrast with the Sinn Féin ard fheis the same weekend attended by over 2,000 delegates and covered by scores of journalists and camera crews from all over Europe and the US. Of course there was nothing happening at the UUC. No Jeffrey Donaldson trying to oust David Trimble. No knife-edge votes about the RUC or the Good Friday Agreement. Even if there had been it doesn't matter any more.

The old sectarian raison d'etre is still there though. Trimble berated the DUP and warned them against putting up a candidate in South Belfast in case, you've guessed it, they let in a nationalist. You see, that's all the Ulster Unionist Council has ever been about. It was founded in late 1904 and formalised in March 1905 as an ethnic umbrella for northern unionists. They were afraid the British government was going to give some devolution to Ireland, not a government mind you, not anything with power even to run the Post Office, just an arrangement which would give the political majority in the country some control over minor day-to-day matters.

Ulster Unionists couldn't face it, even though their comrades in arms in the south and west had long been used to Home Rule MPs and Home Rulers running county councils. This sectarianism of Ulster Unionists has been so powerful it took on the characteristics of racism. They have simply been unable to live on equal terms with the rest of the people on the island. Read the remarks reported from the Waterfront Hall at the weekend and you see that poison remains virulent.

Furthermore Ulster Unionists made it crystal clear to the Liberal government elected in 1906 that they would use violence to prevent any law passed by the Westminster Parliament being implemented which gave any power to Ireland's political majority. Here's the crunch. In case you imagine that they were thinking of taking on the British army, no, too much of a tall order. The violence would be visited on the Catholic minority in the north-east as it had been in 1886 and 1893 when Home Rule bills were introduced. In both instances unionist mobs fell on Catholic districts in predominantly Protestant urban centres, especially Belfast. In implementing any bill the British government would have to consider how many northern Catholics would die in the process and how to curtail the religious civil war Ulster Unionists would foment.

The body organising such violence and which stood ready to establish a provisional government in Ulster was the UUC out of which emerged the UVF in 1913. In 1920 the UUC got their way. The results we see today. Unionists created the most divided society in western Europe with Belfast the most divided city. The six counties they were given are now a backwater at the top or bottom of every socio-economic indicator, whichever is worse. The one-time industrial behemoth based on low wages and rotten housing is now completely dependant on Britain which denies any strategic or economic interest in the place. Who wouldn't?

Yet still, those people who straggled despondently around the commemorations last weekend are the same people who refused to extend the hand to nationalists in the SDLP who for 25 years offered to let bygones by bygones and share power with them. Now the UUC has been bypassed. It remains to be seen whether their successors as the majority unionist representatives, the DUP, are any more genuine in their stance or if it is simply a ploy to draw the IRA's teeth. No matter. The political undead commemorating a century of sectarianism, for that's exactly what the UUC inaugurated in 1905, can at least congratulate themselves on their consistency. Just as in 1905 they had no idea what their future was, so it is today. Worse, they don't even know what they want it to be. They do know no British government wants any part of it. What they can say is that they've avoided equality with Catholics and nationalists so they've maintained the authentic ethos of the UUC and earned the contempt of all outside observers.

It looks like unionism is as out of touch with the modern world as any other political system that tries to justify colonialism.