For a while there, from 2017, the DUP were (kind of) in Government. When Theresa May announced the confidence and supply agreement, I’d guess that Google searches for “Who are the DUP?” went up by at least 1000%.
And this demand for knowledge was almost instantly met by a flurry of articles, written by journalists who were mostly English, mostly based in London, and mostly just finished from googling the very same questions themselves.
These journalists always stressed the same things – the hard-line unionist stance of the party, their Protestant Christian background, and their opposition to equal marriage and abortion – and they’re completely right.
However, the DUP is a far more complex beast than this. What the English journalists have failed to capture is that DUP politicians aren’t just Protestant, the party itself was born from the Free Presbyterian Church. The man who created the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, Reverend Ian Paisley, also founded the DUP. Both institutions have his blood running through their veins.
When I heard one journalist refer to the DUP as ‘right-wing’ I had to laugh. Yes, it’s easy to assume this, since they propped up a Conservative government, and mostly voted the same way as the Tories anyway. Yet it’s just so fundamentally wrong because there is no right wing in Northern Ireland – nor, for the most part, is there a left wing. Parties exist upon a spectrum with Unionist (wants NI to stay in the UK) at one end, and Nationalist (wants a United Ireland) at the other. Even this is a gross simplification.
If one tried to impose a left-right spectrum on the Politics of Northern Ireland, as exists in England, they would find that parties danced up and down it over time, and that members, MLAs, and even MPs would be found dotted randomly along it.
The Green Anorak 