Looking around the Lodge Hotel in Coleraine, Co Derry, shortly before the “Safeguarding The Union” meeting began, most in attendance appeared surprised that so many others turned up on a grey February night. Extra chairs had to be brought in.
However much they disagree, be they evangelical Christians or the more socially-liberal, all want the union with Britain to continue and are frustrated with unionist politicians’ inability to make the case for it.
The idea for “Safeguarding The Union” came from Shankill Road conversations last year, involving Alfie McCrory, a loyalist, who pulled IRA bomber Sean Kelly out of the rubble of Frizzell’s fishmongers on Shankill Road, Belfast, after the 1993 IRA bombing.
At the Coleraine meeting on Tuesday evening, the disengagement of the Lodge Hotel audience from unionist parties was palpable, even if a majority still voted for them. They voted for them because of the lack of options and some were often depressed that political conversations in the North were dominated by talk of Irish unity “rather than keeping what we have”, as one man said from the floor.
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“I never heard any of this stuff before,” one attendee said after listening to an optimistic presentation on Northern Ireland’s worth to the United Kingdom, including numbers showing the North feeds 10 million people a day across the UK.
On stage, the speakers are former Democratric Unionist Party adviser Lee Reynolds and the Belfast-born, Liverpool-based, socially liberal academic, Peter Shirlow, who is no stranger to delivering unpalatable messages to unionism.
Reynolds has form as a campaigner. He took charge of the Leave campaign in Northern Ireland in the Brexit referendum when support for quitting the European Union was just 30 per cent. By the end, that vote rose to 45 per cent. Reynolds is given credit, even by his enemies, for the increase.
He said he had been confident that support for Brexit in Northern Ireland could be increased because the data mined from detailed polling showed such votes were there. Today, the situation was the same, he argued.
People today who now placed themselves in the centre of Northern Irish politics – “neither Protestant, nor Catholic” – have not abandoned their past support for the UK, but “they have moved away from political unionism”, he said.
Reynolds argued that unionists had allowed republicans/nationalists “to get inside our heads” where the latter controlled the conversation “that Irish unity is inevitable, that it’s going to happen, that it can’t be stopped”.
Reynolds understood that feeling, since he often focused on the image of an IRA man with “really greasy, matted hair and a pencil-thin moustache, with a very old coat”, who targeted his father for killing during the Troubles.
“That’s what they have done with a lot of us. They’ve got in there,” he said, tapping his head slowly with his finger. “We’re focusing on them, but we’re not focusing on what we need to do to get them out of our heads.”
Harking back to the oldest of Orange tropes of King Billy and the Battle of the Boyne and the breaking of the siege of Derry, Reynolds said: “There’s no ship breaking the boom or a man on a white horse. But we don’t need them.”
The core of Reynolds’s argument was positivity: “The Bible tells us 63 times to be not afraid. Be not afraid. Be positive. Celebrate our culture, but don’t abuse it. We did a lot of other things outside of 1690 and 1916 – remember that.”
Even if he did not agree with him, Reynolds’s hero was the late Scottish National Party leader and former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, who came “within a whisker of taking Scotland out of the union, by being optimistic, by giving hope”.
However, the biblical reference highlights unionism’s fragmentation: the evangelical wing will not deal with socially-liberal Protestants; the DUP will not deal with Ulster Unionist Party; and everyone else looks down on loyalists in socially-deprived estates.
Fed on stories about Robert Lundy, the governor of Derry in 1689 who sought to surrender to King James’s forces, earning ever-lasting Protestant hatred, unionists must end the perpetual habit of trying to find traitors within its ranks, Reynolds said.
Instead, they must build a trinity of “hard unionists, people in the centre or those simply disengaged”, Reynolds argued.
“We need everyone, not just ones we like. We have to become tolerant. We can’t disagree because others don’t believe in unionism exactly in the same way we do,” he said.
Throughout, Reynolds and Shirlow offered optimistic presentations, pointing to numbers that showed that the nationalist vote share had barely increased since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement referendum, that sectarianism was falling, that a majority wanted to stay in the UK.
The conversation they want is what sort of Northern Ireland do they want to live in? That’s the future they want to talk about, not what unionist politicians want to talk about
— Lee Reynolds
Meanwhile, the majority of the 180,000 now declared as neither Catholic nor Protestant in census forms were mostly “secular, liberal Prods” who would vote to stay in the UK if they were asked, Shirlow said.
However, voting is a habit learned from one’s parents, that gets stronger with repetition, but too many unionists, especially those in often-poorer loyalist districts, have long still lost the habit.
Illustrating this, politician Russell Watton, who now leads the Progressive Unionist Party, told Reynolds that just 28 per cent of adults now voted in the working-class estate where Reynolds was raised in Coleraine. One told him he did not care whether Sinn Féin won the local seat.
“I told him, ‘You’re some unionist talking like that',” he said.
The Alliance’s Lagan Valley Westminster MP Sorcha Eastwood was elected only “because of unionist disunity, she shouldn’t be there. We have to stop losing seats that we shouldn’t be losing”, Watton said.
“We shouldn’t have a Sinn Féin First Minister. The vote’s there; it is about getting it out. I have tried my darndest over 10 years. I got people houses and done my best for people, but they couldn’t walk across the street to a polling station to put down an ‘X’.”
The audience were told that people who identified as British were more likely to vote, so “getting people to identify that way will deliver at the ballot box”, but too many younger people no longer did so.
Reynolds said: “So how do we start turning that around? That’s our foundation. If you want to build a house of victory, you want your foundations to be strong. That’s the foundation.”
But unionist politicians must finally realise that Northern Irish society has changed and that the majority of Protestants were more socially-liberal than the politicians who today represent them.
“The conversation they want is what sort of Northern Ireland do they want to live in? What does the future hold? That’s the future they want to talk about, not what unionist politicians want to talk about,” Reynolds said.
Arguments in Northern Ireland about Irish unification were slowly being undermined, he said.
“They’ve had a hundred years to come up with a plan to bring in 2m people into the Republic – they haven’t got one,” he said.
Equally, the old charges about discrimination against Catholics and nationalists “that we were horrible and they could never be equal” no longer held now that Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill was Northern Ireland’s First Minister, he said.
He argued that Sinn Féin would mostly fail because it was too tied to the past.
“This new generation doesn’t like the past. They want nothing to do with it. And Sinn Féin’s association with that is actually harming them,” he said.
Most of Northern Ireland’s young did not want endless conversations about its constitutional future, he said.
He described them as “referendum unionists” who did not want a referendum but who would vote to stay in the UK if pressed and that “includes more nationalists than you would expect”.
Economically, Reynolds and Shirlow argued that Northern Ireland has been transformed, with near-zero unemployment, even labour shortages, while Belfast has carved out a global reputation in fintech, cybersecurity and film animation.
Unionists did not need to look on the Republic’s economic success with concern or envy, Shirlow said.
“We’ve heard of the Celtic Tiger. Well, basically, they have done it all again. They have created Celtic Tiger 2.0,” he said.
“They have the highest dependency on exports to the United States of any country in Europe. They are dependent on foreign direct investment for a huge amount of their tax base.”
“The entire budget for universities would be gone if just one company quits.”
