‘Different in tone but not in policy’ was how Sinn Féin Northern leader Michelle O’Neill described DUP leader Arlene Foster’s speech at last weekend’s Killarney Economic Forum.
This verdict was precisely wrong. Foster may not have announced any policy reversals but there was still fresh meat in her sandwich. Developing the British-Irish Council, an institution of the Belfast Agreement, as a post-Brexit mechanism was an intriguing proposal, not least because Michéal Martin suggested it last September.
Martin also attended Killarney and met the DUP leader.
After Fine Gael’s confused promotion of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, another agreement institution, Foster’s idea looks suspiciously pointed. If the DUP is taking sides in Southern politics that would be innovation enough.
What was not different was Foster’s tone. She got credit to the contrary simply for turning up, with many reports calling this conciliatory given recent DUP criticism of Dublin.
But even sympathetic Southern coverage found her speech to be “challenging” and “not entirely palatable”, to quote the Irish Examiner.
In narrow terms of tone – Foster’s manner and delivery – the brittle hectoring familiar to Northern audiences was as obvious as always. Mechanical smiles and scripted anecdotes emphasised rather than concealed it.
Allergic dislike
Foster’s tone matters because nationalists have taken an allergic dislike to her. That may be unfair but it is a fact, on which the future of devolution depends.
When the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal came to a head just over a year ago, the DUP leader’s arrogant and contemptuous behaviour crystallised nationalist frustration and rapidly turned it into loathing. This became inseparable from nationalist rejection of Stormont – a phenomenon that took even Sinn Féin by surprise. The republican party tried to ease Foster temporarily off the stage, pending a quick inquiry into the heating scheme, before accepting that was impossible and raising a host of alternative demands. To this extent, soothing the allergic reaction to the DUP leader lies at the heart of the Stormont crisis.
Foster has denounced criticism of her temperament as sexist – the only complaint of sexism she has made in her career. She has been unable to repeat this complaint since a newspaper interview last April, in which she gave a one-word summary of O’Neill as “blond” – infuriating nationalists again.
Prickly character
Superficially, Foster might still appear to have a point. Her predecessor Peter Robinson was a notoriously prickly character and that did not bring government to a halt. However, an issue was often made of Robinson’s tone and he clearly learned to moderate it on becoming first minister. Personal and financial issues in 2010 brought on a further period of painfully evident reflection. Foster has displayed nothing comparable since her political world fell apart.
If only she could strike the right tone, circumstances would be transformed. The historian and former SDLP politician Brian Feeney says nationalists want “contrition” – or sackcloth and ashes, as Ian Paisley once demanded of Sinn Féin. That is too far removed from Foster’s nature to be remotely likely, even if she had the skill to pull it off.
It would be difficult for anyone to find the right tone in Foster’s position. While Stormont was functioning, she tended to comport herself not as the unionist first minister of Northern Ireland but as the prime minister of a unionist Northern Ireland – to understandable nationalist annoyance.
In a limbo
Yet now she is trapped in a limbo that makes it hard to address this offence.
Technically, Foster is still first minister – the outgoing incumbent remains in office until the post is refilled. But without an executive, she is first minister of nothing.
Foster is leader of the DUP and hence of unionism. But the focus of unionist power has moved to Westminster, supercharged by the DUP-Tory deal – and Foster is not an MP.
If direct rule is introduced she will hold no elected office and must step down as DUP leader under the party’s rules. Sinn Féin believes the DUP’s leader in the Commons, Nigel Dodds, is already in charge behind the scenes.
So whenever Foster opens her mouth she provokes that most damning of Ulster dismissals: who does she think she is?
This could be seen in nationalist reaction to her Killarney speech. Commentators and political representatives were affronted that Foster spoke for a unionist Northern Ireland, with no acknowledgement of its Irish population.
Yet if she had presumed to speak for everyone that would have caused offence as well.
The Barry McElduff Kingsmill affair has shown there is still a strong appetite for rapprochement in Northern Ireland. A sense of hatred running out of control ended with palpable relief at pulling back from the brink, thanks largely to a BBC interview last Thursday, when Sinn Féin and DUP former ministers John O’Dowd and Edwin Poots found exactly the right tone of acknowledgement.
The implausibility of Foster managing that with O’Neill, let alone with nationalism overall, is the critical obstacle to selling a Stormont deal.