Paddington Bear wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2023 5:57 pm
sturginho wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2023 4:58 pm
fishfoodie wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2023 3:01 pm
If the DUP does as we all expect, & still refuses to join the Assembly, it gives the Governments all the justification they need to re-write the GFI to change it from requiring a party from the Unionist, & Nationalist sides, & just make it the from the two largest parties, so allowing the Alliance to be more than a spectator & encourage a move away from sectarian politics
Wouldnt amending the GFA (even with good intentions) open up an even bigger can of worms?
Nationalist parties poll a few percent over unionist ones and suddenly the sacred agreement isn't so sacred after all...
The DUP's game is basically this: Try to take down the GFA (which they never supported), by relying on the GFA (and the broken politics that made it necessary) for all their leverage and power. This is not sustainable.
This has been their game throughout Brexit, they claim the GFA is being violated (no one ever agreeing with their interpretation, including the courts), then say their demands must be met to preserve the GFA, all whilst their overall (unstated) goal is ending the GFA and going back to a pre Anglo-Irish Agreement era (which is impossible).
The truth is the ground is moving from under them, they got 21.3% of the vote last time in NI. Unionist parties combined got 40%. Some of their potential constituency have worked out that a sectarian form of unionism is non-viable long term, this is a large part of the reason Alliance grew to 13.5%. The other part of their potential constituency has decided they're not bigoted enough and have moved to the TUV which grew to 7.6%. UUP continue their decline now down to their lowest ever of 11.2% (from generations ago having two thirds of the vote). In the DUP's potential constituency the only parties that are growing are Alliance and TUV.
Power sharing happens between the largest nationalist/republican party and the largest unionist/loyalist party. But on current trends there is a chance Alliance will be bigger than any unionist party, and Alliance is neither nationalist or unionist.
The DUP are taking a huge risk staying out of government. Because their power rests solely on the GFA, beyond that it's less real as time passes. Any threat of violence doesn't really hold up. With republican paramilitaries if there's a cause with at least some validity they would be able to rely on international support somewhere and would have support both in NI and RoI, it's a proven fact they don't go away and become increasingly sophisticated under those conditions. Loyalist paramilitaries aren't the same, they basically never had international backers (besides a quite complicated story about apartheid era SA), if UK security services don't want them to operate then they don't. Loyalist paramilitaries trying to operate against the wishes of the UK state to overturn whatever choices the UK state makes, just isn't a thing that would last long.
The DUPs 'attempts to undermine the GFA using Brexit, have just accelerated a united Ireland. If they continue causing problems then the outcome is going to be more of the same, which would mean cutting them out of power sharing potentially. If loyalists then attempted violence to change that, the solution would be far more likely to be a united Ireland than GFA2. The international community is not going to work out some whole new convoluted way of doing government to further preserve the power of 21%-40% of an electorate, after they refused to form a government for no good reason.
