HEY, Loyal Ulster! The union is safe! Or at least it would be if your addiction to flags didn’t blind you to what’s staring you in the face. Data from the Office of National Statistics this week showed that the North of Ireland – up to recently the financial outside toilet of the union – is now the best-performing region of the UK in terms of prosperity. Economic output has bounced back to almost exactly where it was just before the pandemic. In the third quarter of 2021 it was only 0.3 per below that of the last quarter of 2019 (right). And in another jaw-dropping statistic, the second-placed region in the performance table is the financial boilerhouse of the union, London, where economic output is 1.8 per cent behind where it was at the end of 2019 – and that’s quite a distance between first and second. And the distance between first and last is immense, And what, Loyal Ulster, do you suppose the Financial Times identified as the leading cause of the bounce-back? No, not the pan-nationalist front.No, not the Irish Language Act.No, not two-tier policing.No, not Michael D Higgins.No, not Naomi Long. To the surprise of no-one who is watching developments with the merest sliver of objectivity, the UK’s leading financial publication had this to say of the Hated Provocol, sorry, Protocol. “The economy of Northern Ireland has largely recovered from the hit of Covid-19, marking the best performance across all UK nations and regions, according to experimental official statistics that point to it prospering under the Northern Ireland Protocol.” Now Squinter has never claimed to be a political guru; in fact, his record in predicting developments and events is not one that would trouble his local bookmaker. But it’s clear Brexit has changed the landscape in the North enormously, to the point where the race for a border poll has quickened from a canter to a trot to a gallop. And since any referendum on partition is going to be decided by the floating voters, and since floating voters are going to be massively influenced in their decision on what box to tick by their own personal circumstances, if the North started performing like Singapore instead of Albania then the New Ireland movement’s ‘difficult conversations’ are going to get a lot more difficult. But the good news for the Chucky Crew is that none of the unionist parties has the slightest interest in a six counties with a rising standard of living and a deal of faith in the future. Only pick the battles you can win, wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War, but it appears that neither Geoffrey Donaldson, Doug Beattie or Jim Allister are up to speed with pre-Christian Chinese military philosophy, because in calling for the Protocol to be binned and not tweaked or improved, they’ve painted themselves into a red, white and blue corner from which there is no survivable retreat. Because of course the Protocol’s going nowhere. After a comprehensive slapping down by the insanely powerful Ways and Means Committee of the US Congress, David Frost’s comically dramatic threats to the EU about triggering Article 16 have ceased and the British Government now wants to talk about fixing instead of ditching. The problem is that if by this time next year we were all booking holidays to the West Indies, building conservatories and telling Sinn Féin canvassers to go away round their own door the DUP, UUP and TUV would still be calling for empty shelves and for more sewage in our waters because, just as the Irish Sea border doesn’t actually exist in the sea, unionist opposition to the Protocol doesn’t exist in any economic reality. It’s about an unrequited yearning to belong to a place that at worst groans and slaps its forehead every time the North is mentioned and at best shrugs its shoulders. It’s about an identity and culture whose fatal flaw is that the greater part of it is umbilically connected to somebody else’s identity and culture. Somebody else’s flag. Somebody else’s sword dance. Somebody else’s battles. And when that somebody else left you with the neighbours to go off on their own, well…
