ANY expectations that the series of ministerial and committee appointments made on Tuesday by new DUP leader Edwin Poots would herald a new beginning for the largest party of Unionism have been dashed in the most robust and definitive fashion. In a straight choice between progression and regression, the DUP has crunched deafeningly into reverse gear.
Mr Poots was watched closely to see what messages he would send to two cohorts: first, the Arlene Foster loyalists and Jeffrey Donaldson associates within the DUP who have been left shocked and angered by the speedy and brutal way in which Mr Poots grabbed power.
Second, those non-Unionists, who for five years have watched with something between astonishment and horror as Mrs Foster stumbled from insult to gaffe with grim regularity. Her efforts in the past fortnight to paint herself in a softer hue notwithstanding, her legacy will be one of failure and division.
No-one had any illusion that the fundamentalist Mr Dodds was going to turn overnight into the great moderniser. But there was a genuine hope that he was possessed of sufficient pragmatism to make the changes needed to pour oil on the blazing skipfire that is the DUP at present while at the same time convincing the party’s partners in government that, at the very least, a step might be taken away from the politics of confrontation.
The token gestures made towards the Donaldson camp were immediately and angrily dismissed as a lost opportunity by the two big-name victims of the reshuffle: Education Minister Peter Weir and Economy Minister Diane Dodds. That means that open animosity will continue until the setpiece battle later this month of the Lagan Valley DUP Constituency Association, where Mr Donaldson will go head-to-head with the Dodds/Givan axis in what looks set to be the key scene in this Unionist psychodrama.
More importantly than the intra-Unionist warfare, the appointment of Mr Givan as First Minister and Michelle McIlveen as Education Minister is a clear message to the other parties of government that the DUP has set its face very firmly to the past.
Although only 39 years old, Mr Givan is pickled in old-school DUP orthodoxy, having been umbilically attached by geography, faith and politics to Mr Poots since the age of 18 and with no experience of professional life outside the party. 2016 was his breakthrough year, when as Communities Minister he lit an Eleventh Night bonfire while grinning maniacally for the cameras, then followed that up by providing the last straw for Martin McGuinness ahead of his collapsing of the Executive: the vindictive slashing of the pitifully small Líofa Irish language grants. In a similar vein and in the same year, Ms McIlveen earned her hardline spurs by changing the Irish name of a fisheries protection vessel.
The pattern is clear, the course is set. We’re in for a ride that’s going to be almost as bumpy as that of Mr Poots.
