I am writing this from a wonderful little former fishing village called Glengarriff, an hour and a half’s drive from the gleaming new Cork international airport. The economic success of Glengarriff is a good way of explaining why the DUP-Tory deal is so important to Northern Ireland, which for many years has struggled to keep up with the infrastructure improvements in the south. Today, while Belfast splutters, there is nothing less than an economic revolution going on in the south, thanks to European Union funding and a tourism boom that saw 2016 break all records. House prices in the south are now rising by €2,000 a month.
Back in the 19th century, when the first little inns opened in Glengarriff, the area was so impoverished that almost every donation to help build the local church of the Sacred Heart – where I attended a friend’s wedding – came from former migrants who had fled the Irish famine to move to a better life in America. The local residents had no money for building churches. Until the EU funding came along, the area was economically deprived and reflected how the north of Ireland was the economically superior. Now it’s booming as Cork becomes a cultural and tourist mecca; and hotels are full.
Historically – and this is crucial to realising why the DUP-May deal is likely to be rock-solid and stable – this goes back to before partition, when around 70 per cent of the industrial productivity of Ireland was generated from the greater Belfast area, including North Down, North Armagh and South Antrim. As Irish historians note, most of this production benefitted the British market and became a factor in partition, with a clear economic advantage going to the Irish in the north.
In last few decades, while the heavy industry of the north is in decline, development in the south – thanks to the EU funding and the Irish tourism miracle in places like Glengarriff – has largely reversed the master-servant dynamics of the north-south economic divide. The Belfast area now only produces about 15 per cent of Ireland’s total output as an island. No wonder the DUP want to maintain a “soft border” and also want VAT for tourism reduced to five per cent so that the north can better compete for tourist cash with the south.
While the DUP may have a reputation for cold chequebook politics, one needs to understand the historical context. To grasp the political psychology of the Northern Irish – and especially the DUP – one needs to know the complicated historical dynamics of the economic relationship between the north and south of Ireland.
With so much of the north’s political and national identity being tied up with an almost mythological belief in its economic superiority – not unlike in Germany and Italy, where the industrial wealth of the country has come from the northern industrial heartland – it’s hardly surprising that the DUP have tried to squeeze as much cash as possible to help the north keep up with their newly prosperous cousins in the south.
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In The Bad Boys of Brexit, political funder Arron Banks’s hilarious Gonzo-style referendum diary account of how he spent £5 million helping Nigel Farage’s hard-drinking band of political musketeers win the most unlikely of Brexit victories, there are some interesting entries describing his “grubby” dealings with the DUP, who were being courted by both Vote Leave and Leave.EU to get them to support their campaigns for the official “Out” designation from the Electoral Commission.
What is clear is that the DUP were masterful political operators, playing off Vote Leave against the Banks-backed Farage grassroots organisation – driving up the price of their support in an aggressive bidding war that saw Vote Leave buying the support of the DUP for an alleged fee of £50k a month.
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The other issue that was headline news when I was in Ireland was the controversial decision of Irish education minister Richard Bruton that Catholic schools in Ireland will no longer be able to admit Catholic children ahead of children from other faiths.
The truth is that this is not so much about school over-population but rather about how the government, led by Fine Gael, seems determined to single out Catholic schools for discrimination as part of what the Irish Independent calls the “anti-Catholic mood that exists in the country”. This is because Fine Gael is a political party with a progressive social liberal agenda that wants to all but eliminate the theological influence of the Catholic Church – which it largely hates for its conservative political stance on abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues.
As columnist David Quinn has noted, Fine Gael’s leaders are doing everything they can to “minimise the influence of Catholicism, and indeed Christianity, in Irish life – from wanting to teach religion in a state-controlled way so that Catholicism is marginalised in schools, to kicking the Church out of the hospital system so that progressive ideas on assisted death, abortion and genetics can create a new ‘medical ethos’ that eliminates religion from the debate.”
So while I enjoyed my time in Ireland as a tourist, I also left with a sense of despair as to the sort of anti-Catholic Ireland the current government is trying to create.
William Cash is editor-in-chief of Spear’s
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