Many of Northern Ireland’s Protestants are demanding a new holy grail. They are in search of a new champion to replace the irreparably tarnished Iris Robinson.
Media exposés of the wife of Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson and her teenage lover, together with the allegations of financial irregularity surrounding Unionism’s first family, have plunged the north of Ireland’s self-styled Christian moral majority into total crisis.
Shortly before Christmas, Iris Robinson was rightly regarded as the most influential woman in Unionist politics – with seats in the House of Commons and the Northern Ireland Assembly and on Castlereagh Borough Council.
Now the scandals that have engulfed her have forced her to quit politics altogether. Her career is in the dustbin. Her husband’s hangs in the balance.
The coming weeks are supposed to be a highpoint in the Christian calendar, as churches across Ireland build up to the Easter celebrations. Instead, many Christians – especially evangelical and fundamentalist ones – have been left numb by the impact of the Roman Catholic Church’s paedophile priests scandal and the Pentecostal movement’s “Irisgate”.
With a Westminster election expected in May and another Stormont election a possibility, to whom are Northern Ireland’s Christians supposed to look for political guidance?
The fallout from Irisgate means that being simultaneously First Minister and a born-again Christian has become a poisoned chalice. Former First Minister Ian Paisley and his successor, Peter Robinson, are both born-again believers.
With details of Iris Robinson’s sexual and financial affairs plastered all over the newspapers, it was hardly surprising that other senior born-again fundamentalists among the DUP MPs, such as Jeffrey Donaldson and Nigel Dodds, were slow to offer their services as caretaker First Minister.
The DUP was founded to give hardline Protestant Bible-bashers a meaningful voice. Before then, more liberal churchgoers dominated the ruling Ulster Unionist Party.
Over the years, Ian Paisley’s huge personal votes illustrated how he had mobilised Unionism’s fundamentalist wing. But now its members are leaderless and lacking direction. The next four weeks will be crucial for the DUP as it strives to persuade hardline Protestants not decide to desert the party.
The UUP was eclipsed because the DUP used fundamentalist churches and mission halls to mobilise people against Nobel Peace Prize-winner David Trimble and the Belfast Agreement. Now, if fundamentalists opt to abandon the DUP, they may turn to Jim Allister’s anti-power-sharing Traditional Unionist Voice or Reg Empey’s Ulster Unionist Party, which is now aligned with David Cameron’s Conservatives.
Even the DUP’s core supporters in the staunchly fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church, which Paisley formed in 1951, are badly split over power-sharing and Irisgate. The Orange Order and other Protestant marching orders are also disillusioned with the DUP.
If a new political messiah does not emerge in the next few months, Protestant churchgoers may decide to stay in the pews and stay away from the polling booths. Their apathy might allow republicans and nationalists to gain seats which have not hitherto been Orange bastions.
A pan-Unionist front might restore some confidence in Protestant politicians, but how likely is this?
Similarly, evangelicals within Irish Catholicism could rescue the reputation of their church and spark a similar political revival for the moderate left SDLP. But how likely is that?
One way to combat apathy would be for the DUP to agree a solution with Sinn Fein on policing and justice and get these devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly as soon as possible. Unfortunately, that might precipitate a mass defection to Traditional Unionist Voice.
Since its inception in 1971, the DUP has tended to embody the politics of “Never, never, never”. Its decision to enter talks with republicans on a new policing ministry is a tactical move to buy time, not indicative of a desire to see lasting peace in Ireland.
The DUP always puts party before policies. Given the Robinson scandal, it cannot afford to scrap a deal on policing and trigger a fresh Stormont election. The risk then would be that disgust at the DUP’s hypocritical moralising would result in the sort of meltdown that overwhelmed the UUP at the 2005 general election.
The DUP faces an added moral dilemma: the child sex abuse allegations involving members of Sinn Fein, its partner in the power-sharing executive.
If Irisgate has made the Protestant devout sick to their stomachs, the thought of the DUP in government with a republican party tarnished by child abuse scandals could be the straw that breaksthe fundamentalist camel’s back.
The UUP is now making a comeback, in part because of its links with the Tories. But the DUP might never recover from electoral annihilation.
