In Irish politics it is known as a stroke - an act of bare-faced hypocrisy which wrong-foots your opponent. As strokes go, the Ulster Unionist Party’s decision to cosy up to the Progressive Unionist Party in order to deny an executive seat to Sinn Fein takes some beating. Adding former Ulster Volunteer Force bomber David Ervine to the UUP’s 24 MLAs elected by Northern Ireland’s "decent people" gives unionists an extra seat in any future executive at the expense of SF, which also has 24 assembly members.
For the party of law and order to clamber into bed with a group linked to an armed and active terrorist group to gain a transitory and perhaps hypothetical advantage is an act of unparalleled cynicism. Such a stroke is worthy of Charlie Haughey, much the most devious Irish politician of the past 50 years. It was Haughey who cynically abandoned Fianna Fail’s long held policy of no coalitions to snuggle up to the Progressive Democrats and prolong his tenure as Taoiseach in 1989.
When asked what his cabinet "colleagues" made of this dramatic departure, Haughey revealed that he had neglected to inform them, on the grounds that they were "all a load of gobshites". It seems that UUP leader Reg Empey is from the Haughey school of decision-making. Sylvia Hermon, the party’s sole representative in the House of Commons, was not even consulted on this move. She is now left to explain to her nice respectable constituents in North Down why their MP is aligned with a group of drug-dealing murderers.
The obvious hypocrisy of this stroke is clear for all to see. But on closer inspection, the alliance between the old establishment party and a paramilitary group is not so surprising. The fact is that the UUP has always been ambivalent towards murderers when they came from their own community. The fur coat brigade were happy enough to condemn loyalist violence if it was suitably random. They and their voters had little time for the nakedly sectarian murder of Catholics. But when the UVF or UDA managed to kill someone whose politics displeased unionists, condemnation was not so forthcoming.
Furthermore at times of crisis - the 1974 strike, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Drumcree stand-off - unionists marched shoulder to shoulder with loyalists, both literally and metaphorically. In all three cases, mass unionist defiance of British policy was backed up by loyalist violence. Seen in this light, Empey’s wooing of the PUP is not so strange. Persuading Ervine to take the UUP whip at Stormont is just one more example of a unionist party using loyalists to get one over on them ‘uns.
For make no mistake, this was an inherently sectarian move. Fairness dictates that if the UUP and SF both have 24 seats then the extra place at the cabinet table should go to the party with more votes. Unfortunately for unionists, that party happens to be SF. It may be distasteful to them, but that’s democracy. To secure a six to four unionist majority on the executive, the UUP pulled off their oldest trick - the gerrymander.
Empey’s protestation that the move was designed to address the dangerous isolation of loyalism rings more hollow than a supermodel’s head. If this was his intention, then why did he first approach the former DUP man Paul Berry to try to get up to the magic 25 seats? Are we to believe that only after Berry said no did Empey conclude that a grand gesture of conciliation with loyalism was required?
In his détente with the PUP, Empey has aligned himself with an organisation which was murdering people last summer. He has further damaged his already battered party by embracing the criminality of the UVF. Some of the UUP’s voters who sincerely believe in the rule of law will drift away in despair.
Ideologically too, the UUP is holed beneath the water line. How can they insist the Provisional movement is still unfit for government when the IRA, unlike the UVF, has decommissioned? Any further posturing by Empey on this issue will be easily swatted away by SF by pointing to the former prisoner on the UUP benches.
While tactically, aligning with Ervine was a masterstroke, strategically it was madness. That great survivor of Irish politics, Charlie Haughey, has much to teach Empey yet.