The biggest challenge for the DUP is not to save Stormont but to save the Union.
You save Stormont by appealing to Sinn Fein.
You save the Union by appealing to ‘moderate nationalists’ who vote for Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the Alliance, the Greens or others or not at all.
The border poll vote, when it comes will fail or win on the decisions of those softer nationalists who might swing either way depending on the economy or the extent to which they feel NI is made in their image.
So how is the DUP to win these people over to the Union?
In the past they were, effectively, small ‘u’ unionists, for they were content with NI, worked its public services, paid their taxes and didn’t support the IRA. So it should be easy. Right?
No one expects them to vote for the DUP, of course, but how do you secure the Union in the long term if you have ‘moderate nationalists’ vacillating in their endorsement of it, because of Brexit, socially conservative politics and unionism being defined as essentially Orange?
You need a huge civic unionist party here that does not set shibboleths for taigs. And there isn’t one. Unionism’s moment for readjusting its trajectory to include catholics – if that was ever possible – may have passed.
If they ever saw that need, and most of them didn’t, they were hampered by a sense of siege (understandable enough) by association with a theology that said Catholics weren’t even christian, and by a chauvinistic attachment to a way of being British that, in England, actually makes them look like rednecks.
Malachi O'Doherty 
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