Siobhán Fenton: DUP’s tough talk on Sinn Féin exposes the bind it finds itself in

W hile the Drumcree parading dispute is still playing out in court, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has been determined to drag the row into Stormont as well. The party seized on the prospect that the decision by some Sinn Féin politicians to stand in peaceful solidarity with Garvaghy Road residents might be shown to mean they participated in a technically “unlawful” protest. The DUP has argued this means Sinn Féin is unfit to hold office on the basis that it is untenable to have “lawmakers acting as law breakers”.

Several Sinn Féin figures, including First Minister Michelle O’Neill , have attended police interviews recently in relation to the protest. O’Neill continues to stand over her support for the residents, arguing her attendance was “always the right thing to do”. The stance is popular among nationalist voters and the party is relaxed about the outcome of the investigation. However, the DUP is keen to use Drumcree as an opportunity to energise its loyalist working-class base in advance of the May 2027 Stormont election, after a slew of scandals and strategic errors that saw its support plummet.

No-confidence motions brought by unionist MLAs against Sinn Féin’s ministers, including O’Neill, were easily defeated. Cross-community voting mechanisms meant they needed majority support from nationalist as well as unionist MLAs to succeed. Hardline figures in the DUP then looked to party leader Gavin Robinson to announce harsher action against O’Neill. A spokesperson for the DUP this week said: “The DUP will hold strong and we will not allow lawlessness and arrogance to go unpunished.”

Robinson has so far declined to clarify precisely what that punishment would involve. This has left the DUP in a somewhat embarrassing position. After ratcheting up tensions in a bid to capitalise on loyalist anger about Drumcree, it is now painfully clear that the party has neither a strategic plan nor the appetite to follow through with impactful action against Sinn Féin. Indeed, within days of the no-confidence motion, O’Neill and her DUP counterpart, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly , appeared jointly at a Stormont committee.

Awkwardly, Little-Pengelly also turned up in a TV studio sitting alongside a Sinn Féin MP to make a shared funding request of the British government. Hardliners within the party’s ranks, including MP Carla Lockhart, demanded that the DUP withdraw Little-Pengelly from the Deputy First Minister position in order to forcibly eject O’Neill from the First Minister’s office. When those demands came to nothing last week, Lockhart resigned as a party officer in protest, and there is speculation she could quit the DUP altogether to sit as an independent MP or for the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice .

Yesterday, DUP MLA Diane Forsythe joined Lockhart in demanding O’Neill’s removal. Lockhart believes her public position is a show of strength and there is no doubt it has bolstered her reputation. However, the debate that the DUP is having internally (and, through the actions of Lockhart and Forsythe, publicly) exposes the strategically weak position of the DUP itself. This weakness stems from the party’s ambiguity over powersharing. While there is still little appetite in the DUP for collapsing Stormont with an Assembly election approaching, there are some within the party and within unionism and loyalism generally who now want an end to powersharing altogether.

While many political parties have bought into the moral case for powersharing and cross-community outreach as part of the peace process, the DUP in particular has continually resisted it. It opposed the Belfast Agreement and, after years of decrying Stormont, entered powersharing only when presented with the opportunity to wield power and prestige as ministers. The party initially tried to justify the decision to share power to voters by selling it as a mechanism to keep republicans in check – the DUP positions itself as a tougher watchdog than more moderate unionist parties would manage to be.

Yet even this has been undermined by the DUP’s constant gaffes and strategic missteps at Stormont, which have led some unionists voters to feel Sinn Féin’s politicians are running rings around the DUP. Instead, recent years have seen the DUP increasingly rely on expressing disdain for Sinn Féin to appease loyalist voters who oppose the principle of powersharing. The inconsistency between the DUP’s inflammatory rhetoric implying Sinn Féin politicians are contemptible “lawbreakers” while serving alongside them in office is a difficult one to pass off under normal circumstances.

The more recent insults – and full-throttle admonishments of O’Neill – make the party’s willingness to do joint press conferences and sit placidly alongside Sinn Féin representatives in TV studios much harder to justify to those who would rather tear up powersharing altogether. So the party has been left with little choice but to withdraw Little Pengelly and force the expulsion of O’Neill. If their partners in government are “lawbreakers” – albeit due to an alleged technical breach of law while engaging in a peaceful protest on a human rights issue – by logical extension they are unsuitable for office.

But the reality is that the DUP may need powersharing to succeed much more than Sinn Féin does. Momentum towards a united Ireland is advancing considerably. Sinn Féin strategists are aware that their role potentially involves them legitimising partition by propping it up. Some within unionism and loyalism believe a collapse of Stormont would see a return to direct rule; in reality, Stormont’s collapse could simply strengthen the argument that Northern Ireland is a failed state and fundamentally unworkable, hastening the prospect of a unity referendum.

It may be that more moderate figures in the DUP, such as Robinson, are fully aware of this and this has informed his refusal to heed Lockhart’s calls. But Robinson’s ability to quell the brewing split is limited by his own weak authority. He first became DUP leader on an interim basis following Jeffrey Donaldson’s arrest on child sexual offences. Robinson was ratified as permanent leader in the role shortly afterwards, but is still viewed by many in the party as a figure momentarily steadying the party in the absence of a genuine leadership contest.

The posturing about pulling the plug on Stormont is undoubtedly designed to be a show of strength to appease the DUP’s hardliners. So far, all it has managed to do is highlight the bind the party finds itself in. Siobhán Fenton is the author of Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors