THE north of Ireland’s favourite and most deployed oxymoron is military intelligence.

Apparently eight special forces action men have been deployed “undercover” in Northern Ireland following last week’s violence.

These members of the special forces have been tasked with co-ordinating intelligence operations and identifying the ringleaders behind the violence.

If that’s the case they could have stayed in Hertfordshire and contacted the office of the Northern Ireland Minister Brandon Lewis, who met with the representatives of a range of proscribed paramilitary organisations last month. He’ll have their contact details. 

As the centenary of its foundation approaches, the state of Northern Ireland has once again plunged into crisis.

What began as small-scale protests concentrated in working-class unionist areas escalated into rioting, the result of what many believed to be a calculated move by elements within loyalism to up the ante and provoke sectarian rioting. 

The familiar scenes captured by TV cameras, which had been lying in wait for some time, were of small numbers of young people throwing stones, petrol bombs, and hijacking and burning cars and buses.

The disorder has been attributed to two sources of political discontent.

Unionist and loyalist leaders have blamed widespread frustration at the decision not to prosecute Sinn Fein members for attending the funeral of prominent republican Bobby Storey last June, when Covid restrictions were still in place.

Such was her apparent fury at this decision DUP leader Arlene Foster called for the resignation of the PSNI chief constable, despite the fact that it the decision was made by the Public Prosecution Service against the PSNI’s advice.

Opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol has been cited as the other main factor, with the customs border down the Irish Sea seen as a threat to the north’s constitutional position within the UK. 

While these issues form part of the unfolding political context in which the protests and violence have place, the situation does not easily lend itself to such superficial or self-serving accounts. 

The main impetus for recent events has flowed from the DUP’s efforts to cover up its own failures and recover lost ground.

Having once looked likely to continue enhancing its position as the dominant catch-all unionist political force, the DUP has suffered a number of self-inflicted wounds that have left it in a much weakened position.

Significant in this regard is the party’s implication in successive scandals, its sustained resistance to popular reforms and the destructive role it has played at critical junctures of the Covid crisis.

The DUP’s disastrous miscalculation over Brexit has, of course, been a significant factor, serving to alienate a younger, more liberal and pro-EU constituency within unionism while simultaneously amplifying the voices of hardliners now crying “betrayal.” 

With an assembly election scheduled for next year, recent polling indicates that the DUP’s vote is set to drop from 28 per cent in 2017 to 19 per cent, just 1 point ahead of the centrist Alliance Party.

This would follow the pattern established at the last Westminster election, when the DUP lost two of its 10 seats to Remain candidates and a huge number of votes to Alliance.

The same also poll puts the TUV, a hard-line offshoot of the DUP, on an unprecedented 10 per cent.

This fracturing of unionism would not only mean significant losses for the DUP, but the likely emergence of Sinn Fein as the north’s biggest party and its deputy leader Michelle O’Neill as first minister.

Faced with this unthinkable prospect, and lacking anything resembling a coherent strategy, Foster and her allies have turned to the age-old tactic of whipping up sectarian tensions to consolidate their position, using the Storey funeral and Northern Ireland Protocol for these ends.

Until recently, Foster had been resigned to accepting the protocol, even extolling its potential economic benefits to the north. All of this changed when the scale of the DUP’s political troubles became apparent.

This is part of a familiar cycle whereby unionist politicians incite violence in working-class areas and issue mealy-mouthed words of condemnation from the comfort of their own suburban homes.

It’s been left to residents, community workers, youth workers, faith organisations and local political representatives to deal with the fallout.

The working-class unionist communities affected by recent disturbances continue to be impacted by the loss of traditional employment opportunities, a devastating legacy of educational underattainment and the feeling of not having benefitted materially from the peace process.

They are also marked by low levels of political participation and a feeling of abandonment by the political class that claims to represent them. 

It’s not only that the class interests of loyalist communities aren’t being represented by the DUP.

The pre-eminent, and once hegemonic, voice of political unionism has signally failed to build a clear and positive vision of Northern Ireland — one that facilitates widely supported reforms, allows Irishness to “breathe freely,” gives the majority of citizens a stake in the future of the state and, therefore, from a purely self-interested perspective, consolidates the north’s position within the union for another generation.

There consequences of this failure are twofold. The first is that it has accelerated dynamics already at work due to underlying demographic, social and political change, which leaves political unionism a minority in Westminster, the northern assembly and Belfast City Council — once the bastion of unionist ascendancy — for the first time in the history of the state.

The second, related consequence is that the changes needed to promote equality and  peaceful coexistence of the two main identities in the north — are viewed within working-class unionist communities as the systematic erosion of Britishness and the forward march of republicanism.

Issues of culture and identity have become a key battleground in loyalist communities, with the contours of a culture war particularly visible in the form of parades, bonfire disputes and the continued use of flags to mark territory.

These problems are stacked upon a collapsing economic base, which has been in structural decline for decades.

More than 10 years of Tory austerity and neoliberal peacebuilding have exacerbated these tendencies, eroding the foundations for social stability.

Sinn Fein is not without blame on this front, having subscribed to the neoliberal groupthink that predominated during its first stint in government with the DUP.

But, however much the former might try to make Northern Ireland work, questions about its economic and political viability are set to remain. 

In the immediate term, the likely political outcome to the present crisis is that the British government and EU will announce a series of flexibilities or infrastructural improvements to the protocol, in a bid to spare the DUP’s blushes and keep the show on the road.

It will then be up to the DUP leadership to sell this to its base, having marched people up to the top of the hill. 

The probability of a return to Troubles-era conflict is extremely low, particularly as the majority of unionists have no appetite for a return to the old days and loyalist paramilitaries can no longer rely on the implicit or explicit support of the British state.

As the old nursery rhyme goes, “Collusion is not an illusion.”

With or without a political resolution, the approaching marching season means that we are probably in for a long, hot summer of protests, illegal marches and bonfires, and a long run-up to the assembly elections of next year.

Beyond that, two crises — both by-products of partition — are set to predominate.

On the one hand, there is the permanent, existential crisis of political unionism, fighting rearguard battles from a minority position within its own state.

On the other, there is the crisis of the northern state itself and its structural and political limitations. Transcending these two crises means new economic, political and constitutional arrangements, it means change.