These appear to be strange days for Ukania.
To paraphrase Sarah Palin, if I walk up the mountain at the back of my house I can see the UK!
I spoke last night to a very wiseacre in the Stormont village, and he assured me that Arlene Foster was toast.
As is usual with failed establishment politicians the British political elite will no doubt offer her a place in the House of Lords.
“Baroness Wood Pellet of Fermanagh” sounds an appropriate title at this juncture.
Her handling of the RHI scandal was a case study in WATP hubris.
It was this stance that led directly to the election and the battering that her party took at the polls.
They lost ten seats in a reduced assembly.
There is no way to spin this.
It was a disaster for the DUP and a huge victory for Sinn Féin.
The gap between the two parties is now fewer than 1,200 votes.
Here is poor Flegory in full denial mode.
For the avoidance of doubt, Mr Campbell is very fond of a certain deceased football club in Glasgow.
I hope he has enough years in him to see his beloved United Kingdom die on this island because it is certainly terminally ill…
At the count centre, the ex-First Minister of Norn Iron showed the Dunkirk Spirit as the extent of the electoral damage was relayed to her.
A journalist on the ground there told me that the DUP leader would not come out and speak to the assembled media.
The upshot of the election is that unionism lost their majority in the Assembly.
What the election stated in clear numbers is that ethnic unionism in the northeast of this country is on borrowed time.
The case for remaining within the United Kingdom will now have to be made to all of the people in the Six Counties.
For the avoidance of doubt, that means dropping the Herrenvolk snarl that is redolent of the Ibrox match day experience.
Hence Arlene has to be toast.
My Stormont source said that his tip was for Simon Hamilton to replace her.
He was described to me as a “secular moderniser”.
That would be a smart move.
I have written here, on more than one occasion over the past few years that I believe that a culturally confident nationalist cohort in the six counties would quietly vote to remain British in a future Border Poll.
I styled this psephological phenomenon “Siobhán in the BMW”.
She drops her child off at the Gaelscoil and then drives to her well paid public service job.
Siobhán acquired the latter due to her Master’s Degree.
Moreover, she has a lifestyle and life choices beyond the most optimistic dreams of her grandparents.
Such a person, I believed would quietly vote to remain in the UK.
That was all before Brexit which threatens to be what Franz Fanon thought any process of decolonization should be:
“a programme for complete disorder”.
In Donegal, for the first time in over twenty years, I’m looking at a hard border.
It will be the boundary between the United Kingdom and a supra national state of over 500m souls.
Crazy stuff.
In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum vote last June there was a stampede to Post Offices in the Six Counties to get application forms for an Irish Passport.
This even happened in staunchly loyalist areas.
Strange days indeed…
