‘Preaching to the Choir?’ An Analysis of DUP Discourses about the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Abstract

A BSTRACT This article analyses the Democratic Unionist Party's (DUP) discursive responses to the Northern Ireland peace process. Drawing on narrative analysis of DUP discourses in the Belfast News Letter (1998Letter ( -2005, it argues that the party has articulated five themes: the de-legitimisation of David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party, the immorality of the peace process, the security threat, the victimisation of Protestants, and the 'renegotiation' of the Belfast Agreement. These discourses are analysed in light of a framework for understanding the relationship between the party's public discourses and the political strategies that have allowed for its electoral success. The framework includes the relationship between discourses, agenda-setting in the media, 'the politics of support', and 'the politics of power'. It considers how the DUP's discourses may impact on its relationships with nationalists and unionists. However, efforts by the DUP to communicate with the unionist grassroots may allow it to minimise alienation, thus contributing to a space in which principles such as power-sharing can become bedded down.

The Strengths and Limitations of the Inclusion of Religious Actors in Peace Processes in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina

“…Throughout the conflict and the period immediately after the Agreement the DUP was the smaller of the two main unionist parties, but by 2003 it had overtaken its rival the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) (Farrington 2006). While there is evidence that the DUP surpassed the UUP in part because it softened its evangelical character, many of its representatives appeal to re-ligion and continue to be motivated by it (Ganiel 2006(Ganiel , 2007. When the DUP pushed for a no vote in the referendum to approve the Agreement, it was partly on religious grounds: the party argued that the release of paramilitary prison-ers, as stipulated in the Agreement, was "immoral" and that God would not look favorably on a land that allowed "terrorists" to go free.…”

Unionism, Loyalism, and the Ulster‐Scots Ethnolinguistic ‘Revival’

“…Utilizing Northern Irish attitudinal surveys, Hughes and Donnelly () contend that through the 1990s the ‘Protestant community’ experienced a growing feeling of marginalization, as the ‘Catholic community’ grew in political confidence. Since the Good Friday Agreement, Protestant victimhood has become a key theme of unionist political elite discourses (see Ganiel ); as Cheryl Lawther (:52) writes, ‘the relationship between innocence, legitimacy and hierarchies of victimhood is integral to unionist's sense of identity and collective memory’.…”