Donaldson should think carefully before breaking away from UUP

JEFFREY DONALDSON is no Dessie O’Malley. Donaldson, for all his political skills, doesn’t enjoy O’Malley-like charisma.

The slogan "Jeffrey can do it" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

The history of Irish politics is littered with the debris of breakaway political parties.

Many of these parties were fronted by high profile politicians and were launched in a blaze of publicity promising a new dawn.

Some even had initial flashes of electoral success. Most slowly burned out or were unceremoniously dumped on the political scrap-heap by an electorate which in the main stayed loyal to the established political parties.

Dessie O'Malley is arguably the only politician on this island who successfully established a sustainable breakaway political party although the Progressive Democrats never reached the dizzy political heights some initially predicted.

I remember as a teenager how Fianna Fáil households suffered political heart attacks in December 1985 and January 1986 when the PDs were founded.

As a Fianna Fáil deputy, O'Malley like Jeffrey Donaldson now had intense differences of policy and personality with his party leader.

Ultimately O'Malley was expelled from Fianna Fáil by Haughey. Few were surprised when he subsequently set up a new political party, fewer still when Mary Harney joined him.

Then in the new year of 1986, word spread that Progressive Democrat inaugural meetings were packing the largest hotels in some of this country's biggest cities.

Students were queuing along college concourses to join the new party. Fianna Fáil deputies began to shuffle uncomfortably in their seats.

There were some ripples when the Cork deputy Pearse Wyse jumped to the PDs in late January.

Then, like a roll of thunder, Bobby Molloy, a former minister and 20 years a Fianna Fáil TD, announced that he too was leaving to join O'Malley's new party.

Thousands came out to greet Molloy at his first PD meeting in Salthill the following night. There was white panic in some Fianna Fáil circles. For a tense 48 hours, rumours flew around the corridors of Leinster House.

There was talk that people like David Andrews, Charlie McCreevy and even Seamus Brennan were "considering their position" one of them might be the next to jump.

However, of the large number of TDs within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party who had once supported O'Malley's opposition to Haughey, only a handful were brave or foolish enough to walk the walk when O'Malley led a breakaway.

Fianna Fáil held its nerve; there were no further defections.

The Progressive Democrats had a very good first general election, then fell back and have fluctuated since.

Seventeen years later, O'Malley's breakaway party survives, not least because they have been prepared to go into coalition with their founding leader's political mothership.

It's a lesson Jeffrey Donaldson would do well to remember. Breakaway political parties are like faraway hills; they may look greener or in this case oranger but electoral success for them is still a steep climb.

As he checklists the Ulster Unionist Party candidates selected for the next Assembly election, Donaldson might be tempted to think that there are about 20 or so of them who would join any breakaway he might initiate.

Some are obvious Donaldsonites, including his father who is a party candidate in a neighbouring constituency. Up to a third of the UUP candidates could be said at one time or another to have espoused the type of position being advanced in Donaldson's motion to the

Ulster Unionist Council on Monday night. That of course doesn't mean that anything like that number would jump with Jeffrey if he decides to break away.

Indeed he looked lonely and tired, accompanied as he was by just one party councillor, at his press conference late on Monday night.

The ties of the mother party bind strong and Donaldson could be left with his dad and a handful of others walking with him.

It would be enough to have a presence in the next Assembly but not enough to make a substantial impact.

He might divert some of the Ulster Unionist vote otherwise defecting to Paisley's DUP but ultimately a Donaldson breakaway is likely to either disintegrate or be gobbled up by one of the two larger unionist parties.

In recent times, Northern Ireland's unionist breakaways have been largely unsuccessful.

Robert McCartney's United Kingdom Unionist Party, which was essentially another personality-driven breakaway from the UUP, won five seats in the ast Assembly elections in 1998.

However, within a year, that party too had disintegrated in squabbles precipitated in no small part by the overbearing personality of its leader.

These are all issues for Donaldson to mull over in the coming days.

Apparently he faces a motion of confidence from his own UUP constituency organisation.

It is also reported that he has an invitation to join the Democratic Unionist Party on his desk.

These are serious issues for a relatively young politician who until Monday looked like he was going to play a significant role positively or negatively in Northern Ireland politics. It is said he will wait until Friday week

until announcing his next step.

While Donaldson considers his position the rest of us can consider this: the decision made last April indefinitely to postpone the Assembly elections is now coming home to roost.

The failure of the republican movement to deliver the final steps to end its war destroyed any remaining prospects of the resumption of a power-sharing government before the election.

However, Bertie Ahern and his government still wanted to go ahead with the election, see where the cards fell and then endeavour to reconstruct a power-sharing government probably in the autumn.

But Tony Blair said by some to be suffering from some kind of God complex after his Iraq war victory opted instead to adjourn an election which was already up and running.

He was motivated undoubtedly by a desire to save David Trimble's electoral skin. Given the volatile nature of Northern Ireland politics, Blair's move wasn't just risky it was reckless and has now been shown to be such.

Both Governments now have to accept one reality, which is underlined but not revealed by Monday night's events.

It has been clear for a long time that there isn't a working majority in unionism in favour of going into government with Sinn Féin: not now, and not even if the republican movement could persuade everyone that the IRA's war is unequivocally over.

In a peace process where the restoration of devolved government is dependent on cross-community support this is a serious flaw.

There appears to be a sense of denial in some sections of the Dublin and London Governments that if the peace process is contingent on Trimble's survival, it is doomed.

Dramatic shifts in popular unionist opinion and in the leadership of the DUP are required before the power sharing government will ever be restored.

This isn't going to happen soon and certainly not before the autumn. It's time to think outside the box and maybe even to think outside, or beyond, the Belfast Agreement.

The foiled van bomb attempt in Derry last weekend and the arrest of other suspected dissident republicans south of the Border illustrate how precarious this peace process is in the absence of political progress.