Just how right-wing can the DUP get?

The DUP was set up as a rightwing party, with a fundamentalist approach to evangelical Protestantism. For the first decade after its founder Rev Ian Paisley decided to power-share with Sinn Fein in Stormont, most of its Ministerial appointments were members of the Caleb Foundation. Caleb was set up in 2009 to promote ‘law and government’ in line with biblical thinking. Those associated with the Caleb Foundation refer to themselves ‘jokingly’ as ‘The Caleban’. The Belfast Telegraph pointed out, ‘Where the Taliban is pushing for an ultra-hardline version of Sharia law based on its own reading of the Koran, Caleb wants to see a Bible-based society with every law measured against scripture’. In recent years, however, the DUP has looked less to the Bible and more to the playbook of the American Right.

Think of any policy of Donald Trump that is particularly damaging – anti-migrant racism, climate change denial or contempt for the environment, workers’ rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, the war on drugs and on educating children to think for themselves – and you will find that the DUP has embraced Trump’s positions on these issues. The party had moved steadily towards a more secular right-wing position - a necessary move since a survey of members found followers of Paisley’s Free Presbyterian church now make up only about one in ten members of the DUP. But its position in the polls plummeted in the aftermath of the Jeffrey Donaldson trial. There was widespread outrage at the hypocrisy of the party’s ‘do as I say, not as I do’ when it comes to homosexuality and to extra-marital sex. Since then, it has followed Trump’s example of attempting to distract from all this by attacking migrants and trans people and, more recently, trying to re-ignite the Drumcree turmoil.

The racist pogroms in June of this year saw most politicians pleading for calm. As with last year’s racist riots, DUP politicians blamed “illegal immigrants” for the violence. DUP Education Minister Paul Givan appeared live on Sky News amongst the masked-men protests in Lisburn. DUP MLA David Brooks told the Assembly debate, following the riots, that he believes ‘problematic foreign cultures are present in Northern Ireland.’ DUP MLA Brian Kingston argued that ‘Our equivalent [to small boats] is the number of people travelling across the open border from the Republic of Ireland...officials at Dublin Airport must stop exporting illegal immigrants on the bus to Belfast and telling them to claim asylum when they arrive here.’ The DUP have always been viciously homophobic.

From their 1980s “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign, they have tried to block every advance for LGBTQ rights, any advance came from Westminster. In recent years, they’ve joined the Trumpian moral panic about drag queens (despite the North having a long tradition of drag queens). When the West Belfast Feile cancelled a meeting of anti-trans organisations, we were treated to the bizarre sight of DUP MPs and MLAs holding signs saying “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”. The party that told Women’s Coalition MLAs to get back to the kitchen and which blocked the right to abortion even when there is a fatal foetal abnormality suddenly discovers ‘women’s rights’!

‘Christian values’

Like Trump’s followers, in recent years the DUP has tried to ‘reform’ the education system, holding the Education Ministry since 2016. The education system in the North has long needed reforming – it is still segregated by religion, gender and class, as well as based on academic selection at age eleven. But the ‘reforms’ that DUP Education Minister Paul Givan wants are a return to rote learning and a concentration on ‘Christian values’ in schools. Even after London’s Supreme Court upheld the case of an atheist parent, who argued that religious freedom means that his child should be taught about all the world religions, not only Christianity, Givan insists that ‘Christianity will remain central to the revised syllabus’ and to the compulsory ‘collective worship’ that all publicly funded schools must hold.

Of course, Ministers usually have checks and balances provided by the civil and public servants who surround them. But almost two years ago, the top civil servant at the Dept of Education left his post after reports of ‘shouting matches’ between him and Givan. The Education Authority (EA) is responsible for the provision and delivery of education and youth services in Northern Ireland. Its current CEO is Richard Pengelly, who has been seconded from his previous role as Permanent Secretary at the Dept for Justice. He also happens to be the DUP’s Emma Little-Pengelly’s husband. Of course, the EA has a Board that oversees it. But the Chair of that Board is the DUP’s Mervyn Storey, a former Stormont Minister who lost his seat in 2022. Storey is best remembered for being a ‘young earth creationist’ who objected to information boards around the Giant’s Causeway stating the rock formation is about 550 million years old (because he believes that the world was created in seven days about six thousand years ago).

Givan and the EA have shown nothing but contempt for teachers’ unions and for classroom assistants, feeding misinformation to the public about the unions’ boycotting of inspections as part of their industrial action, and trying to make that boycott illegal. The DUP’s approach to unions is seen also in its blocking of Sinn Fein’s Good Jobs Bill, a Bill which has already been watered down so much it wouldn’t even give its working class voters the same rights as workers in the South or in Britain. The DUP’s approach to the environment is to ignore any harm caused by industry or agriculture and to deny that climate change is happening. Last summer, the Environment Minister started a consultation on the Nutrients Action Programme 2026-29 which aimed to combat the blue-green algae that is killing Lough Neagh by reducing harmful run-offs from factory farms around the Lough. Shockingly, Sinn Fein backed the DUP when it brought a motion to the Assembly to ‘immediately withdraw’ the public consultation.

Both parties point to NI Water causing most of the pollution in Lough Neagh but experts say that industrial agriculture is responsible for two thirds of the damage. The DUP has also opposed aspects of the Climate Change Act, passed by the Assembly in 2022, accusing its political opponents of trying to ‘appease net zero populism’. Space doesn’t allow for a detailed exploration of the DUP’s moves further to the right – although the fact that it recently welcomed a visit by Reform UK members from Scotland gives us a good idea of where the party is positioning itself ahead of next May’s elections.