tones
Tones deaf
In a way, it is about religion - but the religion of the 17th century, when Rome desired to bring Protestant England back to the Catholic fold. According to the Protestant version, Willem of Orange Nassau, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, later William III of England, "King Billy" to his Ulster Protestant fans, was the one who replaced the Catholic James II on the English throne and defeated James's Catholic armies in Ireland, most famously at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690 (the change from Julian to Gregorian calendar moved it to the Twelfth, still celebrated by Ulster Protestants), thus saving the Protestant cause. Well, that's the simple version. The fact of the matter is that William set sail for Ireland with the tacit blessing of, horror of Protestant horrors, the Pope. The bigger picture was that they had a common enemy, Louis XIV of France (l'État, c'est moi) and his machinations. James II in Ireland was acting as an agent of Louis, with whom he had taken refuge after having been deposed (William, his son-in-law, had facilitated his escape). In addition, the Pope thought that James's attempts to drag England forcibly back to Catholicism were "premature and ill-advised".Fair question Yank.
The DUP promote themselves as overtly 'God fearing' and extremely vociferous on anti-abortion, anti same sex-marriage themes. They recently deposed their leader Arlene Foster after she abstained from a vote on a DUP motion promoting gay conversion therapy. They are currently in the midst of a leadership battle where one of the main contenders is Edwin Poots, an ardent Creationist.
From the Guardian, on Foster's departure:
During Foster’s tenure, the DUP lost its ability to single handedly blockany legislative measure it didn’t agree with, as it had been able to do with the petition of concern mechanism. The DUP had wielded this veto over everything from reform of local government to the decriminalisation of abortion, and had used it to block every single manoeuvre to legislate for marriage equality in Northern Ireland.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/29/did-homophobia-lead-to-arlene-fosters-downfall
I'd say it's a very large measure of both.
However, the bigger geopolitical picture is lost on your average Orangeman, and s/he adheres to the traditional adversarial picture of the Catholics. And this is where the tribal element comes in. In addition to having the "right" religion. the Protestant/Loyalist tribe regard themselves as superior, hard-working, clean, thrifty, the other lot as "throughother". There was no point in giving Cathlicks good housing, my bitterly Protestant grandmother would say, they'd only keep pigs in the parlour and coal in the bathtub. It doesn't help that the State and Catholic school systems are entirely separate (at the insistence of the Catholic Church, I might add).
In a scenario that Yank would recognise from the USA and the rise of Trump, this Protestant tribe, long in the ascendancy and used to having its hands firmly on the controls, is seeing this starting to slip, and is Not Happy. In the past, it had tools similar to those of the USA to keep things its way (gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, most notoriously in Derry, multiple votes for Protestant business owners), but most of these have been taken away from it. And things change, even in Northern Ireland - the "Ulster Sunday", when nothing except church services happened, is a thing of the past. The hardliners of the DUP are like Canute, trying to stop the tide. However, I don't expect them to recognise this any time soon.