The truth about the Conservative party's history with the DUP is even worse than you think

In Northern Ireland, many are watching the Conservative Party conference with a mixture of fascination and fear.

There is fascination at the party’s internal battles and its bizarre demonising of the European Union, but also fear – yes, real fear – over what the Conservatives are going to do next to the peace process.

The Conservative government has abandoned its role as an honest broker in Northern Ireland, throwing its lot in with one political party.

And as evidence mounts of the DUP’s hold on Theresa May – blocking her Brexit deal on the Irish border in December and recently accused of contributing to her Salzburg crash, and now said to be “pushing back hard” on the latest compromise – there are growing questions about the influence of the DUP and its often-overlooked opposition to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement.

But the backstory to this conflict of interests precedes the confidence and supply arrangement that the current Conservative government brokered with Arlene Foster’s party. The Conservatives have played fast and loose with the peace process for years in a bid to court unionist support at Westminster, causing real damage to the lives of all communities in Northern Ireland.

In 2010, when David Cameron entered the coalition government with the Lib Dems, he felt he needed an insurance policy and so threw away UK government impartiality on the peace process to woo the DUP at Westminster. Having the ear of the PM emboldened the DUP at the Stormont Assembly in Northern Ireland, where it seemed there was no check on behaviour from London.

For those of us reporting from Stormont, it appeared that successive secretaries of state were briefed to do nothing that would antagonise or embarrass the DUP, despite persistent crises.

As a result, the Catholic community in particular lost confidence in Stormont. Anger boiled over in 2016 after DUP cuts to an Irish language fund for deprived communities were imposed while the unionist party was being blamed for wasting millions on a renewable heating scheme that is now the subject of a public inquiry. Disillusion among Sinn Féin voters forced the party to collapse the Stormont administration. Today the power-sharing government created to bridge community divisions remains in mothballs.

In 2011, the Conservatives ended the temporary policy of 50/50 recruitment of Catholics and Protestants to Northern Ireland’s majority Protestant police service. Nationalists called for it to be prolonged, but unionist demands for the policy’s removal won out. Now the number of Catholic recruits has declined, creating a fresh crisis in efforts to secure a service that reflects the demographics of this divided community.

Decades of violence saw almost 4,000 people killed, 50,000 injured and an estimated 400,000 bereaved or traumatised. Hopes of finally dealing with that painful legacy are now also being undermined by the prime minister’s refusal to tell her own backbenchers or DUP MPs that there is not a disproportionate focus on former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland. Police have confirmed that only around one third of outstanding cases under investigation relate to security forces, but politics trumps facts.

On Brexit, we’re told the prime minister cannot agree a backstop insurance measure on the Irish border because it would treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK. Had the British government refused to treat Northern Ireland differently in 1998, we wouldn’t have had the Good Friday Agreement. And despite the government’s position, Northern Ireland is today the only part of the UK with a ban on marriage equality, while it is also denied protections for the Irish language of a kind available in Scotland and Wales. Rectifying those UK discrepancies, however, is opposed by the DUP.

The government’s impartiality has been so damaged that there are now fears that Brexit will be used to sweep away many of the legal and human rights protections in Northern Ireland that underpin the peace process. This is a very real concern among experts in the field.

Some in the DUP want a hard border on the island of Ireland as a way of turning back the clock. They are keeping May in power. That is why opposition to the Irish backstop – envisaged as a safety net in the absence of an overall deal – has become an article of faith.

The prime minister could unlock progress by appealing to those inside the DUP who are privately sympathetic to accepting a pragmatic outcome, or she could acknowledge that a majority in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU anyway.

Since 2010, the Conservatives have made their own lives easier at the expense of the peace process, but now it has come back to bite them. Their Brexit policy is deadlocked. May could, however, break the logjam by making decisions which protect the peace process that her party has previously weakened. Surely that’s what a prime minister who really cares about this part of the UK would do?

Steven McCaffery is a journalist and writer who was previously political editor for the Press Association for the island of Ireland and a former editor of The Detail investigative news website in Northern Ireland. He now works for the Social Change Initiative, an international charity based in Belfast