Fame is fickle. One minute, you’re the talk of the town; the next, you’re Z-list trash who should be grateful for a faceful of spit. For the DUP, it was both. But dreadfulness giveth, dreadfulness taketh away, and their time in the limelight quickly passed.

For a long time they were seen by the majority of the UK as little more than political bogeymen, something scary in the woods. Northern Ireland in general is seen by many on the mainland through a lens of unsettling mystique. Near, but also alien, removed from the comforts of modern life. Like the sounds from the wood – what is that creature that communicates through harrowing, tortured yowls that sound almost like speech. A bear, perhaps?

We may never know. Because like a bear, Northern Ireland is still thought of as quite a dangerous place. For starters, everyone there seems to exist at a baseline level of anger that people from places like Surrey see as a berserk rage. This probably isn’t helped by an accent that sounds like large, leathery hands slowly putting down a pint glass and tensing. It has a kind of malevolent zen to it.

All of which is really just a matter of impression; in my experience, the inhabitants of Northern Ireland are no less friendly than anyone else from anywhere else in the UK. But within that unfair, broad-brush fiction, there’s a dark, unpleasant kernel of truth. The Troubles are nowhere near far enough in the past to be forgotten. Nor are the events that led to them. These are not to be belittled, simplified into black and white, or mistaken for something that is and could only ever exist firmly in the past.

Shit Still Happens

Bleeding out from that background of bloodshed and division, which so much of the county has worked so hard and forgiven so much to put behind them, seeps the DUP. A reminder that there is more to a bear than fur and a charming love for honey – there are other things they do in the woods, too. Things that are much less wholesome. The bear has an anus.

Under May’s overwhelming display of Strength and Stability, the DUP did very well. Suddenly not just a big thing across the Irish Sea, but a household name in the rest of the union. They got a pile of cash and sent to the Gordon Brown School of Smiling Like You’re Touching Cloth. In exchange for which, they propped up a deal that was almost identical to a deal to which they’re now (only metaphorically, so far) violently opposed.

This fall from grace means their manifesto isn’t getting the attention it deserves this time around. They’re back to being some nasty little trolls somewhere across some water. After centuries of imperial strategy that was just us sending our most repellent, fascistic pious types somewhere inhospitable in the hope they’d either claim it in our name or die (preferably both, in that order), this isn’t newsworthy. But, with the election just days away, I thought it important to share some of their key policy positions.

Disagreeing With Everything

This is the crux of all other DUP policy and always has been. There is no policy so sane that the DUP won’t disagree with it. No position so unreasonable that they won’t adopt it. But that doesn’t mean they’re dogmatic – far from it! Should that position look like winning popular support or – even worse – to have actually been fairly reasonable after all, they will abandon it in a flash.

This extends itself into their wider policy positions. Rabidly conservative big-family Catholics, riddled with homophobic, misogynistic thinking, they have tightly aligned themselves with the increasingly irreligious promoters of marriage equality in mainland Britain, where the population would be shrinking if we weren’t importing people to work for a pittance caring for a population of elderly racists. And with a local economy heavily dependent on subsidies, grants and planning initiatives driven by central government, the DUP are obviously against being part of the EU.

See If Maybe There’s More Free Money

Naturally following from that last point, Arlene Foster’s time leading the party has already seen them blackmail the UK government into giving them a 10-figure handout. The problem is, that money won’t last very long because children are expensive and Foster is reportedly eating between eighteen and twenty-six of them a day.

This means they now need to pretend to be strongly opposed a deal they were previously supportive of. In this way, Boris Johnson will be forced to give them even more free money to cover the next year or two. Meanwhile, freed of oppressive European-based Human Rights, the Feeding Nurseries can be brought back online.

It is worth noting that this is not the most obviously stupid money-spinning scheme in recent Northern Irish history. A few years ago, there was a green energy initiative whereby people could claim £1.60 in subsidies for every £1 of wood pellets they burned. Not for anything; you got paid just so long as you burned them. The author of this fantastically moronic policy – some A Foster who is clearly too much of an imbecile to ever reach a position of real power – managed to ‘lose’ half a billion in public money before something was done about it.

Just as a reminder: these are the same people who think they’re better placed to manage the Northern Irish economy than a bunch of “European bureaucrats”. With degrees in economics and decades of experience running the largest and most complex financial market in the world. Yeah.

Being So Awful That Everyone Misses Ian Paisley

It’s unclear why this is a policy, but it certainly seems to be.

The Past Was Better

One of the things the DUP disagree with most vehemently is progress. The past was so clearly superior – a position I’m sure most people who lived in Belfast through the 1970s and 80s would share – that we should do everything possible to go back to it. Not only that, but also everything impossible, too: DUP researchers are working on ways to reverse entropy, so they can literally wind the universe back to a heyday of people firebombing children in the street.

Similarly, gay people and women should get back in their respective boxes. Treating people like independently valuable moral entities, equally deserving of rights and respect, has been a disaster. Too much buying lip salve and not enough time being beaten straight in your teens by the same priest who monstrously abused you in primary school. If people aren’t divided and oppressed, how are talentless, hate-filled parasites supposed to gain a foothold from which to fritter away taxes on blatant vote-buying local investment projects?

Being Eaten By Rats

As a logical follow-on from how the DUP leadership see the world, it was proposed that they run on a ticket of everyone being eaten alive by rats. After initial objections that it sounded a bit soft, it gained quite a bit of traction by dint of being inhuman and awful in every respect and also addressing unemployment. But at the last minute it was found out that some of the rats were unmarried pregnant lesbians. Feeding them might be mistaken for endorsing their lifestyle choices and the policy was pulled. There are rumours of another go at it with locusts in 2024, but by that point we may be eating them as our primary source of protein.