Ex-DUP man David Graham: ‘Bringing the Taoiseach to Windsor Park didn’t dilute my unionism’

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ex-dup-man-david-graham-bringing-the-taoiseach-to-windsor-park-didnt-dilute-my-unionism/a652379677.html

The former councillor and ex-Linfield general manager talks to political editor Suzanne Breen

David Graham was a great catch for the DUP. The party poached him from the Royal School Armagh where he was head of history at just 29 years old.

He was hired as one of its Stormont special advisers. After devolution collapsed, he stood for election and was returned to Belfast City Council.

A bright political future seemed to lie ahead. Intelligent, enthusiastic and a first-class communicator, he was one of the fresh faces that unionism — and its biggest party — needed.

Five years later, you may have expected to find him on Stormont’s blue benches as an MLA. Instead, Graham is in business and occasionally sits in TV studios commentating on the party he once represented.

While he still counts some of its MLAs and MPs as “good friends”, he describes his experience in its ranks as “frustrating”. He quit after eight months as a councillor.
He says: “I’d run out of road in the DUP. I’m not the type of person to hang around if I feel I’m not wanted.”

Graham left politics to become director of communications at Rangers, where he stayed for three years. He was appointed general manager at Linfield last year, but left in January after relations with some board members soured. One of his bold moves at the club, unrelated to his departure, was inviting Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to Windsor Park last summer.

Extending the hand of friendship was the right call, he says.

“Terence O’Neill brought Sean Lemass to Stomont in 1964 because he recognised the importance of having strong relations with our nearest neighbour.

“It didn’t dilute his unionism, and inviting the current Taoiseach didn’t dilute mine.”
Graham is a “dyed-in-the-wool unionist, a Presbyterian, and a proud Orangeman”, but one who believes that “reaching out more” is instrumental to preserving the Union.
“Unionists’ perennial mistake is to take too long to compromise,” he says.

“We paint ourselves into a corner on issues like the Irish language. Politics is the art of the possible. Compromise is not surrender.”
So what does he make of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s deal to restore devolution?
He replies: “Unionism’s most basic argument is that we’re better off politically, economically and socially in the UK. Allowing republicans to be able to say ‘Northern Ireland has no government, it’s a failed state’ is unwise.

“Nobody can doubt the intellect of Nigel Dodds and Jim Allister. When they argue that something is seriously wrong with the deal, then I sit up and take notice. So I think they’re legally right, but Jeffrey is politically right. He made the correct decision.”

On Sammy Wilson quitting as DUP chief whip at Westminster, Graham says: “Sammy has been a DUP heavyweight from before I was born. The significance of his resignation as chief whip should not be underestimated.”
Graham notes that Sir Jeffrey “went out on the front foot with an aggressive sell” on his deal, and wonders “if there are bear traps waiting for him down the road”.

He admits to discomfort at the DUP leadership’s robust assault on the TUV leader, adding: “Jim has been attacked for failing to achieve things and not attracting enough voters to have other MLAs elected. But politics is like football: everybody has different roles. Some are strikers scoring goals, while others carry out the unseen work of breaking up the opposition.”
Graham (37) was born in Bangor. His father died when he was six weeks old and his grandfather, who became the family’s paternal figure, passed away three years later.

His mother later married a Tyrone dairy farmer. Graham attended Omagh Academy where its head of history, Dr Russell Rees, took him under his wing.

“At school, I’d an issue with authority, but he saw me as a bit of a rough diamond. I‘d a huge passion for history,” he recalls.
He studied it at Queen’s University where he joined the DUP. He also played rugby and was a member of the Northern Ireland Supporters’ Club on campus.

“My circle of friends were all Protestant. It was a case of ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

“Although in history tutorials, there weren’t many unionists. I’d fight the corner alone, but it gave me fire in my belly,” he says.
After graduation, he did a PGCE and began teaching. He didn’t have to deliberate long over leaving that career when the DUP approached him to become a special adviser (Spad) to then Education Minister Peter Weir in 2016.

Graham says: “I’d been finding myself in class looking at online sites like SluggerO’Toole — politics was where my heart lay. I don’t fear change.
“The idea of maybe teaching in the same school for the rest of my life sent shivers down my spine.”

He describes Weir as “a pleasure to work with, fiercely intelligent with a sense of humour that people never see… very much under-rated”.

Nine months after Graham entered Stormont, devolution collapsed over cash-for-ash. Of Arlene Foster, he says: “A woman leading the DUP, and a west of the Bann woman who was great with people, had huge potential.

“Arlene won over UUP and even Alliance voters to the DUP. But she was on borrowed time from RHI. I’m not convinced she always took the right advice. She was treated unfairly by the party, and it’s sad how it all ended.”

He spent the next two years working with then South Belfast MP Emma Little-Pengelly. “Emma is Emma,” he says.

“She is very much her own person. She’s a political animal to the bone, and I can see why Jeffrey chose her to be Deputy First Minister.”

Graham was elected to Belfast City Council in May 2019, but resigned when offered the Rangers job eight months later: “I loved the on-the-ground part of being a councillor, but I found committee meetings mind-numbingly boring: people just say their set pieces and nothing actually happens. I mean, how long have they been talking about pedestrianising Royal Avenue? It just goes on and on.”
His experience in Stormont and City Hall leads him to describe Northern Ireland politics as “too often just a system of bartering”.

He says: “I saw it most crudely on council. The DUP would be looking to solve a bonfire problem. Sinn Fein would be looking to solve a Feile problem. A deal would be hatched with Alliance brought into the room to help get it across the line.

“The smaller parties — the SDLP, UUP, People Before Profit and the Greens — claim the big two are a cabal, cutting the pie and then dividing it out. They’re right, that’s how the system operates.”

Graham also loved his time at Rangers: “There were incredible highs like winning the 55th league title and the Scottish Cup. When you’re sliding across the changing room floor with Steven Gerrard, you pinch yourself. There were lows too but life isn’t win or lose, it’s win or learn.”

He doesn’t speak so warmly about his brief time at Linfield. “Close associates warned me not to take the job. In hindsight, they were right. With 17 board members, reaching a decision was as difficult as it can be at Stormont.”

However, he relished working with the club’s manager David Healy — “an absolute gentleman, one of the best people I’ve ever met” — and still has “a great relationship” with chairman Roy McGivern and former manager David Jeffrey.

Graham is currently focusing on his property business with wife Alexandra. They live in south Belfast with their three children: Zachary (9), Jordan (7) and Talia (5). The couple are opening a business in the hospitality sector in spring.

He still follows politics intently and thinks unionists should start preparing for a border poll.

“I don’t believe a united Ireland is inevitable.
“All is not lost, but there is a job of work to do. Demographics have changed, and that must be acknowledged.

“Unionists need to make Northern Ireland as palatable as possible for as many nationalist and middle ground voters.

“A united Ireland doesn’t hinge on those republicans who gather in Milltown Cemetery on Easter Sunday morning.

“And the future of the Union won’t be decided by people like me who march on the Twelfth. It will be decided by those who drive to Donegal or fly to Spain in July.

“Nationalism awoke after Brexit in 2016, and we must put it back to sleep. Unionists must make Northern Ireland work.”

Graham doesn’t see as much “creative freedom” in unionism as in nationalism, nor “the same value placed on the arts”. He is “envious” of the GAA.

“It’s an organisation which binds people together.

“It brings a sense of community and camaraderie. You go out and play for your parish. Unionism lacks that. The closest we have is the bands’ scene which I see as a real positive. It gives a sense of direction to young, working-class Protestant men.”

Graham has never been to a GAA match but “wouldn’t hesitate to go” if invited. On Casement, he says the GAA has “a right to a stadium along the lines of Windsor Park or Kingspan, but what was promised in 2011 may no longer be financially viable”.
He also sees former DUP leader Peter Robinson as the “biggest and most influential figure” in the party’s history.
“I remember Paul Gascoigne being asked why he was so good. He said it was because he could see things that would happen three passes ahead.

“Peter Robinson was like the best footballers. And he was a strategist as well as a tactician. Those qualities are very much missed.”

Graham was a speaker at a meeting on “reconciling relations” in these islands organised by the John and Pat Hume Foundation in Dublin last week.

Fellow panellists included former Sinn Fein Spad Jarlath Kearney and Fine Gael senator Emer Currie.

“I began by saying that I was the only Orangeman and season ticket holder at Ibrox in the room but I love a pint of Guinness and, if anyone wanted to buy me one at the end, I was up for it,” he says.

Graham believes the “unionist talent pool is weaker than the republican one”.
No “equivalent of a John Finucane” from his community has joined any unionist party, he says.

So would he return to politics?
“I’ve no burning desire to do so at the minute, but never say never”.

by Ah_here_like