Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. As far as Luther was concerned, if a matter wasn’t dealt with in the Bible it was unimportant, a matter of indifference. So, we’ve had, what is it now, five years banging on about the Irish Protocol, which unionists can do nothing about. Then unionists moved on to which party is to blame for operating the Protocol after promising they never would. This knee-jerk intransigence plays into the hands of republicans, but as Cockburn concludes: “Yet any unionist leader who tried to sell this to the unionist electorate has invariably suffered marginalisation or defeat.”