FROM MARGINS TO MAINSTREAM: THE DEMOCRATIC UNIONIST PARTY IN NORTHERN IRISH POLITICS Sheila M. Vennell Beginning as an evangelically-infused rightwing and oppositional party under the leadership of the charismatic Reverend Ian Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party is now Northern Ireland’s strongest single party. Before the 1998 peace agreement, McGarry and O’Leary posited that “the party most threatened by long-term peace is the DUP. In conditions of peace, and if proportional representation applies in all elections, there is no compelling reason why the DUP electoral bloc should hold together.”1 As the authors might have predicted, the DUP abstained from the 1998 negotiations process and remains hostile to the ratified settlement. This rejectionism, however, seems to be at the heart of the party’s most recent political gains, giving voice to a community that finds itself increasingly isolated within Northern Irish politics. In 2003, the DUP out-polled its unionist rivals to become the largest party in the province. This victory – with its concomitant demands of political pragmatism – has nonetheless put the party’s ability to maintain this rejectionistm at risk. Power-sharing negotiations are presently underway with the unionist voice consolidated in the DUP. The party that has been historically unified in saying no, is now provisionally saying yes. My project follows a party in transition as it redefines its image and interrogates its self-conception, a historically oppositional organization seeking to accommodate its new popularity. I have explored institutional flexibilities reflected during its beginnings as a dissenting party and have found dynamism in expanding leadership and examples of elastic ideology. Far from a monolithic autocracy manipulated by Ian Paisley, the DUP has emerged as a diversifying fusion of rhetorical rejectionism and practical accommodation. This tension has also given way to the experience of disillusionment by some traditional DUP supporters as the DUP considers the once unthinkable- sharing power with republican Sinn Fein. This presentation will focus on the ethnographic research experience that considerably informed this project. In January 2007, I traveled to Belfast to conduct twelve interviews, participants including the DUP representative to the European Parliament, two members of the Westminster Parliament, and nine members of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The analysis of these interviews and my own observation of DUP political practices on the ground offer a richness and complexity in the creation of knowledge that I had not anticipated. My presentation will narrate and contextualize the substance of this experiential learning. Key Sources: Interviews and archival research conducted on-site, from January 6th to January 25th 2007, and the writings of Steve Bruce and Jonathan Tonge. 1 John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 405-6. .