13:23

The Ulster Newsletter is one of the oldest newspapers in the world and for centuries has been the daily voice of unionism in Ireland. Back in 1998 it took a leap of faith in backing David Trimble, the then Ulster Unionist leader, in support of the Good Friday agreement. Its editor at the time Geoff Martin came under sustained criticism from agreement-sceptic unionists for backing the Belfast Agreement and Trimble; there were even calls for a boycott of the paper from some DUP quarters.

So it is a measure of the groundswell unionist opposition to Sinn Fein’s core demand for an Irish Language Act in Northern Ireland (the issue on which the talks foundered) that the Newsletter published a front page editorial this morning supporting Arlene Foster’s decision to pull the plug on the current negotiations.

“A grim moment, yes, but also a very necessary one” thundered the page one editorial. The paper that supported the peace agreement almost 20 years ago praised Foster and the DUP for “having brought the process to halt in blackmail over a language”.

There were also some of the harshest words written of late in the pro-unionist press against the Irish government, almost in the same language we used to hear during the Troubles.

While its circulation over the last few years has plummeted, the Newsletter still has its finger on the collective unionist pulse and the message it is transmitting is that tribal trenches are being dug again and the chances of compromise at this moment at least are as remote as survival in a shell-shattered no man’s land.

