Fintan O’Toole: The DUP’s Cambridge Analytica link

It says much for the effects of partition that one of the questions floating around this week has been whether the kind of data mining exposed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal could ever affect Irish politics. The answer should be obvious: it already has.

We know that one of the major parties on the island, the Democratic Unionist Party, is deeply enmeshed in the Cambridge Analytica nexus. What we do not know is whether the party can disentangle itself from that dark web.

A great deal rests on the answer: what happens to the Irish Border and to relationships between the different parts of these islands depends on how the DUP responds to the current crisis.

On some informal basis that we do not yet understand, the DUP was part of a wider pro-Brexit campaigning strategy based around the use of vast data sets

To understand this we have to begin with a sum of money: £32,750, or about €37,500. This is what the DUP paid in the run-up to the Brexit referendum of June 2016 to a previously obscure Canadian company called AggregateIQ.

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Carole Cadwalladr, whose relentless investigative work for The Observer has finally broken through as an international political story, describes AggregateIQ as a "web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia".

It is, however, inextricably linked to Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based company that, as Cadwalladr revealed, managed to access 50 million Facebook profiles and use them to target micromessages on behalf of political clients, most notably Donald Trump.

Two aspects of the DUP's hiring of AggregateIQ are especially striking. One is that it does not seem accidental. It is improbable that the DUP found that little Canadian company all on its own. AggregateIQ was also hired by other organisations that, like the DUP, were campaigning in favour of a leave vote in the referendum.

The official leave campaign spent (remarkably) more than half of its £7 million, or €8 million, budget on AggregateIQ. Other groups that sprang up in the course of the campaign, BeLeave and Veterans for Britain, also hired the Canadian data analysts.

This cannot have been the result of deliberate co-ordination, which would have been unlawful, but it was hardly pure coincidence either. On some informal basis that we do not yet understand, the DUP was part of a wider pro-Brexit campaigning strategy based around the use of vast data sets.

The other striking thing is precisely that AggregateIQ is Canadian – and therefore outside the jurisdiction of UK electoral laws. A subsequent London School of Economics report found those laws to be "weak and helpless" in the Brexit campaign because they could not control third-party donations to campaigns or the operations of offshore digital-targeting specialists.

Again, the DUP is enmeshed in a wider strategy whose effects were to nullify key parts of UK law intended to ensure that voters were not excessively influenced by hidden financial donors.

AggregateIQ is not a cheeky little Canadian start-up. It is deeply connected to Cambridge Analytica. It was explicitly a “contractor” for Cambridge Analytica in its work on Brexit. But it is in effect a stablemate.

Cambridge Analytica is mostly owned and controlled by one of the key funders of the hard right in US politics, the billionaire Robert Mercer. But Mercer also owns the intellectual property rights to AggregateIQ. And Cadwalladr has reported former Cambridge Analytica staff as describing AggregateIQ as in essence their back-office operation.

How did the DUP become entangled in this web? Almost certainly through the dark money it received as part of the Brexit campaign. We know that an obscure Scottish-based group, the Constitutional Research Council, donated £435,000, or about €500,000, to the party, but we do not know the ultimate source of that money.

We also know that the vast bulk of it was spent outside Northern Ireland, including £282,000, or about €325,000, on a wraparound Vote Leave supplement in the Metro freesheet newspaper that circulates only in Britain.It seems highly probable that the £32,750 the DUP paid AggregateIQ came from the same pot of money.

DUP MPs bought into hard Brexit as the ultimate expression of Britishness. But the dark data story also forms a net from which the party is still struggling to escape

But we might conclude that this is all in the past. However deplorable the use of hidden financing and obscure data manipulation, it does not affect current Irish politics. Except that there are some reasons to think that it does, that the continuing consequences of all of this murky dealing may be quite profound.

Here we have to pull back from the close-up to the wide shot. The big picture is this: it is now in the vital interest of Irish unionism that the United Kingdom as a whole stays in the customs union after Brexit.

Theresa May's hapless government has trapped itself between two competing imperatives. On the one hand it has agreed with the European Union (and implicitly with the Irish Government) that, in the absence of other, increasingly improbable solutions, Northern Ireland will in effect stay in the customs union to avoid a hard land border. On the other it has agreed with the DUP that Northern Ireland will remain fully aligned with the rest of the UK, to avoid the unionist nightmare of an effective border in the Irish Sea. As we saw from the transition deal agreed between Britain and the EU this week, this conundrum remains unresolved.

And there is in reality only one political force that has the power to resolve it: the DUP. The single realistic way to prevent both a hard land border in Ireland and an effective border in the Irish Sea is for the UK as a whole to remain in the customs union.

Remarkably, the DUP can probably make this happen. In the coming weeks it is very likely that the British Labour Party will introduce an amendment to the Brexit legislation going through Westminster. It will get the support of a handful of Tory remainers, as well as the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Scots and Welsh nationalists.

The DUP’s 10 MPs could almost certainly push the amendment over the edge, committing the UK as a whole to remaining in the customs union. On any objective analysis this is overwhelmingly the logical choice for the DUP.

The EU’s “backstop” option of Northern Ireland remaining in the customs union, while the rest of the UK leaves, is the biggest threat to unionism since Northern Ireland was established. It would create a semi-detached entity in the short term and a long-term dynamic of difference and separation. But the luck of the electoral draw has given the DUP the power to banish this threat. So why on earth is it not using that power?

On the surface the answer might be that the DUP is still clinging to the hope that a magical technological solution will create a seamless, frictionless, invisible border and make the whole problem go away. The power of denial can never be underestimated, but this is taking denial to heroic levels.

The House of Commons select committee on Northern Ireland, on which the DUP itself is heavily represented, has just issued a report that says it has been "unable to identify any border solution currently in operation across the globe that would enable physical infrastructure to be avoided when rules and tariffs diverge". The DUP's three members of the committee – Ian Paisley, Gregory Campbell and Jim Shannon – did not dissent from this conclusion. This suggests that the party knows very well that no last-minute reprieve is coming from that quarter. So why is the DUP not stepping forward to secure the unionist position by insisting that the UK as a whole stay in the customs union?

Ideology is certainly a factor: the party’s Westminster MPs in particular bought into a hard Brexit as the ultimate expression of British identity. But the whole dark money/dark data story also forms a net from which the party is still struggling to escape.

First, there is a continuing cover-up of the source of the dark money. That donation from a hidden source was possible because Northern Ireland was exempted from UK legislation requiring transparency. And an implicit part of the deal between the DUP and May’s government seems to be that the source of the money must be protected.

On March 7th the Commons voted on amendments to the Transparency of Donations and Loans (Northern Ireland Political Parties) Order 2018, which would have required the sources of donations going back to 2014 to be revealed. The entire Conservative Party went into the lobbies with the DUP to ensure that those amendments were defeated.

Secondly and most remarkably, the DUP remains entangled with AggregateIQ and thus with Robert Mercer's hard-right international operation. Electoral-spending returns from the 2017 assembly elections unearthed by the Detail showed DUP candidates paying a total of $14,250, or about €11,500, to AggregateIQ. The invoice described the services rendered as "GOTV", presumably "get out the vote". It is interesting that this relationship continued after the Brexit campaign.

The DUP seems either unwilling or unable to escape from the hidden nexus that encompasses Cambridge Analytica. At a time when it needs to move nimbly to protect the union, it is stuck in a shadow world.