Help Northern Ireland, and unionism, to embark on a new path on Thursday.

Polling for the European election is on Thursday and the next few days will see the culmination of the Conservatives and Unionists campaign to get Jim Nicholson re-elected as an MEP for Northern Ireland. Whilst Diane Dodds campaign has been unremittingly parochial, Nicholson has incessantly emphasised the need to put Northern Ireland at the heart of UK politics, at Westminster and at the European parliament.

Dodds and her team have been preoccupied with Stormont and disingenuous rhetoric about smashing the DUP’s coalition partners! Despite the ’ourselves alone’ alliance of common and communal interests in the executive and assembly, the party has not felt the need to revisit its repetitive mantras about Sinn Féin.

Whilst Conservatives and Unionists have engaged the Northern Ireland electorate on the basis of issues which are actually at stake in a European election, the DUP has treated voters like children, repeating yesterday’s slogans with blithe disregard to the fact that the party itself has performed a blatant U Turn on the positions which they articulate.

Voters blinkered enough to believe that haranguing Sinn Féin is sufficient qualification for any representative, on any political stage, have a more convincing alternative to Dodds in Jim Allister. Voters whose ’unionism’ is actually tethered to a real commitment to the United Kingdom and its politics have a tantalising prospect available in returning Jim Nicholson. He will join the largest UK delegation in the European parliament.

Nicholson has spoken about ‘strengthening, deepening, broadening the Union’ through the new Conservative and Ulster Unionist alignment. Surely a strong performance from the new force, first in Europe and then at the Westminster election can only strengthen what the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant termed ‘our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom’.

Thursday represents a chance for Northern Ireland and for unionism to embark upon a path which leads to what has long been many unionists professed goal.