The Stormont Assembly, once a beacon of hope for power-sharing, now grapples with the prospect of dissolution amidst political stalemate
WE HAVE occasional waves of optimism in Northern Ireland that the Stormont Assembly might come back. I find it hard to enter into that mood because if it did come back I would need reassurance that it was not going to be pulled down again by either of the senior power sharing partners taking a huff and walking out.
Currently the assembly isn’t sitting because the DUP is boycotting it in protest against the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit withdrawal agreement and its upgrade, the Windsor Framework.
This is a deal reached between the British government last spring to tweak the protocol and reduce the obstruction caused by checks on imported goods at Northern Irish ports. These checks create, in effect, a border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.
Jeffrey Donaldson is the man who leads the boycott, and he is the one who will have to decide whether or not to restore our assembly. He knows that he risks splitting his party for there are some in it who wish they had never agreed to power-sharing with Sinn Féin in the first place.
And since Sinn Féin has the votes now to appoint the First Minister, the new assembly, if we ever see it, will look to unionists like a major advance for republicanism. Actually First and Deputy First Ministers have equal power. The assembly can’t function without both, which is why one walking out pulls the whole thing down. And unionism is still bigger than nationalism. It just doesn’t have the biggest party and it is the biggest party in each community that gets the top seat. That’s a change to the original Good Friday Agreement that the DUP insisted on when it negotiated changes in 2005.
So, like the Brexit they argued for and feel so uncomfortable with, it is a setback of their own making. Still, we can gloat and get nowhere. Better still would be to find agreement on how to restore the assembly and to make it stable enough to endure.
I don’t know if that can be done but a change of attitude among party leaders would help.
The whole point of power-sharing was that the leaders of nationalism and unionism would learn to cooperate and get on with each other. There have been times when that seemed possible and others when it clearly wasn’t.
The executive which these parties appoint should function like a cabinet in which every member commits to an agreed policy.
What gets in the way of amicable and creative cooperation between unionists and nationalists is that they, of course have different visions of the future.
Sinn Féin wants a united Ireland and looks forward to a referendum on that.
Unionists want to stay within the UK and feel insecure with the prospect of such a referendum, even if, as is likely, it’s a decade or more away.
There is a way around that problem and it is set out in the Good Friday Agreement. The idea of a referendum on unity takes the question out of the hands of the parties and gives it to the people.
So parties could agree to just shut up about it, stop fretting and stop seeking to undermine each other’s political cultures.
The DUP would argue that its current boycott is not an attack on nationalism but a necessary defence of the Union. They are trying to force the hand of the British Prime Minister. But depriving others of the chance to govern shows little regard for their concerns and rights.
Power sharing should entail a commitment by these parties to respect each other’s visions of the future as valid and valued. There could be an end to sneering at each other.
We have a political culture in which unionists are commonly dismissed by nationalists as a bit deranged and in which nationalists are derided by unionists as devious and manipulative.
Each could make some effort to reassure the other of its respect without giving up any core principle or ambition.
After all, the job of the executive is not to create a united Ireland or shore up the Union. It is to run the hospitals and the schools and the rest.
Those who think you can get a better job done by a nationalist or a unionist can vote as they please, of course. But they are not being logical. These ideologies contribute nothing to government efficiency; they simply rally communities of support around causes that are not under the control of the parties.
If anything they incentivise voters to back candidates on their British or Irish identity claims rather than on ability to govern. If you appointed civil servants on that basis you’d be breaking the law.
The DUP would argue that it needed to pull out of the assembly to defend the union, wrecking regional government as a form of protest when there was no prospect of using the assembly to achieve their ends.
Sinn Féin similarly stayed out for three years to enforce a demand for an Irish Language Act that it could not achieve through an assembly vote.
Parties in other parliaments would love the luxury of being able to walk out and crash the whole thing when they don’t get their way. They can’t because they understand they have responsibilities to meet.
Ours think they have more important things to concentrate on.
