WHAT do you do if you are a political party in a power sharing coalition, as an election approaches, when you can’t demonstrate that you have been governing well?
This is the challenge facing the pro Irish unity Sinn Féin party and the Democratic Unionist Party which seeks to preserve Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom.
These two parties have been locked together in a power sharing executive for nearly twenty years. Smaller parties get fewer seats at the executive table and a formula called the D’ Hondt process distributes departments among them.
These parties face an assembly election next May and they can’t boast that they have proven they are fit to govern.
Here’s a sampling from a long list of their failures.
Lough Neagh, the largest inland lake in the UK and Ireland, is horribly polluted by green algae. The lough provides drinking water for a large section of our population. Nothing is being done about this, probably because the farmers who provide much of the muck that goes into the lough have more influence than environmentalists.
One minister represents both of them.
A big GAA stadium is to be built on the site of the old Casement Park. Parties have wrangled for years over who is to pay for it, how big it is to be and when it might actually be completed.
The Irish government has committed to helping with the funding of a major new road from Derry, through Tyrone to the border. It was to be finished in 2012. The court of appeal has just ruled against a previous hold up on environmental grounds. So there’s progress.
The two big parties have to agree on legislation and is each blocking bills from the other, one for employment law reform, one for reform of school inspections.
Worst of all perhaps is that they have not been able to agree a budget for this year, let alone next year.
Secretary of State Sir Chris Bryant set a deadline by which this had to be done and the deadline passed barely noticed because the parties were locked in another disagreement, over whether an Orange parade might be allowed down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown.
To many of us this will have seemed a ludicrous distraction from vital work but there are substantial political gains to be made from a good old inter-communal row. In a divided society where identity politics prevails, you don’t necessarily have to be efficient to be rewarded with votes. Just annoying the other side may be enough to make you hugely popular among your own people.
This is the flaw in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 which brought an end to republican and loyalist terrorist campaigns. It provided an alternative platform for contention between parties representing the Protestant/unionist and Catholic/nationalist communities.
The Sinn Féin first minister Michelle O’Neill and other ministers who stood alongside her blocking the Garvaghy Road against Orangemen and the police may be about to get a criminal record for her behaviour but among nationalists and republicans that will be as good as a medal.
The DUP seems weakened and divided having failed to get the Orangemen the support they needed to get down that road but they will fight the next election on the need to supplant O’Neill and put a good unionist in her place.
In short, sectarianism works better for electioneering than does a record of practical achievement.
So, you may ask, what of the other smaller parties? Is there no middle ground in Northern Ireland that can offer a saner, wiser alternative to inter-communal bickering?
Well, there is but it is fractious too.
First of all, note that about a third of the registered electorate doesn’t vote at all, either because it is disgusted with populist sectarian politics or it doesn’t have faith that it can change anything.
There are four parties in that notional middle ground, The Alliance Party, which does not identify as nationalist or unionist, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which identifies as nationalist and the Ulster Unionist Party. Then there is the left-wing People Before Profit which currently has just one MLA.
In an ideal world, these softer nationalist and unionist parties would combine with the Alliance party, defer the arguments over whether Northern Ireland should be Irish or British, put identity politics aside and commit to offering good government. And they all do that individually but there is a tragic anomaly. They are all fishing in the same votes pool, so they compete with each other rather than cooperate.
The ideals and sentiments of the average voters across those three parties are clearly much closer to each other than the ideals and sentiments of the people in the two big parties, but the sectarian division keeps them apart too.
Those who devised the power sharing system thought that unionists and nationalists would learn in proximity to each other to co-operate for the good of both communities. That experiment has failed.
We need something better but the irony is that the big parties of the two communities would have to agree on it and, on current form, they never would.
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