Movement at last in Northern Ireland

It’s been a while since we looked at Northern Ireland, which at the end of this week will have been without a government for exactly two years. Now, finally it seems that hiatus might be coming to an end.

Two years is not the longest period for which self-government in the province has been in abeyance – there was no government for the whole of the 2003-07 Assembly, and after the government collapsed at the beginning of 2017 it took three years to re-form it. In the meantime, Northern Ireland has been ruled directly from London, which in practice means the civil servants have run things without having to worry about the politicians.

Although there have been other issues involved, the underlying problem for the last seven years has been Brexit. The main unionist party, the DUP, brought down the government two years ago to try to put pressure on the British government, then led by Boris Johnson, to meet its demands: effectively, to renege on the deal Johnson had made with the European Union to give Northern Ireland a special customs status.

Successive British governments since then have made various attempts to tweak arrangements so as to meet the conflicting demands of the unionists and the EU. Last year, Rishi Sunak signed a deal with the EU that conceded significant ground to the DUP’s position, but it failed to bring the party back on board for self-government.

The problem was that in the meantime, in May 2022, there had been a Northern Ireland election, and in the new Assembly the DUP was no longer the largest party. The nationalist Sinn Féin won 27 seats to the DUP’s 25, giving it the right to nominate the first minister and relegating the DUP to deputy first minister. The two positions have equal power, but conceding the added prestige of first minister to the nationalists was a bitter pill for hardline unionists to swallow.

And it’s not just a single election. The demographics of the province are running against the unionists; the 2021 census revealed that Catholics now outnumber Protestants, undermining the whole rationale for Northern Ireland’s separate existence. (For more of the background, you can read this article by Sarah Howe and me on the fallout from the 2022 election.)

So what’s been going on for the last year and a half is largely a battle within the DUP between moderates who want to return to self-government if they can get some face-saving concessions from Westminster, and hardliners who are set against ever going back to co-operation with Sinn Féin – with the minutiae of the Brexit trade provisions being used as a pretext. A series of temporary expedients have averted the holding of a fresh election, in which voters would presumably take revenge on whoever was seen to be responsible for the impasse.

Now, it seems, the moderates have got the upper hand, with DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson securing his executive’s approval for a deal with the British government. The promise is that the party will return to government once the agreed legislation is passed at Westminster, which the British described as “a welcome and significant step.” It’s intended that self-government will be up and running again before Britain goes to the polls later this year.

But Donaldson had to fight hard to get his colleagues to agree to that much, and whether they will actually sit down with Sinn Féin when the time comes remains to be seen. And if the tide continues to run in favor of the nationalists then there is going to be more anguish ahead for the DUP.