Seasonal crises in Northern Ireland’s government have, in recent years, appeared with the regularity of New Year’s resolutions and seemed to last about as long. The script has been that a crisis has emerged (usually related to an aspect of the Troubles period and how to deal with the legacy of the conflict), and threats are made that the institutions may collapse. A series of talks are organised, compromise of some sort is apparently reached or a promising direction for progress indicated and the parties step back from the precipice (see the Haass-O’Sullivan talks in 2013, Stormont House Agreement of 2014 and the Fresh Start Agreement of 2015). However, the 2016-17 variant is somewhat different in terms of focus, intensity and likely outcome.
The issue that led to the decision by Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness to resign as Deputy First Minister, which under the rules of Northern Ireland’s devolved government system effectively ends the tenure of the First Minister as well, is a somewhat surprising one. Few would have envisaged that a decade of devolved government, the result of the internationally acclaimed peace process, would collapse due to a row over a scheme to encourage investment in greener fuels (the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme). The issue came to a head with the refusal of the First Minister, the DUP’s Arlene Foster, who had been the Enterprise Minister when the scheme was originally introduced in 2012, to temporarily step aside whilst an inquiry was held into the scheme (which it is estimated may cost taxpayers in Northern Ireland up to £490 million over the next twenty years).
At one level it could almost be taken for ‘progress’ that Northern Ireland has a crisis not linked to the border question or the violence that characterised so much of its history post-1969. Senator George Mitchell, who oversaw the talks that led to the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, concluded his book Making Peace by looking forward to a time when he might sit in the NI Assembly and listen to the MLAs ‘debate the ordinary issues of life in a peaceful democratic society: education, health care, agriculture, tourism, fisheries, trade. There will be no talk of war, for the war will be long over. There will be no talk of peace, for peace will by then be taken for granted’. But, inevitably, although the ill-designed RHI scheme may appear to be just such an ‘ordinary’ issue of life in a political democracy, the reality and the potential consequences are more problematic and the question of what happens next, hard to answer.
The rules of devolved government mean that if Sinn Féin does not nominate a Deputy First Minister within 7 days of McGuinness’s resignation the British Government will collapse the devolved institutions and a new election will be called. The results of such an election are unlikely to be spectacularly different from that held in 2016. Given the very low rate of cross-community voting in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin cannot expect to gain significant numbers of votes from former DUP supporters. They may be hoping that the unionist community will penalise the DUP for their stance over the RHI initiative and vote instead for the other main unionist party, the UUP. This could possibly split the unionist vote to such an extent that Sinn Féin emerge as the largest party and thus get to fill the First Minister post in a future devolved government (though this is not a likely scenario). But Sinn Féin cannot be sure that their own vote will not be impacted by the scandal and its aftermath. It is also possible that the SDLP could gain in the election if nationalist voters decide to penalise Sinn Féin for collapsing the Assembly (though the SDLP supported calls for Foster to stand aside) or for their record in government (the SDLP and the UUP decided after the last election not to join the power-sharing Executive but to go into opposition). But given the outcome is likely to be an Assembly with party representation broadly the same as now, what would change?
Although the RHI scheme may have been the catalyst for the crisis it is far from the only issue that is straining relations between the two main parties in Northern Ireland. McGuinness’s resignation letter argued that the decision was due to the refusal of Arlene Foster to step aside, but it also hinted at the wider problems between the two parties. McGuinness claimed that the ‘equality, mutual respect and all-Ireland approaches enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement have never been fully embraced by the DUP’. Speaking to the press announcing his resignation he claimed that, “There will be no return to the status quo.” It is this observation that may indicate the difficulties that lie ahead. If by this McGuinness is suggesting that Sinn Féin will not rejoin an Executive headed by Arlene Foster as First Minister under the existing terms of the Good Friday Agreement (and its successor the St Andrews Agreement) then it is hard to see how a significant period of direct rule from London can be avoided. If Sinn Féin’s core constituency are indeed unhappy with the party’s role as the DUP’s power-sharing partner and the current events are in part a reflection of that disquiet, as some have suggested, then what lies ahead is unclear. With the collapse of the government, many of the issues that divide the two main parties in Northern Ireland are likely once again to come to the fore. The vexed but important issue of how to deal with the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland (which has been rumbling on for years), the continuing problems over Northern Ireland’s budget; and the newer challenge that Brexit poses for Northern Ireland (the only part of the UK that will share a land border with an EU state) will not go away just because the Northern Ireland government has.
The crisis may ostensibly have been triggered by ‘ordinary’ political issues but the fallout from them may mean that it will be some considerable time before George Mitchell would be able to sit and listen to an Assembly debate in Northern Ireland. Maybe the current crisis will be averted like its predecessors in recent years and the executive saved, or a deal done to restore devolved government on similar terms to those currently in-play after an election (perhaps after an inquiry into the RHI scheme); predicting the outcome of the seasonal crisis in Northern Ireland is a perilous undertaking. A devolved power-sharing government including the largest parties from the unionist and nationalist tradition is the prescribed formula for Northern Ireland and has been for at least the past two decades. Direct rule from London is the fall-back position but is not the first choice of any of the main actors; whether this is enough to force the parties to resolve the crisis remains to be seen. But at the moment, the immediate future of Northern Ireland’s experiment in devolved power-sharing looks bleak.
Eamonn O’Kane is co-author (with Paul Dixon) of Northern Ireland Since 1969 and is currently writing a book on the Peace Process.
Image: Sinn Féin CC BY-NC-ND
