What next for Northern Ireland? Let's try another election...
The caretaker executive in Northern Ireland has run out of time, so the next steps seem to be a fresh set of elections for the assembly
The Westminster community is divided sharply. There is about 90 per cent, at a finger-in-the-air guess, who ignore Northern Ireland, regard it as a different place and think it almost exclusively a source of trouble. I have some human sympathy with this. The difficult politics of Northern Ireland are knotty, textured and require a lot of background knowledge. And many people in Britain have never been across the Irish Sea to the Province, despite it being a flight of less than 90 minutes from London to Belfast. They see nothing to draw them there, and their impressions of Northern Ireland and of violence, grim suffering and hostility.
The other 10 per cent, in which I count myself, care a great deal. Mostly they are from Northern Ireland themselves, or have close family there. A few have an academic interest in the place. Some, like me, have ties of upbringing rather than birth. It is true that my maternal great-great-grandfather, Jacob McLean, was born in Londonderry, though in later life he moved to southern Scotland, so I have a fragment of genetic connection. As a young man, I developed a strange fascination for Northern Ireland, a place of strong and long-standing passions, in which the past was a living participant in everyday politics, and I had, initially and in some ways still, a deep affection for the stubborn patriotic loyalty of the unionist community, which seemed a beleaguered population standing firm against enormous pressure.
Age is an important factor. Growing up in the 1980s, I remember the Brighton bombing (albeit rather vaguely), and as a child I associated terrorism instinctively with violence in the name of one or other of the traditions in Northern Ireland. I was, young as I may have been, appalled by the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen in 1987. I was aware of Operation Flavius in 1988, in which the SAS controversially shot dead three members of the PIRA’s Belfast Brigade who turned out to be unarmed. And I recall watching quizzically as Gerry Adams was interviewed on television but, because of government broadcasting regulations, had his words dubbed by an actor, usually Stephen Rea; it seemed a peculiar arrangement which hardly did much to mute Sinn Féin nor to show the government’s steely determination to resist terrorism. I suspect my younger friends would find it baffling.
Becoming a teenager in the 1990s gave me a ringside seat on the best and worst of the Troubles. I remember the murder of Ian Gow, the Conservative MP for Eastbourne and devotee of Margaret Thatcher, in 1990: his death was a grievous blow to Thatcher, almost as much as had been that of Airey Neave, her shadow Northern Ireland secretary, weeks before the general election in 1979. Manchester was bombed in 1992, and the following year bombs exploded in Warrington, killing, among others, three-year-old Johnathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry. The latter’s parents, showing titanic courage, went on to found the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Peace Foundation, desperate to find some way to stem what seemed like unceasing violence. As a grave and serious-minded teenager, I was deeply affected by Colin Parry’s attempts to understand the motivations which had led to his son’s death. This, I knew, was extraordinary moral fibre.
The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was negotiated when I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. As a keen but outside observer, the whole process made me uneasy. It seemed to forgive rather too much, to accept the inclusion in civil society of some men and women who were, I knew, irredeemably evil, and it rankled that unionists were required to make significant concessions to a cause which had sought to take away their fundamental legal identity and citizenship. But I recognise, now more than I did then, that dramatic gestures and uncomfortable understanding were necessary to try to break the cycle of violence which threatened to become simply a settled way of life. Tony Blair, Mo Mowlam and Bertie Ahern are often held up as the heroes of that agreement, but I would stress too the enormous influence of John Major, Patrick Mayhew, Jonathan Powell and, perhaps above all, David Trimble and John Hume, the UUP and SDLP leaders who brought their communities with them to the negotiating table. The two were recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998; both are now dead. Each was a great man, but Trimble was, perhaps, the more complicated and unknowable.
I remained a careful observer. I met Senator George Mitchell, the US legislator who had co-chaired the talks leading up to the B/GFA, when he visited St Andrews in the late 1990s, and he struck me as a man of duty and straightforwardness. But I confess it rankled that a wholly internal United Kingdom dispute had had to rely on an American mediator, especially as I knew that many Americans who took an interest in Northern Ireland were not neutral actors. (Years later, in the mid-2000s, I almost got into a fight in a bar at Boston Logan Airport when a drunken American traveller began proposing toasts to the IRA. I talked myself out of remonstrating but it was not easy.)
Latterly I spent some time in the Province. For six years I had a partner from County Down, so we visited frequently, and in my professional life I was for a while a committee clerk for the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, which brought me into contact not just with Westminster politicians but their counterparts in Dublin, Belfast and other jurisdictions. It is easy to criticise BIPA, with its somnolent plenary sessions and windy declarations, but the interaction of politicians from all those jurisdictions in the social interstices was invaluable in building understanding, friendship and affection. There are a few current and former TDs and senators whom I came to know and like, and it certainly opened by eyes and widened my perspective. In 2010, I spent a short secondment at the Northern Ireland Assembly, fascinated by a legislature so different from Westminster, staffed by well-intentioned but sometimes inexperienced officials. And I vividly remember sitting in the public gallery during one session and sinking red-faced into my seat when the deputy speaker, the late David McClarty, whom I knew from BIPA, spotted me and waved enthusiastically from the chair.
Yesterday, Thursday 28 October, was a significant milestone. Readers will be aware that there were elections for a new assembly in May, but it has been unable to meet or function since its first duty is to elect a speaker. This must be done on a cross-party (and cross-community) basis, but the DUP, the largest unionist party but now the second-largest bloc after Sinn Féin, has refused to participate in protest at the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Since the assembly cannot meet, it has not been possible to appoint a new executive. Changes to the Northern Ireland Act 1998 allowed the existing executive to remain in office temporarily while a politicxal solution was sought, but the time limit for this arrived on 28 October. The secretary of state, Chris Heaton-Harris, is now required to call fresh elections to the assembly. That provision must now come into force.
Heaton-Harris is aware that there is little enthusiasm for new elections. But he was careful to rule out other options, telling the House of Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee that his hands were effectively tied. “I know that lots of people really do not see or do not want that to happen but it is a legislative requirement.” He dismissed the idea of further changes to primary legislation to prolong the executive’s life. It was unlikely, he said, that there would be sufficient time to make such a move, though he stressed that his preferred outcome to the impasse would be an agreement to convene the existing assembly.
So now we are at the beginning of a wearily familiar process. Today Heaton-Harris is likely to announce the calling of new elections, and it is thought that the likely polling day will be 15 December. This offers the bleak prospect of campaigning in the run-up to Christmas, hardly appealing to anyone who knows what Northern Ireland’s weather can be like in winter, and there is an air of exhaustion on all sides. While the DUP remains adamant that it will not treat with Sinn Féin until there are changes to the Protocol, however, it is hard to see what alternative there is. A bill to amend the Protocol is making its way through Parliament, and indeed has been agreed by the House of Commons, but it has yet to complete its committee stage in the House of Lords.
Since consideration of bills is not subject to timetabling in the upper house, the scrutiny of the draft legislation may be lengthy, hard-fought and exacting. The government has no majority in the Lords, with 253 peers out of 762, and the DUP has only five peers, with two UUP and one independent unionist peers in addition; the nationalist parties are not represented at all, save for Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, the former SDLP leader, who takes the Labour whip. (In addition, there is a handful of Northern Ireland crossbenchers, and the former speaker of the assembly, Lord Alderdice, who sits as a Liberal Democrat.) It is hopeless, therefore, to hope that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill will pass swiftly, let alone in time to help solve the current crisis.
So elections there must be. It is a good maxim that more democratic input into the political process is better than less, but the fear among many, in Britain and in Northern Ireland, is that little will change following a fresh round of elections. An opinion poll in August showed Sinn Féin’s vote largely static on 30 per cent, the DUP fractionally up at 24 per cent, the Alliance having gained a few points and the UUP holding steady at 11 per cent. So it is entirely possible that the new, eighth assembly will reflect its predecessor almost entirely in composition. That would be worse than making no progress, as the elections themselves would represent another weapon removed from the armoury (if I can use a rather inapt metaphor).
One of the problems in Northern Ireland is that politicians from the mainland still pay only reluctant attention and, as I wrote this summer in The Irish Times, too many continue to take Reginald Maudling’s view of the Province after his first visit as home secretary in 1970: “For God’s sake, bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.” There is also a pervasive belief, born of ignorance, that any problem can be solved by negotiation if there is enough determination and time. That belief may soon meet the brick wall of reality.
I could not disagree with Maudling’s opinion more. I adore Northern Ireland and its people, from all traditions and none, and I have huge affection for the down-to-earth humour and eye-rolling in the face of adversity which marks them out. Although there are extremists who have caused untold harm to life and society, in the main Ulstermen and Ulsterwomen are gritty, good-humoured and pragmatic. In ten days I will be in Dublin, and I look forward to meeting an old university friend who is a committed nationalist, with whom I disagree fundamentally on constitutional issues, but we have a warm and tolerant friendship, secure in the knowledge of each other’s good faith. (We have both come a long way in 20 years.)
But I also try to understand Northern Ireland as best as an outsider can. As a romantic and an historian by training, I understand the depth of feeling on both sides of the conflict, though I am an immutable unionist and will always stand on the side of that majority, while it remains a majority, to remain part of the United Kingdom to which it is passionately loyal. Faulkner (William, not Brian) said that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Nowhere is that more true than in Northern Ireland, where Bloody Sunday (1972) is still recent and raw history, the 1916 Easter Rising arouses strong feelings and the Battle of the Boyne, the victory of William III over the displaced James II in 1689 is celebrated every year by unionists on 12 July, the Twelfth which sees parades and bonfires, and is a public holiday.
I am afraid to say it, as if writing the words somehow makes it real, but I fear that we are soon going to see a realisation that some circles will remain circular however hard we try to make them square. For all the progress that the B/GFA represented, the gulf between unionists and nationalists remains, at its heart, unbridgeable. Northern Ireland must either remain within the UK or become part of a united Ireland (there is a tiny, quixotic and almost certainly impractical school of thought which supports the Province becoming independent, but it has never had any political muscle). The Protocol also points to a choice to which I cannot see a compromise: in the end, if we are to have a UK single market with which the EU insists on having hard border checks, I have failed to find a third way between that border existing between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (as the Protocol imposes) or between Northern Ireland and the Republic, which no-one wants as a first choice. Brexit has made this choice stark but, I fear, ultimately unavoidable.
There are many layers of context which complicate the political situation. Many argue, correctly, that Northern Ireland did not vote in favour of Brexit, and they therefore see a hard border with the Republic as an intolerable imposition and a throwback to the pre-1973 past. Others, with equal force and rightness, insist that the UK government is committed to the preservation of the Union, and that a border down the Irish Sea is a serious infringement of that constitutional status. The truth of this was affirmed by the Court of Appeal in Belfast earlier this year, when it ruled that the Protocol, and the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 which birthed it, were lawful and did not represent a contradiction of the B/GFA. However, the court also admitted that the Protocol had implications for the Act of Union 1800, and was inconsistent with Article 6 of that act, which guarantees free trade between all parts of the Union.
The lady chief justice of Northern Ireland, Dame Siobhan Keegan, ruled that, while the Act of Union had not been repealed, Article 6 had to be read subject to the Withdrawal Agreement Act. I am not, as I frequently have to remind people, a lawyer, though I have experience of drafting bills and of supervising their progress through Parliament; but Dame Siobhan’s position seems to be somewhat ambiguous, trying to believe two contradictory ideas at once. At any event, it seems to me that it is a compromise which cannot last for ever.
There are other issues in the background. In September, the results of the 2021 census revealed that the Catholic population of Northern Ireland is now larger than the Protestant community by 45.7 percent to 43.48 per cent, the first time Protestants have been outnumbered since the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921. But it is significant that neither tradition represents an overall majority. In recent years it has become apparent that the question of the Union is no longer as simple as a sectarian headcount, with Catholics automatically being nationalist and Protestants unionist (though a strong correlation remains). The non-sectarian Alliance Party, while it was founded in 1970 as a moderate unionist grouping, now appeals to a significant part of the electorate, winning 13.5 per cent of the vote in May’s assembly elections. And young people in particular are less likely to see their identity purely or even primarily in terms of constitutional issues but through the prism of more run-of-the-mill political matters like education (though that remains predominantly faith-based), housing, the economy, infrastructure and health.
There is also a worrying disaffection among working-class loyalist communities, and especially the younger members of that demographic. They are economically underprivileged and marginalised, and see their identity being compromised by political developments. Indeed, they wonder what, if anything, they have gained from 25 years of the peace process, and on the fringes of the political establishment they have warned that violence could become their last resort. Last year, David Campbell, chair of the Loyalist Communities Council, told the Northern Ireland affairs committee that the Protocol was unacceptable and that major changes needed to be made to bring them back into the political mainstream.
We definitely could creep over into violence, I describe this as probably the most dangerous situation for many years, but I do hope common sense will prevail.
There is no obvious solution to the disaffection of loyalists, but to ignore their very real grievances as somehow outdated or incompatible with the mainstream move towards peace would be to throw a match on the bonfires with which they represent themselves every 12 July.
We now have a generation of young people, active in politics, who were born after the B/GFA. They have only folk memory of the days before the peace process, and while this can make them determined to retain the more peaceful atmosphere which has prevailed since 1998 (though violence continues to occur and paramilitary groups still exist and have influence), they can also take it for granted, and ignore the dangers of going back to the days of the full-on Troubles.
I wish I could offer solutions—but if I could, I would be packing my bags for Belfast, handing out cards announcing my status as “saviour of the peace process” and preparing my acceptance speech for the Nobel prize. I can identify areas on which much work needs to be done: apart from engaging more positively and deeply with loyalist communities, there must also be more action against paramilitary violence, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (which replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 2001) needs wholesale root-and-branch reform, perhaps tantamount to disbandment, as its leadership has made catastrophic political judgements which have squandered the goodwill of unionists, and more fundamentally the economic structure of Northern Ireland must be changed: the public sector employs 27 per cent of workers in the Province as opposed to 18 per cent in the rest of the UK. Northern Ireland receives a substantial subsidy from the UK government, and that is not sustainable in the long term to its current degree.
These are, however, questions. The people of Northern Ireland must force their political leaders to find and implement solutions. But I do not, alas, think that a new round of elections in December will do very much to break this deadlock.
(Note: while I try as much as possible to avoid using “Ulster” as a synonym for Northern Ireland, as the historic province of Ulster contained not only the six counties of Northern Ireland but also Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan, now part of the Republic, I ask for latitude in using the term “the Province”. While it may offend sticklers for absolute accuracy, it is, I hope, a tolerable synonym to avoid endless repetition of “Northern Ireland.)