When David Cameron called his Brexit referendum, the potential difficulty of Northern Ireland was not uppermost in his mind. Nor does it seem to have worried Theresa May greatly when she announced a snap general election this week. Even before this fresh electoral battle, Northern Ireland’s politics were already — to paraphrase Sean O’Casey — in ‘a terrible state of chassis’. Perhaps May thought the existing chassis in Belfast couldn’t get any worse. On reflection, I’m not so sure.
The last Assembly election in March left the DUP and Sinn Fein, the two tribal behemoths, delicately balanced on 28 and 27 seats respectively. Unionists lost their overall majority. Six weeks later, the parties have yet to reach an agreement on forming a government. Dust is gathering on numerous in-trays, and urgent decisions are dangling in mid-air.
When the Stormont government is active, it is an extraordinary contraption, whose departments effectively operate as independent party fiefdoms. There is little concept of collective responsibility, a lack which allowed Sinn Fein to collapse the Executive in January, ostensibly over a DUP-administered renewable energy scheme: a hot mess that encouraged citizens to run wood-pellet boilers at a spiralling cost to the taxpayer.
Another factor decisively contributed: the serious ill-health of the late Martin McGuinness, who — endorsed with fierce joviality by the late Ian Paisley in 2007 — had spent nearly a decade as the one senior Sinn Fein figure the DUP could do business with. Now both Paisley and McGuinness have gone. To a small ripple of controversy last week, McGuinness’s headstone was unveiled. It was proudly inscribed to ‘Oglach Martin McGuinness’ — ‘Oglach’ being the name the IRA gives its volunteers. The time for public equivocation on when he left the IRA (1974, he always said, though no one else did) is clearly over.
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