Political deadlock in Northern Ireland, which has led London to announce it will call fresh elections there, shows the region’s governance system is “not fit for purpose” and should be reformed, according to Ireland’s prime minister.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said Northern Ireland’s nationalist and unionist communities have rightly been required to share power since a landmark peace deal in 1998 that ended three decades of conflict over the region’s constitutional status.
But unionist and nationalist parties have often made fractious bedfellows in a system of compulsory coalitions where one side cannot govern without the other, and Martin called for reform of the power-sharing arrangements enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement.
“There’s a reason why all this [power sharing] came in, in the early years,” Martin said in an interview with the Financial Times.
But now, nearly 25 years on, he added: “There is room for the parties to look at changing the system. The system does polarise and it is not fit for purpose . . . The electoral system should not be one that constantly reinforces polarisation.”
Martin said any changes to the system should be considered over the next four to five years. Dublin believes reform is a matter for Northern Ireland’s parties and the Irish and UK governments to decide.
Martin was speaking ahead of last Friday’s deadline for a power-sharing executive to be formed in Northern Ireland following elections to the region’s assembly at Stormont in May.
The UK government responded to the failure to establish a fully functioning devolved administration by highlighting its legal duty to call fresh elections — which no party wants — although it did not set a date. December 15 is seen as the likely day for the poll.
The Good Friday Agreement enshrines the principle that the biggest parties representing the nationalist and unionist communities must have leading roles in a power-sharing executive.
But this means each community has a veto over the existence of the executive.
For about 40 per cent of the time since the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland has lacked a government because one side or the other has refused to participate.
The Democratic Unionist party, the biggest pro-UK party, sparked the current crisis by insisting it would not enter government until Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trading arrangements were scrapped.
From 2017 to 2020, Sinn Féin, the nationalist party supporting Irish reunification, blocked a power-sharing executive after a scandal over renewable energy.
The elections last May were a huge milestone for Northern Ireland, because Sinn Féin became the region’s biggest party for the first time — relegating the long-dominant DUP to second place.
The centrist Alliance party surged to third place, showing rising numbers of people no longer identify along traditional unionist and nationalist lines.
However, the political system shuts the Alliance out of governmental decisions requiring majority unionist and nationalist support.
“There’s a healthy spread of parties now,” said Martin. “We should explore an amended system.”
The Alliance has argued that if the DUP does not want to participate in the executive, that should not act as a bar to a government being formed.
Jon Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, said London “should be reviewing the rules of the Good Friday Agreement and ending mandatory coalitions . . . putting them in the dustbin where they belong”, instead of calling another election.
London and Dublin hope a power-sharing executive can be in place by next April, the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and US president Joe Biden is expected to visit to mark the occasion.
But much appears to hinge on whether the UK and EU can reach a compromise on changes to Northern Ireland’s trading arrangements that satisfies the DUP.
It objects to how the Northern Ireland protocol in the UK Brexit agreement with the EU requires different trading conditions for the region compared with Great Britain.
The protocol puts a customs border in the Irish Sea, requiring checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, which the DUP claims undermines the region’s place in the UK.
Without a deal between the UK and the EU to overhaul the protocol that the DUP deems acceptable, fresh elections to the Northern Ireland assembly are widely expected to fail to secure the establishment of a power-sharing executive.
Credit: Source link
