Northern Ireland Stands on the Precipice

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Northern Ireland Stands on the Precipice

Submitted by Chris McCarthy on Wednesday, 3 February 2010No Comment

The Northern Ireland Peace Process Commemorative Chess Set! (c) Just_Tom

Amidst the frivolities of duck houses, limp coup attempts, and the perpetual re-naming of Whitehall departments, politics can be a serious affair. Those who govern on our behalf have the capacity to effect meaningful and progressive change. The Northern Ireland peace process was a shining example of what can be achieved when politics works, when negotiation and compromise trump violence and intimidation.

The power-sharing arrangement in Stormont was always going to be a delicate undertaking. Predicated on shaky coalitions, as it needed to be to have a mandate to govern the people of Northern Ireland, the entrenched distrust between nationalists and unionists will take at least a generation to unwind. It is this suspicion, cultivated by decades of violence, which once again threatens the fragile peace process.

While the Northern Ireland Secretary, Shaun Woodward, has remarked on the “considerable progress” that has been made, it is the ‘work still to be done’ that decides where this chapter in Northern Irish history ends.

Sensitive Beginnings

The Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 was rightly championed as a historic milestone on the path to devolution. Some notable areas, namely policing and justice, were still highly sensitive areas of responsibility and much like Obama’s efforts to pass healthcare reform, it was considered by some a better outcome to have half a loaf then no loaf at all. Consequently, devolution of policing and justice powers were deferred to a later, unspecified date, at which point it was believed (or hoped) that the key protagonists would be more amenable to compromise.

That time has arrived, not so much through common agreement but because of salacious circumstances. The Iris Robinson affair, initially a tragic story that brought Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Peter Robinson, to public tears, soon grew into something more malicious, both in content and with respect to the ramifications it might have had (and may still do so), for the power-sharing agreement. Not since the Profumo affair of 1963 has a sexual liaison threatened to precipitate a political crisis.

Fearing voter outrage and coupled with Sinn Fein’s threats to pull Martin McGuiness, Ireland’s deputy First Minister, out of the coalition (which, according to the Good Friday Agreement would require Peter Robinson to stand down also) the DUP could no longer decline negotiations.

Security concerns

The sticking points remain the same and can only be understood within the context of the Troubles that began in the late 1960s. The DUP, which, in the crudest of descriptions, favours continued and closer relations with the rest of Great Britain, suffered attacks and attempted killings at the hands of the IRA, an organisation commonly viewed as the paramilitary wing of Sinn Fein. Are we thus surprised that hostilities remain between these two political parties that, allegedly, still refuse to share lifts with one another?

The reluctance of the DUP to come to the table, or more specifically, to see policing and justice powers devolved to Northern Ireland, is born of broader fears than personal animosity. At the heart of this latest intransigence, as it has been since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast, is the issue of security. The DUP want assurances that any new policing arrangement can be sustained in the face of nationalist agitation. Sinn Fein argues it has provided this and accuses the DUP of playing politics with the peace process.

Some have leveled a similar accusation at Gordon Brown and Shaun Woodward, who gave a 48-hour deadline earlier in the week for the parties to come together or the British Government would publish their own proposals for devolution of policing and justice. Astute negotiating or short-sighted politics?

Edwin Poots of the DUP remarked that it was more important to get the “right-deal, as opposed to a hurried deal”. I would like to credit Brown with producing a galvanizing effect amongst Northern Irish politicians keen to produce a ‘Stormont solution’ as opposed to a decree from Westminster. Judging by his perpetual bungling, however, I can’t help but suspect this consequence was of the unexpected variety. Cynic I here you cry!

The Final Chapter?

The length of the latest round of negotiations and the hear-say that they could break-down at any moment, illustrates the continued delicacy of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing arrangement. Whatever agreement is arrived at, we should listen closely to the words of Martin McGuinnes and Peter Robinson. Anything less than total support for the decision threatens the dissolution of the Stormont Assembly.

Conversely, the very occurrence and duration of these talks, the longest since the peace process began in the 1990s, is a demonstration of the vast progress that has been made in a country some thought would be blighted with violence for decades to come. In an analogous remark to the recent crisis in the banking sector, the consequences of these negotiations are too big to be let to fail.

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