On 29 August 2018, almost a year and a half since the last Stormont election failed to produce a ‘new’ administration, Ireland’s north-eastern counties took first prize in Europe’s ‘time spent without government’ category. Previous title-holder Belgium had gone a mere 541 days ‘ungoverned’ back in 2010-11. The award came as something of a surprise, not least because the government with ultimate jurisdiction over the Six Counties didn’t reside at Stormont Castle anyway, but in Downing Street.
Unlike Belgium, in the north of Ireland it is the devolved administration and not the actually-governing government that has been suspended. Like Belgium, the foretold four horsemen are yet to touch down in Aldergrove airport. ‘Direct rule’, on the other hand, has most definitely arrived. In fact, it arrived 500-and-something days ago, just none of the parties cared to notice as to do so suited no one.
North on ice
So here we are and here we have been since March 2017: an empty Assembly chamber; those elected to sit in it focusing on ‘constituency work’, while still collecting the monthly pay packet; and, rather than stick to the rulebook and run an election nobody wants, Britain’s Northern Ireland Office have contented themselves to put Stormont on ice (which sounds like the worst Sunday-night television contest you can imagine). So, how did this happen? Why is it happening? Who on Earth cares?
How?
In February 2017 events conspired to make Sinn Fein do what Sinn Fein never does: confront Unionism. This brief challenge followed Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) involvement in a succession of high-profile scandals, principally that surrounding the Renewable Heat Incentive – which everyone now insists on calling a ‘botched’ fuel subsidy scheme. It was the type of ‘botch’ that makes those in the know a lot of money at the public expense; in other countries they call it corruption. The characteristically nonchalant response of the DUP to the associated revelations, together with the humiliation engendered by Sinn Fein’s unwillingness to do anything about it, finally stirred the party’s ‘grassroots’. Pressured from below, Sinn Fein collapsed the house of cards that was the Northern Ireland Executive.*
Why?
But that was 20 months ago. When, in the past, Unionism manufactured its own crises of ‘the institutions’, Sinn Fein was keen to get things back up and running. What’s changed? Early on it was suggested that Sinn Fein was playing it cool, that it suited the party not to be responsible for the northern mess while it awaited the forever-coming election in Dublin. We were told it was playing the long game, just biding time until the Brexit chaos swept in, anticipating conditions in which it could ‘force’ a border poll and bring forth Irish unity from the ashes. Nonsense. Sinn Fein doesn’t have a long game. Their people would be back at Stormont yesterday if the DUP would only open the door.
In fact, they thought it was opening earlier this year when a deal to restore the Executive seemed imminent. Having raised the slogan ‘no return to the status quo’ at the time of the Executive’s collapse, Sinn Fein – in the heat of the moment – named its price for re-entering a power-sharing arrangement. But what the DUP decried as a Republican ‘shopping list’ of demands was progressively whittled down to a takeaway order of tweaks to Assembly procedure and a diluted Irish language law. Ultimately, even this was too much for loyalism. On 11 February 2018 as the British Prime Minister and Irish Taoiseach prepared trips to Belfast to congratulate themselves on the anticipated Stormont reboot, the DUP – we are told – was busy briefing representatives of the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force on the contents of the prospective deal – and especially on the merits of conceding limited legal protection to the Irish language. The paramilitaries cast their veto and the DUP promptly scuppered negotiations.
Since the 2017 General Election made kingmakers of the DUP’s parliamentary contingent, power has decidedly shifted within that party from Belfast to London. They who were supposed to be yesterday’s men, packed off to draw the Westminster pension, now run the show – and are loving every minute. Never keen on power-sharing, direct rule by a government that depends on their votes suits them fine.
Who cares?
In the Six Counties, there was only ever one section of society for whom power-sharing was neither treachery nor begrudged concession, but a triumph. Sinn Fein has come to represent a very substantial Catholic middle class. The emergence, growth and institutionalisation of that class is perhaps the most important political development in 50 years of Irish history. Confident and entitled, they were major beneficiaries of the process expressed legally in the Good Friday Agreement and the political institutions it established. Yet, as the north’s public sector is dismantled and Brexit looms, there is a slow realisation that their place is not secure. They complain that, in the north, Sinn Fein is short on leadership and lacks direction. Well of course. You hardly need a compass if you don’t intend to go anywhere. As a party, Sinn Fein arrived at its destination long ago and now only moves when it’s shoved one way or the other: into headlong retreat whenever unionism takes the offensive, or, rarely, stumbling forward, pushed by its own base – and always ready to shuffle back when no one’s looking.
Some commentators wilfully mistake the party’s political floundering for the unravelling of an enigmatic masterplan. But they’re as lost as the rest of them. Reformism can feather the nest of an intermediate class and their party in the short term. What it cannot do is equip them to deal with a bloody big crisis of the capitalist system. They’re up shit creek and they decommissioned the paddle.
Patrick Casey
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 266 October/November 2018
*For the relevant background see: ‘Ireland: “power-sharing” executive collapses’ in FRFI 255 and ‘Ireland: no return to the status quo?’
