2025 Is Unlikely To Be A Year Of Harmony In Northern Irish Politics
Prime Minister Keir Starmer in conversation with Northern Irish First Minister Michelle O'Neill and Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelley (Alamy)
5 min read
London and Dublin are starting to repair the Brexit damage but what comes next could make Northern Ireland even more unsettled, argues Alex Kane
Why, as the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) nudges towards its 28th anniversary, do we still have to ask if the institutions it created – the Assembly and Executive – are stable? Well, they have been down for five of the last eight years, and in the years they weren’t down they were the scene of almost serial stand-offs, cliff-edge wrestling and emergency summits (co-hosted by the British and Irish governments) to prevent collapse. Indeed, at celebration conferences to mark the 20th and 25th anniversaries of the ‘success’ of the GFA, in 2018 and 2023, neither the Assembly nor Executive was even functioning.
The instability stems from the fact the GFA was built around reaching conflict stalemate rather than conflict resolution. At the outset there was talk of underpinning the process with what David Trimble described as ‘constructive ambiguity’ – that is, allowing the individual parties to believe what they wanted to believe about what they had signed up to. But it didn’t take long until ambiguity was replaced with destructive clarity; the clarity that unionists and nationalists really didn’t want to copper-fasten cooperation and trust at the heart of government.
It's early days but there is little to suggest that 2025 is going to be the breakthrough year in terms of peace, hope and harmony in Northern Ireland’s politics. What may be of significance, though, is the reset in relationships between London and Dublin. They have been mostly terrible since the Brexit result in 2016, not least because Dublin accused London of planning to deploy a wrecking ball to previous commitments to the GFA, while a series of Conservative governments believed that Dublin was playing a negotiating hand dealt to it by the EU.
It is in the interests of both new governments to repair the damage, and it is expected they will begin work fairly quickly. Neither has any particular interest in pushing for a border poll, provision for which is made in the GFA, but it seems likely both will be prepared to discuss and then set in stone the precise terms and conditions for the calling of that poll on whether Northern Ireland wants to remain in the UK or join the Republic of Ireland.
That’s why it is worth keeping an eye on former taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who seems to be at the pilot stages of building a very broad-based Irish unity vehicle (detached from Sinn Fein). He’s willing to play a longish game, as are Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the backbone of the incoming coalition.
Northern Ireland has been shoved into something best described as a granny flat: not fully in the UK, nor fully in the EU
All of this will unsettle unionism, which already knows that British governments don’t have a strategic, economic, political, constitutional or emotional attachment to Northern Ireland. They may have been cheering Sinn Fein’s failure to enter an Irish coalition after the recent election, but history suggests they have more to fear from a British government than Sinn Fein, particularly if a British government is prepared to discuss border poll contingencies with its Irish counterpart.
And when unionism is unsettled, the internal tensions increase. Unionism is not a single, coherent entity. It is made up of competing factions and interests. They may be united on maintaining the constitutional status quo, but there are serious divisions on how best to secure that goal. Right now, for instance, one section prioritises devolution because it regards it as a better option than either direct rule or hybrid joint authority involving Dublin, while another – likely to grow – wants unionism to withdraw entirely, and permanently from the institutions, because it thinks they favour nationalist/republican interests.
Meanwhile, unionism, all of it, still has huge concerns about the impact of the NI Protocol and Windsor Framework. While there has always been a sort of begrudging acknowledgement that Northern Ireland has long been ‘a place apart’ within the UK, at least unionism could content itself that it was in the UK. Today, though, it has been shoved into something best described as a granny flat: not fully in the UK, nor fully in the EU. Again, another source of unsettlement for unionism and a further consequent detachment from trust in the GFA.
Some argue that the best way to underpin institutional stability would be reform of the original 1998 rules. At the moment, if either the DUP or Sinn Fein withdraws from the Executive, which both have done on previous occasions, then collapse follows. It is the ultimate veto, and that’s precisely why neither of the dominant unionist or nationalist parties would ever agree to its removal. It’s the supreme irony, of course; there can’t even be the pretence of stability in the absence of the nuclear veto option. Dr Strangelove territory, in other words.
It’s hard to see that genuine, cross-community stability is possible. After all these years they haven’t even managed to end the silo approach to policy or embrace a collective responsibility for a ‘Programme for Government’. The institutions swing between existence and limbo and it’s actually very difficult to tell the difference between those two states. To paraphrase Dr McCoy from Star Trek: “It’s government, Jim, but not as we know it.”
Alex Kane is a former director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party. He is now a commentator and columnist based in Belfast, working for newspapers and broadcast outlets on both sides of the border.
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