Former taoiseach Bertie Ahern said the Irish Government was fully entitled to assume a greater consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland in the event of the Stormont Executive not being restored after the new Assembly elections.
Mr Ahern said Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar were well within their rights to assert the Irish Government’s right to more involvement in Northern Ireland should the DUP continue to hold out after a new election is held.
Chris Heaton-Harris, Britain’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, announced on Friday that he is to call a snap Assembly election after the DUP refused to restore the Executive until concerns over the Northern Ireland protocol governing the movement of goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland are resolved.
But Mr Ahern, who negotiated the Belfast Agreement — also known as the Good Friday agreement — with British prime minister Tony Blair and the main parties in Northern Ireland in 1997, ruled out any question of a joint authority because there is no provision for such a move within the agreement, which never uses the phrase.
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But he did say the agreement does allow for a greater consultative role by the Irish Government if devolved government is suspended.
Mr Ahern said he didn’t believe that Mr Martin or Mr Varadkar had used the phrase “joint authority” with the intention of suggesting the Irish Government would have a direct role in governing Northern Ireland.
He said he believed what both Mr Martin and Mr Varadkar were seeking to make clear was that there could be no return to the type of direct rule from Westminster as had happened on previous occasions when the Stormont Assembly was suspended, and they were entitled to say that.
“I think this is an area [mention of joint authority] that can raise the hackles of unionism in the North very easily… [but] there can’t be joint authority because the words ‘joint authority’ are not in the Good Friday agreement,” he told the Daniel O’Connell School in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry.
“But since the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, we have a special position and the Irish Government are custodians of the Good Friday agreement and so anything that happens, the Irish Government are totally right and have an obligation to be across what is happening.
“I heard some comments from across the water yesterday that’s it the same as it used to be — well, it’s not the same as it used to be. The constitutional position is based on consent, it is not dominated by Westminster any more, those days are gone.”
Mention of a joint authority was immediately condemned by DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson. “Joint authority would be an abandonment of the Good Friday agreement... The Irish Government needs to hear this loud and clear, unionists will never accept joint authority.
“If the Irish Government thinks that by threatening me or my party with joint authority that that will help us to get to a solution, that it will move us forward on the basis of mutual respect and understanding, then I’m afraid the Irish Government is deluded,” he said.
The British government also rejected any suggestion of a joint authority in the absence of a powersharing government at Stormont, saying it was “not being considered” and pointing out that it was not consistent with the terms of the Belfast Agreement.
“The UK government is absolutely clear that the consent principle governs the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. We will not countenance any arrangements that are inconsistent with that principle,” said a Northern Ireland Office spokesman.
But speaking in interview with former Irish Times political editor Stephen Collins at the Daniel O’Connell School, Mr Ahern said that he could not see any new election resolving anything as he expected it to broadly return the same parties with the same numbers of MLAs.
“I think it was inevitable all along that the DUP would not take their seats… and unfortunately the British government’s minds were elsewhere...Chris Heaton-Harris was running Boris’s campaign for the last two weeks so he wasn’t very helpful to Northern Ireland.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s sad, having an election that can’t achieve anything. If everyone voted one way or the other way, it wouldn’t make any difference because the negotiations on the protocol are between the UK and the EU, so nothing happens other than raising the temperature.”
He added: “It’s about one clause in the protocol which comes out of Brexit, so it is Brexit which has caused this problem and the only one that can fix this problem is the UK government negotiating with the EU. So the poor individuals running around trying to get elected in the North have my sympathy.”
