The chaos in Westminster has obscured the fact that time has almost run out for the Northern Ireland Assembly elected in May. This prospect should prompt the Irish and British governments to take a hard look at the formula that underpins the formation of an Executive at Stormont.
If the arrangements designed to pave the way for power-sharing effectively stand in the way of a devolved government being established then it is surely time to change the rules rather than treating them as tablets of stone which cannot be tampered with.
As the former Alliance Party leader and Fine Gael MEP John Cushnahan pointed out in a recent submission to the Seanad consultation committee on the future of the island of Ireland, the obstacle to progress is the 2006 St Andrews Agreement which modified the 1998 Belfast Agreement as a sop to Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
The core of the St Andrews Arrangement was that the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister would no longer be elected by the Assembly, as happened under the terms of the Belfast Agreement. Instead the largest party was given the right to nominate the First Minister, and the largest party in the other community was given the right to nominate the Deputy First Minister.
In the short term it did persuade the DUP and Sinn Féin to come together, with Ian Paisley as First Minister and Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister working so closely in harness they were dubbed “the chuckle brothers”. While the arrangement continued under Paisley’s successor, Peter Robinson, it has not survived the test of time. What is has effectively done is to give the DUP and Sinn Féin a veto over the formation of the Executive and encouraged the drift from more moderate unionist and nationalist parties to the extremes.
Before the last election in May, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said he would not be prepared to serve under a Sinn Féin First Minister. After the election he changed the terms of his opposition by insisting the DUP would not take part in the Executive as long as the Northern Ireland Protocol remained in its current form.
That has resulted in a stalemate which has blocked the formation of a new Executive for the past five months. Under the current rules if it is not established by next Friday the Northern Secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, is obliged to call a new election. He told MPs on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of the Commons earlier this week that he had briefed his cabinet colleagues that this is what would happen.
“I cannot be clearer, that is what will happen on October 28th,” he said, with an election expected on December 15th. “I know that lots of people really do not see or do not want that to happen but it is a legislative requirement,” he told the committee.
As for extending the current deadline, he expressed doubt that it would be possible given the current parliamentary timetable.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney and his officials have been engaged in talks with their British counterparts and the parties in the North for the past two weeks and there seems little prospect of a last-minute agreement by the DUP to drop their objections to serving in a new Executive and no way of avoiding another election.
Whether Heaton-Harris will actually implement the threat to hold another election is an open question, and the resignation of Liz Truss as prime minister further complicates matters. The DUP is quite happy to have another go at winning an extra couple of seats, while Sinn Féin is confident it can squeeze more nationalist votes from the SDLP. In all likelihood another election will also result in stalemate. So what do the governments do then?
The basic problem as identified by Cushnahan is that the carve-up of political power between the two largest parties on either side of the traditional divide, far from encouraging them to co-operate, has given each of them a political veto which they both have used when it suited them to prevent the Assembly functioning.
Cushnahan has called on the Irish and British governments to initiate discussions with all of the North’s political parties to amend the St Andrews Agreement by adding a default mechanism to be implemented in event of either of the two main parties preventing the powersharing Assembly from discharging its powers.
He proposed that in such a scenario the British government should invite all parties to engage in negotiations with one another to form a voluntary coalition government which will command a majority in the Assembly and meet the requirement of fulfilling the criteria of having sufficient cross-community support to the satisfaction of both the Irish and British governments. Those parties that prefer not to be part of the coalition government could then serve as the official opposition.
Cushnahan is surely right that radical change in the St Andrews Agreement is required to guarantee political stability and the formation of future powersharing Executives in accordance with the Belfast Agreement. It is simply intolerable that the rules designed to underpin powersharing are preventing it happening.