For much of the past week, it looked as if a new interim method of governing Northern Ireland was about to be unveiled.
Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Secretary, announced last Thursday that in Stormont’s absence he would introduce legislation to “support Northern Ireland departments to manage the immediate and evident challenges they face in stabilising public services and finances.”
This suggested something between direct rule and the current administrative autopilot of “indirect rule”.
The Irish Government appeared to be giving London space. Hours earlier, at Davos, the BBC reported that Leo Varadkar “would not be drawn” when asked about Dublin’s role in any ‘Plan B’.
But when the legislation was presented in Westminster on Wednesday, it merely moved the deadline to restore Stormont back two weeks to February 8th. Heaton-Harris had kicked the can down the road again, albeit not very far.
If the DUP misses the new deadline, Stormont’s door will be left open. The true significance of the past week’s pantomime is that time has run out for indirect rule. There is no longer any defensible reason to keep Northern Ireland in limbo if devolution is not promptly restored.
During last week’s public-sector strike every Stormont party, every trade union, the head of the Northern Ireland civil service and the Labour opposition in London all called on Heaton-Harris to step in and settle pay disputes. If such a sweeping direct rule intervention is justified for public-sector pay, why not for backlogged decisions on health, education and infrastructure? The distinction between them is arbitrary.
This week, the first serious legal challenge to indirect rule was brought by Belfast’s Children’s Law Centre. It will argue Stormont’s budget has been set without due process.
Andrew McCormick, a former senior civil servant, went further in a Belfast Telegraph article last week, describing indirect rule as “an affront to democracy and an unprecedented departure from constitutional principles”.
He claimed it breaches the European Convention on Human Rights and hence the Windsor Framework.
Direct rule is not such a fundamental outrage that Northern Ireland must be left almost ungoverned when Stormont falls, for any length of time
Indirect rule is the default when Stormont falls primarily because “British-only” direct rule has become unacceptable to nationalists. The strength of this objection is a relatively recent phenomenon – there was little sign of it when the DUP threatened to collapse Stormont in 2015. However, when Sinn Féin walked out two years later it wanted a riposte to accusations of simply handing power back to London. So it dug out a document from the 2006 St Andrew talks, in which both governments threatened the DUP with new “British-Irish partnership arrangements” if devolution was not restored. This meant Plan B must be “a form of joint authority”, Sinn Féin claimed.
The 2017 collapse of Stormont was followed within three months by an Assembly election, causing London to hold off on direct rule. Three months after that came the DUP confidence-and-supply deal with the Conservatives at Westminster. Combined with a worsening Brexit atmosphere, this made direct rule unacceptable to broader nationalism, including the Irish government.
Most of these reasons have since become redundant. They leave behind the political reality that nationalism will not tolerate direct rule without an enhanced role for Dublin. While that has to be accommodated, its somewhat random emergence also has to be recognised. Direct rule is not such a fundamental outrage that Northern Ireland must be left almost ungoverned when Stormont falls, for any length of time.
The DUP might spend the rest of this year dithering while the British government falls apart. A Labour government could then replace it and still take months or years to coax Stormont back to life. Direct rule could be introduced quickly as a stopgap measure, with safeguards and input from Dublin developed on the hoof.
The debate about Dublin’s role in any Plan B has raged amid two absurdities: few people in Northern Ireland seem to have noticed that London and Dublin are barely on speaking terms; and few people in the Republic seem to have noticed the debate at all.
It would take time for both governments to patch up their differences and reach even an interim arrangement.
As Alliance leader Naomi Long pointed out last weekend, the Republic is “circumscribed” to a consultative role in Northern Ireland by the Belfast Agreement. Moving beyond that would require a substantial renegotiation, as would reform of Stormont to address its large-party vetoes. These changes could be sought in parallel, in sequence, or as alternatives – but that would all take time and cause tension, during which devolution might still be down, or the DUP and Sinn Féin could threaten to bring it down. Indirect rule should not be the only alternative.
One immediate role Dublin could play would be signalling no objection to London taking urgent decisions at Stormont. Is direct rule still ‘British only’ if Britain effectively needs Ireland’s consent?