ANALYSIS:DUP dithering over the devolution of policing and justice could see the powersharing experiment come apart
KEEP TALKING. That was the message from Brian Cowen and Gordon Brown to Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness last night on how to resolve the standoff over policing and justice that is threatening the Stormont powersharing administration.
We’re in for a period of intensive carrot and stick politics dictated by the British and Irish governments.
The Taoiseach and British prime minister have their work cut out because the trouble is that Robinson and McGuinness aren’t talking to each other.
The mood at Stormont last night remained one of recrimination, nervousness, tension and uncertainty. Sinn Féin chairman Declan Kearney, speaking in Co Antrim on Sunday, warned against “train wreck” politics. There was a real sense yesterday of a wreck waiting to happen unless Cowen, and particularly Brown, can persuade Robinson over the finish line on policing.
Perhaps it’s the “storm before the calm”, wondered SDLP Assembly member Alex Attwood, mindful of how so often in the past Northern politicians, after first talking themselves into a crisis in the end pulled back from the brink. Yet, there is no doubting the real political and official fear that the powersharing institutions could collapse. At Stormont and in Dublin and London people were wondering openly whether the Northern Executive and Assembly have a future because of the impasse.
Worryingly too, people were making comparisons between David Trimble, when he was the beleaguered first minister, and current First Minister Robinson. The DUP leader faces unionist opposition within and outside his own party. He has hard decisions to take and the official concern is that he will take no decision or the wrong decision.
Robinson and McGuinness jointly head the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister but there is absolutely no sense of theirs being a shared office.
On Friday McGuinness went down to Fermanagh with local Sinn Féin Minister Michele Gildernew to sympathise with the flood victims. On Saturday Robinson went to Fermanagh with local DUP Minister Arlene Foster for the same purpose. They should have gone together if they wished to demonstrate to the public that devolution is working. It isn’t.
What Sinn Féin politicians such as McGuinness, Declan Kearney and Upper Bann MLA John O’Dowd have been implicitly warning in recent days is that without devolution of justice the Executive can hardly survive.
That will earn political and public recrimination for both Sinn Féin and the DUP, but objectively it seems that Robinson and the DUP have most to lose from collapse.
Cowen has been told by McGuinness that the issue now goes beyond policing and justice, that more generally Sinn Féin has serious questions over continuing a political relationship with Robinson and the DUP that, in reality, doesn’t exist.
At the moment Robinson feels vulnerable on a number of fronts and that must be affecting his ability to take decisive action.
He faces opposition from Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party and from the Ulster Unionist Party energised by its link-up with the British Tories.
The party faces trouble in the Westminster elections regardless of whether or not he takes the leap on policing and justice. If he doesn’t, the DUP could be so damaged in Assembly elections – that would be due if Stormont folds – that Sinn Féin could emerge as the largest party with McGuinness in line for the First Minister post.
Robinson knows too that on the doorsteps the issues of expenses and political double-jobbing at Stormont and Westminster and the political lifestyle of the tabloid-dubbed “Swish Family Robinson” have done him damage.
There are also people within his own parliamentary party who are hardly married to the powersharing project. Yesterday morning East Derry DUP MP and MLA Gregory Campbell appeared to go on a solo run by telling BBC Radio Foyle that no date would be set by Christmas for the devolution of policing – as Sinn Féin is demanding – and that it could take years before these powers are transferred to Stormont.
Such comments on such a sensitive and critical matter surely were a matter for Robinson and not for Campbell. But there is no sense of any DUP mavericks being reined in by Robinson.
To make matters worse a Belfast Telegraphpoll of a cross-community representative group of 500 people carried out by public affairs consultancy Inform Communications had McGuinness as the most impressive minister in the Northern Executive. With some unionist support he polled 27 per cent compared to just 7 per cent for Robinson.
Moreover, there is absolutely no evidence of the indefatigable support that Robinson supplied to Ian Paisley through almost three decades as deputy DUP leader being supplied by his deputy Nigel Dodds.
Leadership is a particularly lonely post for the First Minister and DUP leader these days.
It can’t be easy. Yet Robinson must know if he continues to dither and procrastinate on policing and justice that the current Assembly and Executive will crash into the buffers.
Sinn Féin will take some of the blame if it walks out of Stormont but Robinson could suffer the worst of the wreckage.
It still appears emphatically in his, his party’s and Northern Ireland’s interest to move speedily on policing without bringing in more preconditions, but have all the pressures blinded him to that reality?
Gerry Moriarty is Northern Editor