OPINION:NORTHERN IRELAND needs a robust political system that can take decisions, as well as one that represents everybody fairly. The current difficulties in the Executive raise a question over whether the system devised in the 1998 Belfast agreement needs to be improved to ensure that it passes the test of decisiveness, as well as the test of fairness, writes JOHN BRUTON
Like the rest of the island, Northern Ireland faces real economic threats. It is heavily dependent on the British exchequer. Some 32 per cent of its workforce is employed in the government sector. That sector is kept going by an annual net transfer of £16 billion from the British exchequer. Now the British exchequer is running short of money. It has a deficit of 13 per cent of its GDP.
Both major parties in Britain are agreed that after the election there will have to be big cutbacks in spending. Such cutbacks would be more of a threat to areas like Northern Ireland that are disproportionately dependent on public sector employment.
A question the Executive must ask itself is whether the system, in its present form, is capable of making quick, fair and efficient decisions to reduce public spending in a way that maximises the long-term dynamism of the local economy and protects its job-creating capacity. The trouble is that the parties are not staying up all night discussing the threats to employment in Northern Ireland arising from the financial crisis or what to do about them. Instead, it is the policing and parades issues which have brought them to the precipice. These issues have little or nothing to do with the economy, and have been around for a long time, and could have been settled years ago.
The parties have been sitting together in the Executive for a long time and presumably interacting on a daily basis. One might, therefore, have expected that they would have quietly come to some common understanding on how to tackle these two well-rehearsed problems, policing and parades, without the need for high-profile, all-night sessions attended by the Taoiseach and the British prime minister, both of whom have plenty of other things to do.
The fact that the parties have not used their ample time together in the Executive to sort out these two predictable issues illustrates an underlying problem with the 1998 arrangements for the Executive. These mean that the Executive does not face an opposition that is ready to take over from it. So long as each of the two bigger parties keep a majority in their own “community” happy, they are guaranteed their places, and do not have to worry about what the other “community” is thinking.
These arrangements were, of course, put in place for very good reasons and to deal with an historic problem. To prevent a majority-take-all system returning, as was the case from 1920 to 1972 when the unionist majority had all the power, the 1998 agreement required that every decision have the agreement of a sufficient number of both unionist and nationalist representatives. This is to achieve what is called cross-community consent.
Each decision must, at minimum, have 40 per cent support of representatives who have registered themselves formally as “unionist” and also 60 per cent of those registered as “nationalist” or vice versa. Representatives of parties who decline to register as either “unionist” or “nationalist” may vote, but their votes do not count when it comes to deciding if cross-community consent has been obtained. Thus the votes of members of the Assembly who do not register in one of the two ancient camps are worth less than the votes of those who do.
Thus there is a systemic disincentive to the formation of parties that strive to win support on the basis of providing a new politics that transcends the historic divisions, and which appeal across the divide, and a disincentive to voting for such parties. Electioneering thus becomes a process of segmentation of the electorate, not of reconciliation.
And as the work of the Executive and the Assembly is a search for a permanent and perfect balance on a see-saw between the weights of two narrowly defined communities, there is a rational incentive for voters to choose parties at the more extreme end of their own particular community spectrum. This is seen by many as the best way of maximising leverage for their own side or of counterbalancing the possible election of extremists on the other side.
In fairness, it must be acknowledged that there might never have been an agreement at all in 1998, if these complicated, and apparently perverse, arrangements had not been put in place. And if there had been no agreement in 1998, a lot of people might have been killed since then. But perhaps it is now time to accept that, while the arrangements have kept the peace, they have also preserved and exaggerated the divisions that led to the conflict in the first place. Now may be the time to start thinking about other ways to achieve cross-community consent, ways that allow for more decisiveness and which achieve cross-community consent without polarising representation in the way the present system does. One might, for example, say that for any Executive to be formed, it must have the support of (say) 75 per cent of the Assembly, and that all decisions of the Assembly must have a vote of the same percentage to go through.
One would then no longer need to register representatives as “unionist” or “nationalist” for the purposes of establishing cross-community consent. That change would make it easier for parties who seek the centre ground between the two communities and to emphasise economic and social choices rather than solely ones to do with sovereignty.
Such a change would still, in practice, require cross-community consent to be achieved because no decision or Executive could assemble 75 per cent support without a lot of support in both of the two traditional “communities”. It would also allow an opposition to develop which could fight to replace at least some of the parties in the ruling coalition Executive.
In present economic circumstances, divided societies, like Northern Ireland, will not escape the need to make tough decisions, any more than more united societies. The current difficulties illustrate a design problem that needs to be studied by all those who want to build structures that reconcile inherently divided communities that share the same space, whether this be in Afghanistan, Iraq, Belgium, Macedonia or elsewhere.
Divided societies do indeed have to go to greater lengths than others to devise systems that emphasise fairness, but they need to emphasise robust and speedy decision making too.
John Bruton is a former taoiseach and former EU ambassador to Washington