When is a talks process over? Surely when the host says it’s over – unless you’re the leader of the DUP.
“This is starting to feel a bit like a bad break-up, where one person has listed themselves on Facebook as single and the other one is still claiming it’s complicated,” said Alliance Party leader Naomi Long to laughter from the assembled press pack outside Hillsborough Castle.
On Tuesday the North’s four Executive parties – Sinn Féin, the DUP, Alliance and Ulster Unionists – were back at the Northern Secretary’s round table for further talks on the financial package on offer to a restored Stormont. As expected Chris Heaton-Harris upped the figure – from £2.5 billion to £3.3 billion – with the key change the write-off of the Stormont overspend estimated at £559 million.
The talks on finances have concluded, he said; this is the UK government’s final offer, and it will remain on the table until the Northern Assembly and Executive are restored.
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And just as this conversation is over, he said, so too are the political talks with the DUP. “From our perspective the Windsor Framework talks on all issues of substance have effectively concluded, but we’re always happy to answer concerns and any questions on these. It is now time for decisions to be made,” Mr Heaton-Harris said.
Except that wasn’t what the DUP heard. “Well, the Secretary of State certainly hasn’t told us inside that the talks and the talking is over,” the DUP leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, said in response to questions from reporters. His party’s position, he said, was “very clear, there is not yet agreement finalised on the issues of substance, and we will continue to engage with the government to get to the point where that agreement is reached.”
“Jeffrey clearly wasn’t in the same meeting as the rest of us then,” was the response from the Sinn Féin vice-president and Northern Ireland’s first minister designate Michelle O’Neill. “It was very clear, unequivocal on the part of the Secretary of State, that those Windsor Framework discussions are now completed, so nobody can take anything from that other than that very statement.”
Her party colleague, the Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald, summed it up: “The work is done here.”
Sinn Féin, Alliance, the Ulster Unionists, the SDLP all agree that it is done, that it is long past time to get back into government in Northern Ireland and the place for any further discussions or changes is inside the Assembly and Executive, not outside of it.
Yet the way Stormont operates means that as long as the DUP chooses to stay outside everyone else must remain outside; in the short term it means that despite all the optimism and apparent progress of recent weeks people in Northern Ireland will spend another Christmas without a government.
The DUP will have to consider how it can justify to striking public sector workers who will not now get a pay deal in time for Christmas.
A wide-scale “day of action” involving all unions already engaged in strike action has just been announced for January 18th, to coincide with what is now the next date in the talks/not talks calendar – in theory the deadline by which the Northern Secretary must call a fresh Assembly election if Stormont is still not back up and running by then.
Less than a week ago the mood was very different; Donaldson hailed the “significant progress” made in the talks and said the time was approaching for a decision. “I haven’t come this far to plan for failure,” he said.
Yet when it was time for a decision, whether though his own innate cautiousness, fear of opponents within the DUP or within unionism more broadly, or simply not wanting to give the impression the DUP could be bought off with £3.3 billion, Donaldson has hesitated.
The momentum towards a deal has stopped; in the short, cold days of January it will be difficult to get it started again.
To borrow the evocative phrase used by David Sterling on the BBC’s The View last week, the risk with such a delay is that the mice can get at it; the more they nibble away at it over the holidays the less likely it can be patched back together come the new year when the UK government’s bandwidth will be increasingly taken up by the forthcoming general election.
It is take it or leave it time for the DUP; if the DUP is to take it and go back in it will have to do so swiftly in the new year, but if it opts to leave it the stalemate could continue to drift, potentially as far as that general election.
The Irish Government, Sinn Féin and the SDLP have spoken of the need for a Plan B, and there are also calls for the reform of the powersharing institutions, not least from Alliance.
Stormont was supposed to be the compromise; if it cannot be made to work then it will fuel the conversation about the alternative, be it joint authority or shared stewardship or indeed direct rule or a Border poll.
The current talks process is over; the longer the Stormont stalemate continues the more those talks about an alternative will gather pace.
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