Opinion

Newton Emerson: Putting manners on DUP could result in voluntary coalition

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. Picture by Hugh Russell
First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. Picture by Hugh Russell First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. Picture by Hugh Russell

WHO now remembers ‘the solo run’?

That was the DUP’s red line - at least in public - throughout the years of negotiations on restoring devolution, after it became the largest party of unionism in 2003.

Peter Robinson, who led those negotiations for the DUP, vowed that never again would a minister act unilaterally on a major issue. Collective responsibility would be ensured and he proclaimed this to be the triumph of the 2006 St Andrews agreement, paving the way for Stormont’s return the following year.

By ‘minister’ the DUP meant ‘Sinn Féin ministers’ and the solo-run cited again and again was Martin McGuinness’s abolition of academic selection. The fact that McGuinness did this on the last day before Stormont’s 2002 suspension made the solo run problem worse in unionist eyes, rather than absolving a system given no time to address it.

St Andrews put a series of interlocking protections in legislation. Any “significant or controversial matter” or issue outside the programme for government has to be referred to the entire executive. If this does not happen, 30 assembly members can petition for it. This is all supported by a binding code of conduct, which more generally requires “consensus wherever possible.”

A new condition was also placed in the statutory pledge office, compelling ministers to “observe the joint nature of the offices of First Minister and deputy First Minister.”

Yet once the DUP got into power, it began ignoring the very protections it had insisted on - performing the ultimate decade-long solo run that has brought devolution to the point of collapse.

New talks now seem inevitable, either before or after an election. These are being referred to as Fresh Start 2 but if there is to be no return to the status quo, as Sinn Fein insists, what is needed is St Andrews 2 - another rebalancing of the Good Friday Agreement to ensure a more equal partnership.

What is to stop the DUP ignoring that as well?

In addition to being put into law the St Andrews agreement is in effect a treaty between the British and Irish governments, making them co-guarantors of its implementation. In practice, that means London. But, again in practice, what could London have done to stop the DUP sidelining Sinn Féin? No single step of the decade-long solo run was serious enough on its own to merit intervention by the British government or even by the Northern Ireland Office, all of whose powers would have seemed excessive. Even republicans might have baulked in principle at such disproportionate interference.

Sinn Féin has struggled over the past week, presumably for ideological reasons, to blame broken British promises for the current mess in Belfast. Gerry Adams cited the Bill of Rights, although that failure is entirely the rights sector’s fault. Martin McGuinness cited austerity and Brexit, although public spending has never fallen in Northern Ireland and Brexit has not happened.

The plain truth is that unionists used their slight advantage within the structure of the institutions to roll over Sinn Féin until republicans could take it no more. As the DUP is clearly prepared to ignore any lawful agreement that mitigates its slight advantage, while stepping in over slight sleights is too much of a British nuclear option, where do we go from here?

It is easy enough to see how Stormont should be tweaked to put unionists and republicans on a more solidly equal footing. The dreaded ‘deputy’ should be dropped from the title of deputy first minister, as Sinn Féin has long proposed. Petitions of concerns should be abolished (if the next election outcome does not make them redundant), committees should be opposition led - this list is long and well-known at the assembly and executive.

However, DUP sources have already indicated they will not rejoin office on significantly different terms to St Andrews. So new arrangements would have to be imposed by London, albeit with the fig-leaf of other Stormont parties concurring. If that is to be a credible threat, one of those new arrangements must remove the DUP’s nuclear option, by allowing the next-largest unionist party to fill its shoes if it walks out. But that would require depriving Sinn Féin of the same ability - meaning its walk-out this week, for example, would simply have put the SDLP in its place.

In other words, putting manners on the DUP means a huge jump towards voluntary coalition.

Is that acceptable to nationalists and republicans, after generations of clawing their way towards mandatory coalition?

newton@irishnews.com