Opinion

Newton Emerson: Expect Sinn Féin to wait until autumn before saving Stormont

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.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

Expectations management is now in full swing, which explains why Sinn Féin seems to be swinging to and fro. Last week, Gerry Adams made it clear his party will be returning to Stormont. This week, lesser party figures were tasked with rumbling about how the DUP and the British government are endangering devolution and wrecking all hopes of a deal by the official June 29 deadline. This will enable Sinn Féin to say it saved devolution when a deal is struck in the autumn. There was never much hope of the official deadline being met - why rush to restore an assembly just in time for its two-month summer break? It would be even dafter for Sinn Féin to jump before seeing how the next few weeks pan out in London. After that, however, all signs point back to Stormont.

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A letter to the Scottish government that Arlene Foster could not remember sending has been released under the Freedom of Information Act, confirming that in 2015, while she was finance minister, she asked Edinburgh not to convert Northern Ireland civil partnerships into same-sex marriages to avoid legal “uncertainty”. Foster’s DUP predecessor Simon Hamilton sent a similar letter six months before, indicating this may have been some party or executive initiative taken over their heads. But that will not lessen the main effect of the story. The DUP has now been seen to have stuck its nose into social policy beyond Northern Ireland - and this has been widely noted in Britain, where everyone was promised the DUP would only stick its hand in the till. As well as making a Tory-DUP deal more toxic, campaigners across the water are now licensed to demand change here.

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It’s all fun and games in Northern Ireland politics until the summer comes along and reminds you that it’s really all about paramilitary thuggery. Loyalists are flagging mixed areas of south Belfast, including a new shared housing scheme built under the DUP and Sinn Féin’s Together: Building a United Community programme. South Belfast MP Emma Little-Pengelly, recently endorsed by the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando, was a DUP special adviser during that programme’s creation. The election endorsement contained an unprecedented warning to all unionists and loyalists not to vote Alliance, denouncing every such vote as “a nail in the union’s coffin”. Sabotaging mixed housing looks like part and parcel of this reasoning. Pengelly described the situation as “complex” and said residents did not want “a fuss”. Who can blame them? Anyone making a fuss might be threatened or worse - and anyone taking the flags down is quite likely to be arrested.

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The favourite expression of Stormont finance ministers down the ages has been “Barnett consequential” - the extra money Northern Ireland gets as a consequence of any public spending increase in England, via the Barnett formula, which supposedly equalises spending per head across the UK. Sources at the Treasury have suggested this cuts both ways, meaning that for every £1 Northern Ireland gets in a DUP-Tory deal, an extra £35 must be spent in Britain. Unless you are familiar with the world of public sector accounting, it is hard to appreciate just what a cracking rib-tickler of joke this is. Suffice it to say that for the whole 36 hours the DUP reportedly refused to answer phone calls from Number 10, Theresa May could probably hear giggles from Number 11.

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Former Nama adviser Frank Cushnahan has dropped his legal actions against the BBC and the editor of BBC Spotlight. He had been in the process of appealing a judge’s ruling that the BBC had a “clear public interest” in broadcasting an investigation into his Nama dealings. The same judge also found that parts of his case were an abuse of process. Cushnahan says he now intends to take the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights because the law does not enable him to protect his reputation. It is far from clear that he can do this regarding a case he has abandoned - how can he prove he would not have won? The implication of Cushnahan’s complaint is that we should have a European-style privacy law, making it almost impossible to report on public figures. Perhaps the DUP would like to put that in a Northern Ireland ‘bill of rights’.

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Many Irish people cringed when new Taoiseach Leo Varakdar said his first visit to Downing Street reminded him of a scene from Love, Actually. Heaven knows what his hosts made of it, as Irish visitors tend to remind them of when mortars landed in the garden. This has led to confusion before. In 1997, when the Sinn Féin leadership visited Downing Street for the first time since 1920, Martin McGuinness walked into the cabinet office and said: “So this is where the damage was done.” Tony Blair’s chief of staff confirmed it was indeed the room where the 1991 IRA attack blew in the windows. “No,” replied McGuinness. “I meant this is where Michael Collins signed the treaty.”

newton@irishnews.com