Opinion

Brian Feeney: Ominous signs as Stormont slowly implodes and British and Irish governments remain far apart

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

The British and Irish governments are as far apart as they've been for 30 years, and that's a bad thing. Pictured are Boris Johnson and Micheal Martin at Hillsborough Castle in August 2020.: Brian Lawless/PA Wire.
The British and Irish governments are as far apart as they've been for 30 years, and that's a bad thing. Pictured are Boris Johnson and Micheal Martin at Hillsborough Castle in August 2020.: Brian Lawless/PA Wire. The British and Irish governments are as far apart as they've been for 30 years, and that's a bad thing. Pictured are Boris Johnson and Micheal Martin at Hillsborough Castle in August 2020.: Brian Lawless/PA Wire.

It’s a commonplace observation that the Stormont executive is dysfunctional. Even those passing for ministers in the grandiose Ruritanian county council admit that.

The DUP has pretty well ceased to cooperate on anything; obstructing, vetoing, paying only lip service to all-Ireland bodies. Elements in the party support Jim Allister’s line of protest politics and would engage in passive aggressive boycotting if they could.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Irish and British governments deliberately created the scenery at Stormont with the maximum trappings of a fictitious government accompanied by maximum opportunity to strut about importantly plus access to an opulent gravy boat, and boy, don’t the assembly members revel in it all. Apart from all the cash swilling around for chairs and deputy chairs, there are the Gilbert and Sullivan titles for Speaker – seriously Speaker as in Westminster or the US congress? – Principal Deputy Speaker, Deputy Speakers and who knows the full list of pompous posts?

However, the two governments knew that even all the baubles and bangles wouldn’t guarantee good behaviour so they established various structures available to oversee the carry-on at Stormont, the main one being the British-Irish Inter-Governmental Conference (BIIGC) and its permanent secretariat. The BIIGC used to meet regularly, but after the Conservatives came to power in 2010, then a Fine Gael dominated government in Dublin from 2011, meetings tailed off and stopped. It’s difficult to know which government is more to blame, but certainly Enda Kenny’s government took little interest in the north and his responsible ministers more or less disengaged.

The BIIGC is supposed to ‘promote bilateral co-operation at all levels on all matters of mutual interest within the competence of both governments’. It doesn’t, and for the last five years that has been because British governments have not cooperated. Partly that was because of Brexit, but more importantly because of the Conservative party being captured by extreme xenophobic, nativist figures exemplified by Johnson’s Cabinet of nodding dogs, their tails wagging union jacks. You’d have thought that while the executive had collapsed the BIIGC would have been meeting regularly, but it hardly met at all, mainly because Theresa May’s government didn’t want to operate it.

The last time it met was May 2019 and pretty frosty it was too with the British not agreeing to a joint press conference and refusing the Irish delegation a room for conducting their own press conference. There’s been no meeting since Johnson’s crew took over that summer and none is planned. None of the work proposed at the 2019 meeting has happened. The truth is that the British government doesn’t want to cooperate with the Irish government because many in Johnson’s Cabinet and Brexiteers outside it, fixated with their peculiar concept of sovereignty, don’t accept that an Irish government should have any say in the north’s affairs. Most have never read the Good Friday Agreement. Those who have like Michael Gove deplore it despite protestations to the contrary. Others don’t think devolution in itself is a good idea (Johnson said Scottish devolution had been “a disaster”) and have been clawing back powers from devolved regions.

The prognosis is bad. Last week in a forlorn speech in the Seanad Simon Coveney said: “Good things happen in Northern Ireland when the British and Irish governments work together.” The opposite is also true: bad things happen when the British government goes it alone. That’s what’s happening with the Irish protocol as the British government takes unilateral action to subvert it. Of course it’s between the EU and UK, but if anything is a ‘matter of mutual interest’, it’s trade between Britain and Ireland, not to mention the small matter of the slowly imploding tragi-comedy at Stormont.

Experience shows that on each occasion the scenery at Stormont collapsed around the players only the two governments acting together could restore it. Now they’re further apart than they’ve been for thirty years: a bad thing.