WE must wait another week to confirm that Sinn Fein will permit the DUP’s Paul Givan to become first minister. It seems safe to assume his appointment will go through, despite some republican grandstanding. Neither party is prepared for an early election and both could be punished for causing another Stormont collapse.
Perhaps we are fortunate the Northern Ireland Office has not found time to pass the New Decade, New Approach law that would have stretched the permitted week without a first minister or deputy first minister to six months.
This is intended to stabilise the executive if one of the two main parties walks out, by leaving the other still in office. However, in the very different context of one party needing the other to facilitate a reshuffle, the law could have led to six months of mischief and manoeuvring.
Givan will spend next week being tested over Irish language legislation, having infamously cut the Líofa bursary before Stormont’s last collapse.
There is an older irony. In 2007, while he was DUP culture minister, Edwin Poots cancelled the Irish language act the government promised under the St Andrews Agreement.
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For all Yes, Minister jokes about sausage wars, serious games are being played over the Northern Ireland protocol. An unknown EU member state appears to be threatening the Republic with a sea border between Ireland and Europe, to discourage Dublin lobbying for a softer sea border here. US President Joe Biden has given the UK an extraordinary diplomatic rebuke for “inflaming” tensions, yet also said the UK should reach a “negotiated settlement” - Brussels insists the protocol is the settlement and negotiations are over.
Biden has also offered Boris Johnson a way to square the Brexit circle: if the UK adopts EU food rules, the White House will ensure this does not prevent a US-UK trade deal.
That truly could be a best of both worlds for the whole UK: free trade with Europe and America and the sea border virtually gone. However, it would jeopardise other trade deals, such as the one about to be struck with Australia. And could Biden really deliver a deal that locked out American farmers? Trade deals take years - will he still be in office or in control of Congress?
These questions might not be decisive, given Johnson’s style of government. All he needs to move on is a good story.
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The DUP has backed a bill to liberalise Northern Ireland’s pub and club opening hours, meaning it has finally taken a Free Presbyterian coup to let us drink until 3am. As if that was head-spinning enough, only Sinn Féin has objected to an SDLP proposal to review the liquor licensing system. Under Northern Ireland’s uniquely restrictive ‘surrender principle’, the number of licences has been effectively fixed since partition. As more have been acquired by supermarkets and off-licences it has become increasingly impossible to open a bar, handing existing publicans a lucrative cartel. Sinn Féin’s acquiescence to this is not thought to be concern about the devil’s buttermilk. Stormont officials simply cannot be bothered tackling the problem and Sinn Féin cannot be bothered tackling its Stormont officials.
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Cinemas will be able to serve alcohol - if they can find a liquor licence to buy - under an amendment to the bill from independent unionist Claire Sugden. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK and Ireland where this is not presently the case so the reform is overdue, although its appeal fades somewhat with age. At 34, Sugden can still imagine drinking through a two-hour movie without worrying she will miss half of it.
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Sinn Féin is apparently the obstruction to removing the fair employment exemption for teachers, the only religious job discrimination permitted in Northern Ireland outside a church or home setting.
Fair employment laws have always contained the exemption but only with a clear legislative ‘off switch’, implying it should be temporary. Every executive party has long claimed to want to scrap it. However, fresh efforts to do so have run into a mysterious blockage at the Sinn Féin and DUP-controlled executive office. Neither party will elaborate but only Sinn Féin has equivocated over this issue in the past. At least it has the decency to be embarrassed about it.
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The secretary of state has appointed former Irish rugby player Trevor Ringland as the UK government’s special envoy on Northern Ireland to the United States.
Sinn Féin has complained this is “arrogant and disrespectful” as Ringland is a professed unionist and the executive already has a diplomatic bureau in Washington.
Could a professed nationalist represent the UK government? As foreign relations are not devolved, why does Stormont have a diplomatic bureau?
The day before Ringland’s appointment, Sinn Féin’s representative in North America published an article calling for a US special envoy to take on “English nationalists” and “the Orange card”. Was that respectful?
Perhaps Irish-American congressman Richard Neal should have the postscript on Ringland’s appointment, although he made this remark last month: “I often get told by unionists that they never got a hearing in Washington. They did, just nobody agreed with them."
