Opinion

Newton Emerson: DUP devolution doomsday clock is reset

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

At the start of this month, Jeffrey Donaldson warned he would bring down Stormont if protocol talks had not concluded by the end of this month.

At the start of this week, with that deadline approaching, the DUP leader warned he would bring down Stormont if talks were “strung out for weeks”.

On Thursday, the DUP attempted an executive vote against sea border checks.

Stormont cannot override the protocol, as previous DUP efforts have demonstrated.

But a legal argument by loyalist activist Jamie Bryson was wheeled out to justify another go. A party source told the BBC’s Jayne McCormack this was “a staging post ahead of more decisions in the coming days.”

So we were down from months, to weeks, to days. It seemed Stormont was due a version of Labour’s much-mocked warning a decade ago: “72 hours to save the NHS”.

Then first minister Paul Givan emerged from the vote to say the executive must survive until an EU-UK meeting on February 21. The DUP’s devolution doomsday clock was reset.

Who is any of this still fooling, let alone impressing?

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The DUP may not collapse Stormont before May but it is clearly planning some post-election hokey cokey. At a press conference on Monday, Jeffrey Donaldson was asked if his party would serve with a Sinn Féin first minister.

The DUP leader replied he will respect the rules and outcome of May's election, but added: “those rules give us alternatives, they give us options and I would remind you that pretty much all of the other parties have opted out of the executive in certain circumstances, have gone into opposition. All of those options are available to my party. Why should I predetermine now what I'm going to do when we haven't even completed the selection of our candidates?”

The DUP could only enter opposition if it were the second-largest unionist party - and Donaldson will not even discuss coming second to Sinn Féin. So something else has been drawn up on the whiteboard at headquarters that is just about within the rules. Perhaps the DUP will split itself into two parties in the assembly, each smaller than the UUP. This suggestion is offered only half in jest.

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Doug Beattie's fall from grace is a social media phenomenon coming full circle. The UUP leader owed his rise in no small part to the inveterate tweeting that has brought him low. He built an online profile that was noticed by journalists, who then amplified it to party colleagues. Yet there is scant sign this ‘Beattie bounce' ever translated to the polls. UUP support is 14 per cent, the level it was at before he became leader. Beattie has developed no distinct policies, beyond an image now ruined. The circle has nothing in the middle.

Half the adult population in Northern Ireland has a Twitter account and a quarter look at it daily but only seven per cent use it as a source of news on Northern Ireland, according to Ofcom - less than half the figure for Cool FM. The vast majority of tweets are produced by a tiny proportion of users.

Politicians and journalists tend to be active users, so a presence on the site can have influence. However, spending all day on Twitter is an addictive illusion of engagement, with a risk of scandal out of all proportion to the electoral benefits. Even for politicians whose tweeting is above reproach, it is an extravagant waste of time.

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Sinn Féin condemned Beattie's offensive tweets, only to have comparable tweets from three of its MLAs uncovered by the Stephen Nolan show. Fortunately, the party had its double standards prepared. In the assembly the day before, Michelle O'Neill responding to a question from one of those MLAs on abortion services. The deputy first minister compared the lack of services to violence against women, denouncing it as “hypocrisy”, “appalling” and “totally unacceptable”.

Asked by the DUP's Diane Dodds if she would also condemn IRA violence against women, O'Neill replied: “The politics of condemnation is not the right space for us to be very much focused on.”

Where does condemnation by politicians end and the politics of condemnation begin? Could it be whenever a republican has finished speaking?

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The executive re-allocates its unspent funds three times a year, in what are known as monitoring rounds. With a clear eye on the election, Sinn Féin and the SDLP are arguing over £100 million left over in the current round. The SDLP says it is “absolutely outrageous” Sinn Féin finance minister Conor Murphy could not find a use for the money, which may have to surrendered to the Treasury. Murphy says other ministers were late engaging with the monitoring round, extra Covid cash has distorted the figures and in any case the Treasury lets him carry up to £130 million over into the next financial year.

All parties should step back from these tri-annual accounting arguments, which just turn voters off Stormont as a whole. Underspending is inevitable, money should not be squandered to meet deadlines and £100 million is less than one per cent of the executive's budget.

The restriction on carrying over funds is the real, shared problem.