Opinion

Newton Emerson: Renegotiation is overdue and might actually prove popular

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.

At Sinn Féin’s election launch, Michelle O’Neill ruled out changes to mandatory coalition, saying Jeffrey Donaldson must serve with a republican first minister and “we will not be shifting any goalposts to satisfy unionism before, or after elections.” Photo: Sinn Fein/PA Wire
At Sinn Féin’s election launch, Michelle O’Neill ruled out changes to mandatory coalition, saying Jeffrey Donaldson must serve with a republican first minister and “we will not be shifting any goalposts to satisfy unionism before, At Sinn Féin’s election launch, Michelle O’Neill ruled out changes to mandatory coalition, saying Jeffrey Donaldson must serve with a republican first minister and “we will not be shifting any goalposts to satisfy unionism before, or after elections.” Photo: Sinn Fein/PA Wire

Sinn Féin’s election slogan, “make politics work”, is a clever riposte to the ‘make Northern Ireland work’ slogan used by everyone else. However, it clashes with Michelle O’Neill’s repeated insistence she will “not renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement”.

This had initially referred to a demand by Jeffrey Donaldson to extend cross-community consent to the Brexit protocol - a demand nobody outside unionism supports. But at Sinn Féin’s election launch, O’Neill also ruled out changes to mandatory coalition, saying Donaldson must serve with a republican first minister and “we will not be shifting any goalposts to satisfy unionism before, or after elections.”

Preserving the DUP’s veto on power-sharing clearly does not make politics work.

Under the agreement, mandatory coalition was meant to be reviewed after three years, so renegotiating it is legitimate and long overdue. It could also prove widely popular. Even the DUP might facilitate an option to step out of office for a while, such is its political predicament.

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The Northern Ireland Office has postponed passing language legislation at Westminster until after May, saying it would be inappropriate in the middle of an assembly election.

This provoked a curious response from Michelle O’Neill.

“The campaign will go on and parity of esteem for those of an Irish national identity will be achieved,” she said.

Although it should not be contentious in the slightest to link the Irish language to Irish national identity, convention dictates it must be described as part of unionist identity as well because it ‘belongs to us all’ (except Gregory Campbell.)

Stranger still, the legislation has been held up since October because Sinn Féin will not agree to the Ulster-Scots/British Commissioner having ‘British’ in their job title. Is that not the identity Irish is to have parity with?

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Loyalists can hardly believe Doug Beattie will no longer be attending their anti-protocol protests after saying they are raising tensions - a mild observation, as even peaceful protests can raise tensions.

A statement from Lurgan United Unionists, organisers of the next protest Beattie was due to address, typifies the spluttering reaction.

“The leader of the Ulster Unionist Party has chosen to withdraw and thereby isolate himself from his constituents and the wider unionist family”, declared LUU, an abbreviation it sadly does not use.

Beattie leads a party with 95,000 voters, four times Lurgan’s entire population. Why do loyalists not think they are isolating themselves from him?

Perhaps this ‘we are the people’ mentality among so few people is explained in the first line of their statement, which reads “Lurgan United Unionists is a grassroots movement”.

The term ‘grassroots’, which I must confess to using lazily myself, requires better definition. Why am I not a grassroots unionist, for example? Is it because I have a petrol lawnmower?

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So farewell then, it appears, to the Hightown incinerator. In one of her final acts as infrastructure minister, Nichola Mallon of the SDLP refused planning permission for the £240m council waste-to-energy project.

Mallon was able to do so because the political, economic and technological context of incineration has changed during the eight years everyone has been arguing over the plainly sub-optimal Hightown location. Yet the project made perfect sense in 2009 when its previously agreed and ideal location on Belfast’s North Foreshore was scuppered at the last minute by councillors over some tinfoil hat nonsense. Given that politics, economics and technology keep changing - and on this issue, ever faster - how can a system so slow deliver any solutions to the energy challenge ahead?

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The High Court has refused to hear a case from the System Operator for Northern Ireland (SONI), the privatised monopoly owner of the electricity grid.

Last year, the Utility Regulator found SONI is not adequately protecting consumers and whistleblowers because it is insufficiently independent of its parent company, southern operator Eirgrid.

SONI responded this was beyond the Northern Ireland regulator’s remit and should be examined by the all-Ireland committee of the northern and southern regulators. Then it took the northern regulator and the committee to court for failing to engage with it properly. After the judge threw this out, dismissing the claim as “unarguable”, SONI told the Belfast Telegraph it still considers the northern regulator to be acting “with no legal basis”.

While every company must have recourse to the law, even against their own regulator, failing to accept the court’s verdict is extraordinary. A grid operator, of all businesses, should know when it has crossed the line.

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The horrifying NHS scandal emerging in Shrewsbury, where 201 babies and nine women died during a two-decade insistence on ‘natural childbirth’, is likely to be a UK-wide phenomenon. My immediate family has experience of ideological hostility to caesareans and misleading high pressure tactics on expectant mothers, along with the futility of trying to complain about it. Mercifully, all survived unharmed, leaving me the luxury to professionally marvel at the randomness of public debate. Our whole society can argue passionately for years about abortion, or women’s rights and transgenderism, or the science of vaccines. Meanwhile, the health service has almost certainly been killing or seriously injuring thousands of women and their babies every year, in plain sight, over some bonkers anti-medical mysticism - and nobody really seems to care.