Opinion

Alex Kane: The Stormont Assembly is on life support and may not survive

Alex Kane

Alex Kane

Alex Kane is an Irish News columnist and political commentator and a former director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party.

When we know that putting two political polar opposites at the heart of government has singularly failed to defrost relationships and encourage genuine cooperation, why would we choose to do it again? Pictured are former First Minister Paul Givan (right) and former Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA Wire.
When we know that putting two political polar opposites at the heart of government has singularly failed to defrost relationships and encourage genuine cooperation, why would we choose to do it again? Pictured are former First Minister Paul Givan (right) When we know that putting two political polar opposites at the heart of government has singularly failed to defrost relationships and encourage genuine cooperation, why would we choose to do it again? Pictured are former First Minister Paul Givan (right) and former Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA Wire.

Shortly after the assembly was rebooted in January 2020, I wrote that it would not survive another collapse: ‘It hasn’t sat for three years—even though its members have been handsomely paid—and they’re only tumbling back into office now because the Secretary of State seems to have threatened them with a snap election. The NDNA isn’t even their own agreement and I’m fairly sure most of them haven’t bothered drilling down into the detail. Can they make it through the couple of years before the next election is due?’

Ok, they did get to within a whisker of the official closing down date—March 28—but it has still ended with the executive blocked, the ministers morphed into the political equivalent of zombies and trust boomeranging all the way back to pre-1998 days.

One would like to think that their heads would be hung in collective shame, but that would require most of them to be dragged out of their backsides first. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: “The whole map of the world has been changed by the pandemic, but as the deluge of restrictions subsides and the vaccines force Covid back we see the dreary pin-dancing, point-scoring of NI’s executive emerging once again.”

To be honest, it never really went away. Indeed, I’m sure that the proliferation of bakeries in Northern Ireland is down to the fact that our politicians, of every hue, will always prioritise the bun fight over the sleeve-rolled-up tackling of socio/economic issues that would make a difference to all of us, irrespective of our take on the constitutional question.

In the same way that Covid doesn’t give-a-damn about your political views, nor do cancer, heart disease, mental illness and a whole array of threats to our health and way of life. Two decades after the 11-plus was removed we still don’t have an agreed replacement for it. Our infrastructure is still a mess. It’s probably easier to get a commercial trip to the edges of space in a rocket than a reliable bus service into the centre of Belfast. And talking of space: I’m sure our mountain of unresolved, kicked into the long grass problems is one of only a couple of things that can be seen from there.

I used to joke that it would take a combination of Judge Judy, Jerry Springer, Frasier Crane and a boatload of Nobel Prize winning psychiatrists to get to the heart of what really divides unionist and nationalist politicians. I think I may have been uncharacteristically optimistic on that particular day. I’m not even sure if the Great Architect of the Universe could explain it, other than as some inexplicable glitch in the system: like the weird and extremely annoying buzz my computer makes when I’m typing on Word.

Anyway, whatever the explanation may be the fact that we can’t pin it down means that every effort to resolve the problem seems doomed to failure. There are moments when it looks like we may have cracked it (the 1998 referendum result, for example, or that inexplicable coupling that was the Chuckle Brothers), but then we revert to our normal setting and return to our old ways. I won’t go as far as to say that we hate each other (although some give a darn good impression of it), but there’s certainly no love lost.

Here's the biggest mystery, though; when we know that putting two political polar opposites at the heart of government has singularly failed to defrost relationships and encourage genuine cooperation, why would we choose to do it again? But we will do it again at the coming election. For in exactly the same way that the more civil relationship between the UUP and SDLP was dumped in favour of the permafrost of the DUP and Sinn Féin from 2003 onwards, we will continue to reward them for their dead-handed chess playing.

Not all of us, maybe, but enough to make sure progress won’t be possible. Because—and you might want to avert your eyes at this point—I’m not persuaded a majority of us actually want progress. Even those backing the UUP and SDLP are probably, at heart, just supporting a less in-your-face form of government rather than a game-changing rewriting of the rules of engagement. And while Alliance talks of a centrist position, it seems to be some sort of political sweet spot that nestles between unionism and republicanism rather than offering something entirely different.

Back to my opening line about whether the assembly would survive another crisis and predictable collapse? No, it won’t. It might, like Frankenstein’s monster, stumble back into a parody of life if enough volts were pumped into it. But the idea that it will suddenly defy all previous experience and serial enragement defies both logic and plain, good old-fashioned common sense.

The beep-beep-beep sound you hear is the assembly’s life support machine sending you a message.