I love a good election. Tonight I have the opportunity to wean myself down from last week's assembly poll by watching how the votes fall for Brooke Scullion from Bellaghy, who is representing Ireland in the Eurovision semi-final tonight.
Thanks to the vagaries of the Eurovision voting system, people living in the north will be able to vote for Brooke and hopefully, in a landslide, bring her a step closer to being installed as Queen of Europe on Saturday night.
Despite receiving a resounding douze points from the electorate, Michelle O’Neill may have to wait a little longer to be installed as first minister. It really is quite something when you consider that Sinn Féin achieved the highest percentage of first preference votes at 29.2 per cent in this election and the highest percentage of first preference votes at 24.5 per cent in the Dáil election in 2020, yet political opponents in both jurisdictions have done their utmost to keep them out of power.
It makes me wonder how on earth Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald manage to stay as calm as they do. They were positive, upbeat and could not be angered on the campaign trail and it drove their opponents mad.
With the DUP insisting that they will not go back into the executive without significant movement on the protocol, it does not seem as if there is any quick fix to the stalemate at Stormont. But it is irresponsible for other parties and MLAs to throw their hands up in a “what can we do?” gesture. They cannot sit back and allow the future of the institutions to be a pawn in the British government’s stalemate with the EU.
During the Leader’s debate prior to the election, Naomi Long said she wanted to build a “coalition of the willing” at Stormont. I winced when I heard the phrase because of the historic context of the US-led invasion of Iraq, but if we are to take it at face value, then we can identify very easily who would form part of that coalition.
The Ulster Unionist Party, Alliance, SDLP, Sinn Féin, People Before Profit and Independent MLA Claire Sugden have all stated clearly and unequivocally that they want to see Stormont back to work and the mechanism exists to allow this to happen.
I sat in an RTÉ studio on Friday evening with Naomi Long as the results were coming in and as the picture started to become clearer in terms of the growth in seats that the Alliance party could expect. Although at the time we were still dealing in hypothetical seat numbers, I did suggest that Alliance could re-designate as unionist in order to nominate for the position of deputy first minister in the event that the DUP declined to do so.
The response from Naomi Long was that yes, Alliance had designated as unionist in the past for 24 hours in order to save Seamus Mallon but under no circumstances would they be doing so again.
If Alliance re-designated as unionist, they would become the second largest unionist party and if the DUP declined to nominate a deputy first minister, the opportunity to nominate would fall to them. We saw this process happening in 2016 when the UUP and SDLP went into opposition and I can’t see any bar in the legislation as to why this couldn’t happen with the position of deputy first minister.
But if Naomi Long is intent on sticking to her pledge not to tactically re-designate, then how about building this coalition of the willing and encouraging other parties to do so? People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll already designates as “other” in the assembly and if the Ulster Unionist Party and Independent MLA Claire Sugden can be persuaded to tactically designate as “other” then, at 28 seats, this would become the second-largest designation in the assembly. The DUP plus TUV plus Independent MLA Alex Easton would total 27 seats.
Based on the percentage first preference votes, over two thirds of the electorate voted for parties and candidates that pledged to get Stormont up and running again. The electorate isn’t foolish. It knows that re-designation in these circumstances would be entirely tactical in order to be able to get on with the business of drafting a budget, addressing the cost of living crisis, tackling waiting lists in hospitals and the myriad other urgent matters that make up the business of government. Not for one minute would anyone think that Doug Beattie had become a united Irelander overnight by re-designating. And Alliance, depending on the day and the person making the statement, are either crypto-unionist or crypto-nationalist in any case so why should they care?
Naomi Long said on Monday on returning to Stormont that with power comes responsibility. There is a responsibility on all pro-democracy MLAs to do everything in their power to get Stormont back up and running and cut the legs out from under the DUP protest over something it is not within the gift of the assembly to change.
Wasting the opportunity to get Stormont back to work could result in a nul point for a few parties if we’re back at the polls in December.
