By Tom McGurk
Sunday Business Post
15 June 2008
With the Chuckle Brothers act off the political stage, the truth about the fractures and paralysis in the North’s Assembly is all too plain.
Last month, in preparation for the US investment conference in Belfast, the Stormont power-sharing Executive planned to publish a booklet to be distributed to every home in the North and to be given to every delegate at the conference. The high-quality colour booklet was intended to detail the progress that had been made since the ending of the Troubles and to extol the success of power-sharing.
In the end, the publication of the brochure had to be abandoned, with large costs to the taxpayer, because the DUP and Sinn Féin could not agree about the editorial - in particular the use of the Irish language in the publication – and whether to refer to Derry or Londonderry.
At the end of a week in which the DUP is claiming to hold the balance of power at Westminster - after its nine votes saved Gordon Brown’s 42-day terrorist detention bill – the North’s power-sharing Executive could hardly be described as the happiest of families. There’s no denying that the tension between the DUP and Sinn Féin is growing and, to many, the DUP performance in saving Brown may be bad news, given its likely effect on the balance of power at Stormont.
The Paisley era has ended, the Chuckle Brothers are now history, and the atmosphere within the power-sharing Executive led by Peter Robinson has been described by one insider as ‘‘dour and dire’’.
It began from the outset, when there were dark mutterings from an increasingly frustrated Sinn Féin last week about not supporting the nomination of Robinson as first minister until some progress had been made on what they called ‘‘the outstanding issues’’.
They were referring in particular to the Irish Language Bill (still in limbo), a replacement for the 11+ exam and the whole question of the transfer of policing powers from London.
In fact, an emergency meeting had to be called by Gordon Brown in London to head off a potential DUP/Sinn Féin falling-out. Such was the atmosphere at that meeting that Robinson launched a blistering attack on foreign affairs minister Micheál Martin - who had rushed over from Dublin - questioning his right to be there in the first place.
The outstanding issues, of course, effectively amount to almost every major political decision the power-sharing Assembly has been asked to agree on since it came into power last year. The political reality is that - for all the external miraculous nature of the DUP/Sinn Féin relationship - on the inside, fundamental disagreements have frozen the executive into a state of political paralysis.
For all of Paisley and McGuinness’s fine words, the Executive over which they presided could agree on almost nothing. Given the political ambitions for power-sharing and the task of restructuring the North, major decisions have to be made.
And while the day-to-day business of the Executive has been carried on reasonably effectively, long-term planning or major symbolic decisions are not happening.
The fact that four major policy decisions await unobtainable Executive approval reveals the unbridgeable political and cultural divisions that remain between the DUP and Sinn Féin. The agreement on the devolution of security and policing powers from London to the Executive is bitterly opposed by the DUP, dreading as it does that someday there could be a Sinn Féin minister in charge of the police at Stormont.
The row about whether to site the new national sports stadium at Long Kesh or in Belfast reveals DUP worries that it could become some sort of shrine to dead hunger strikers. The row about the replacement for the 11+ and the role of grammar schools cuts across the class issue between the two sides.
And perhaps most revealing of all is the DUP opposition to the Irish Language Bill. It is a measure of the DUP’s 17th century mentality that they should continue to oppose the growing Gaelscoil movement in the North. For some sad reason, the Irish language has always been anathema to them.
Until recently, the Paisley/McGuinness political roadshow dominated the headlines. The fact that power-sharing was increasingly looking like it had no clothes was obscured. Now Robinson is in charge and DUP politicians are looking over their shoulders at their former MEP Jim Allister, who is taking the familiar political road rightwards in opposition to power-sharing with Sinn Féin.
With the DUP now boosted by the remarkable result in the Commons vote last week, London and Dublin may be thinking that the summer holidays at Stormont can’t come quickly enough.
Nor will Allister go away. After an ugly loyalist mob ambushed a visit by President McAleese to a school in Co Derry last week, Allister’s comments left little doubt about where he stands. He said:
‘‘Considering the flagrant way she troops all over Northern Ireland, treating it as if it were her own, it will do no harm that today President McAleese met a grassroots protest in Coleraine.”
Some see Robinson’s recent suggestion that the DUP and the UUP might begin to look at ending the 40 year schism in unionism and create one unified, larger party in the future as evidence of DUP concern at the potential electoral threat of Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice party two years down the road, at the next Assembly elections.
Meanwhile, frustration is building in Sinn Féin with the perception that the DUP is stymying real power-sharing within the Executive. It has left them in a difficult political place. The Sinn Féin experiment south of the border has stalled and, with their continued abstention from Westminster, Stormont has become their critical showcase.
There isn’t an immediate threat to power-sharing; one imagines that Robinson and the rest of the DUP ministers enjoy their status. But who can be really optimistic in the long term? The problem is that power-sharing requires levels of mutual cultural and political respect that are not in the DNA of the DUP. How do you simultaneously contain loyalist extremism while retaining mutual respect for your political partners?
After Paisley, the DUP is more liable to fragment: the potshots taken at Sinn Féin when it huffed and puffed before Robinson’s election may be an indication of what is to come. And with Blair and Ahern gone, there may no longer be any political ambulance service available if a Stormont crisis develops.
The summer holidays can’t come quickly enough for politicians north of the border.
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands