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Northern Ireland must reform the way it elects its first minister to end “a highly temperamental system of government” in a region that has lacked a functioning executive for nearly two years, a Westminster committee has recommended.
In a report issued after more than a year of hearings and deliberations, the House of Commons’ Northern Ireland Affairs Committee said the first and deputy first minister posts should be rebranded as “joint first minister”.
More contentiously, the committee also proposed scrapping a requirement for the posts to come from the two biggest parties within the pro-Irish unity nationalist and pro-UK unionist communities that have traditionally dominated the region’s society and politics.
“We recognise the continued importance of unionist/nationalist representation to the legitimacy of government in Northern Ireland and the wider stability of the region,” the committee’s report said.
“However, there is an emerging sense that “cross-community” should take account of the growing section of Northern Ireland society which does not acknowledge as either unionist or nationalist,” it added.
Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended three decades of conflict, Northern Ireland has had a system of enforced power-sharing.
But the arrangement, reformed by the 2006 St Andrew’s Agreement, in effect handed a veto to the biggest unionist party and the biggest nationalist party and both sides have pulled down the Stormont executive and assembly — it has been on ice for 40 per cent of the past 25 years.
The committee said the system resulted in a “highly temperamental system of government”.
Its chair, Sir Robert Buckland, said “more stringent safeguards are needed to protect against the cycle of restoration and collapse”.
The committee recommended changing the rules so that “the two holders of the office of Joint First Minister are elected by the assembly on a supermajority basis of two-thirds, with nominations open to any two MLAs [Stormont legislators] of any two parties who run on a joint slate”.
It also recommended that the speaker of Stormont be elected by a two-thirds supermajority.
Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party triggered the current crisis when it pulled its first minister out of Stormont in February 2022 in a row over post-Brexit trading arrangements.
It then refused to form a new executive following elections in May 2022 won by Sinn Féin. In that vote, the Alliance party, which does not designate as unionist or nationalist, emerged as the region’s third force and has said a revamp of the election rules is now overdue. Northern Ireland is currently being run by civil servants in Belfast.
All changes recommended by the committee would demand consultation with the Irish government, which has said it is in favour of reforming the rules but wants the executive restored first.
The committee’s report comes amid waning hopes that the DUP and UK government will resolve their differences and restore Stormont before the UK moves into a general election period next year.
Chris Heaton-Harris, the UK’s Northern Ireland secretary, has said talks are in the “final, final stages” with an “ever-diminishing number of questions that we have to answer from the DUP”. He declined to comment on whether the committee’s recommendations could be part of a deal to restore the executive.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, said in a message to his party at the end of November that the party was not “fixated with timelines” and would not be “calendar-led”.
He wants changes to the Windsor framework, the post-Brexit trade deal that would assure Northern Ireland’s place in the UK and ability to trade with Britain.
It was not immediately clear whether Sinn Féin or the DUP would back the committee’s recommendations.
