Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Northern Ireland’s newly restored Assembly will vote on Monday on proposals to launch reforms to protect the region’s fragile political institutions from the regular paralysis they have suffered over the past quarter of a century.
The move at Stormont comes after Micheál Martin, Ireland’s foreign minister, said at the end of last week that the restoration of the region’s political institutions in February after a two-year hiatus meant the time was right to discuss reform.
Under the current rules, the biggest nationalist and unionist parties in the region are required to govern jointly but each side has a veto that can collapse the power-sharing institutions.
The opposition Social Democratic and Labour party will table motions on Monday calling for reforms to be included in the executive’s programme for government and for a committee to report in six months on legislative ways to “neutralise the nuclear veto over the institutions”. Matthew O’Toole of the SDLP said: “There are no excuses now Stormont is back.”
A Westminster committee last year called for an overhaul of Northern Ireland’s “highly temperamental” system of government, introduced under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended three decades of conflict.
The Alliance party, the region’s third-biggest and part of the power-sharing executive, has long championed a sweeping overhaul of the institutions. At her party conference on Saturday, Alliance leader Naomi Long described the veto as “ransom politics” and called on the UK, a co-guarantor with Ireland of the Good Friday Agreement, to back reform of the “dysfunctional institutions”.
The UK government said “any conversation about changes to the institutions would require widespread consent”.
Meanwhile, the Irish government said the time had come for change. “Every time I was asked in the last couple of years about reform, I always made the point that it would be better to address these issues against the background of functioning institutions,” Martin told Alliance members at a dinner on Friday. “Well, that is now in place . . . I believe it is time for that conversation to start.”
“The reform agenda has now got legs . . . because of the [intervention by the] Irish foreign minister,” said Jon Tonge, politics professor at the University of Liverpool. But analysts have cautioned that progress requires the support of both of the two biggest parties: nationalist Sinn Féin and the pro-UK Democratic Unionist party.
Michelle O’Neill, vice-president of the region’s largest party, Sinn Féin, made history a month ago by becoming the first nationalist first minister in a region created in 1921 to have a permanent pro-UK majority. Emma Little-Pengelly of the DUP became deputy first minister.
The roles have equal legal status and neither can function alone in a region still deeply scarred by the Troubles, when Republican paramilitaries fought to end British rule and reunite the region with the Irish Republic. The conflict also involved loyalist gunmen fighting to keep Northern Ireland in the UK.
But the veto has led to stop-start politics, with Stormont not functioning for about 40 per cent of the time since 1998, including between 2022 and this year when the DUP paralysed it, and a Sinn Féin boycott between 2017 and 2020.
Sinn Féin has recently said it would be open to discussing reform but a spokesperson said it was not yet clear if it would back the motions at Stormont. The DUP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
