Jonathan Evershed (University College Dublin)
Northern Ireland is providing a case-study in what Antonio Gramsci famously termed the ‘interregnum’: a political moment in which “crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born”. The most recent collapse of devolved government is a “morbid symptom” of a crisis in and for the DUP which the party has largely created for itself (and, as a consequence, for Ulster Unionism more widely).
On 3 February, at the behest of his party’s leadership, the DUP’s Paul Givan resigned as First Minister, collapsing the mandatory coalition required of the executive branch of devolved government in Northern Ireland. As Clare Rice has outlined, Givan’s resignation was the latest move in the DUP’s phased ‘strategy’ seeking to ‘free’ Northern Ireland from the Protocol. The aim of this strategy has been to prove the Northern Ireland Protocol ‘unworkable’ and bring the issue to a head. Crucially, the DUP sought to ride a wave of crisis into an early election, in which it hoped to reap the electoral benefits of appearing suitably staunch on the question of a post-Brexit ‘border’ in the Irish Sea.
It failed in this endeavour. And the whole sorry affair may yet backfire substantially for the party, as the resultant stasis drags on until scheduled elections in May.
Under the rules then pertaining, the resignation of the First Minister sparked a seven-day countdown to the dissolution of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the calling of an election by the Secretary of State. However, in line with proposals outlined in 2020’s New Decade, New Approach deal, on 7 February, Parliament passed the (backdated) Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Act, which, inter alia, extends to six weeks the time between the resignation of the First or Deputy First Minister and the requirement for the Secretary of State to set a date for an election. It also makes provision for Executive Ministers to remain in post, and for the Northern Ireland Assembly to conclude business already in progress. Givan’s resignation has been followed by the expedited passage of legislation by the Assembly, including ‘Dáithí’s Law’ on opt-out organ donation.
This (albeit highly constrained) continued functioning of devolution in the absence of a DUP First Minister (and, for that matter, a Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister) raises new questions about the DUP’s role in – and, indeed, the future nature of – devolved governance in Northern Ireland, and the longevity of the governmental infrastructure created by the Good Friday Agreement. In his Irish Times column on 17 February, Newton Emerson demonstrated how the DUP has potentially created a “year-long limbo” at Stormont, and painted a picture of a hypothetically indefinite period of rolling caretaker governments.
This possibility of a prolonged period of zombie government in Northern Ireland is mirrored in – and exacerbated by – a lack of urgency in London in its response to events there. The drawn-out process of (re)negotiation around the Protocol has categorically not been brought to a head by Givan’s resignation as First Minister. Indeed, the EU’s chief concern is that its British counterparts intend to continue to prolong these negotiations indefinitely, rather than to force a confrontation through triggering Article 16. The mood music since Liz Truss assumed responsibility for Protocol negotiations has generally (though not always) tended more towards conciliation than to escalating conflict. Critically, neither party is liable to allow the dispute over the Protocol to disrupt a joint approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The latter is, at any rate (and quite rightly) currently absorbing almost all governmental bandwidth across Europe. The net result is that discussions are liable to rumble quietly on.
As DUP MP, Ian Paisley Jr, has lamented in the Commons’ chamber, Boris Johnson’s palpable disinterest in the current political crisis at Stormont could not be any plainer. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, has also been markedly hands off (spending several days following the First Minister’s resignation in the US) but has confirmed that he will not be calling an early election. This all follows HMG’s reneging again on a prior deal with the DUP, this time on the reintroduction of ‘double-jobbing’. This would have allowed DUP Leader Jeffrey Donaldson to seek a seat in the Assembly while holding on to his seat at Westminster.
Instead of a short, sharp election campaign, the DUP is now facing into several weeks of fractious and tiring political contestation. So far, much of the party’s firepower has been trained inward, with an internal battle resulting in the deselection of Edwin Poots: a final humiliation for the party grandee after his abortive attempt to assume the leadership in 2021. Revelations about talks between Jeffrey Donaldson and UUP leader, Doug Beattie, in 2021 have raised questions about the former’s commitment to the DUP. While this is really something of a non-story, it nonetheless continues to smoulder slowly in the background.
The DUP’s attempts to whip up anti-Protocol sentiment at the Unionist grassroots have done little to substantially reverse its declining polling numbers. Further, mirroring what happened during the flag protests of 2012 and 2013, the party risks unleashing forces that it can no longer control. At a recent rally against the Protocol in Markethill, a speech by the DUP’s Sammy Wilson was almost inaudible over the boos and jeers of the crowd.
The DUP has thrown in its lot with (and is largely allowing itself to be led by) elements within Unionism that are, frankly, un- if not anti-democratic. The party’s refusal to distance itself from the dangerous claims about the independence of the judiciary, or from personalised attacks on academics at Queen’s University Belfast, that have come from these quarters is nothing short of a scandal. Likewise its refusal to state whether it is prepared to nominate a Deputy First Minister should (as currently seems likely) Sinn Féin return to Stormont as the largest party after May’s election.
The DUP is thus playing a high-stakes political game, one which gambles not only with its own political future, but with that of all of Northern Ireland (and, indeed, of these islands more generally). It remains to be seen whether and in what ways the present crisis in and of the party eventually resolves. A protracted period of uncertainty looms as Northern Ireland looks into and beyond May’s election.
Jonathan Evershed is the Newman Fellow in Constitutional Futures in the Institute for British-Irish Studies (IBIS) and School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe) at University College Dublin.
The views expressed in this blog reflect the position of the author and not necessarily that of the Brexit Institute Blog.
Image Credit: “DUP Spring Policy Conference 2013” by DUP Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0