By Peter McLoughlin
The two main political parties in Northern Ireland announced a deal last month to restore the region’s power-sharing government, which had ceased to function three years ago. Within 24 hours of the announcement of the deal on Jan. 10, which was brokered by the British and Irish governments, Northern Ireland’s institutions of devolved government were back up and running. Yet while many in Belfast are breathing a sigh of relief, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recent Brexit deal has created a host of new problems for the region that the reopened Northern Ireland Assembly will need to confront.
After years of deadlock, the catalyst for the recent accord was the U.K. general election in December. Both the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein and the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, suffered significant losses at the hands of voters frustrated by their unwillingness to compromise. If they did not find common ground, they faced the prospect of new regional polls for the Northern Ireland Assembly to break the stalemate. Rather than fight another election where they were likely to see further losses, they agreed to compromise on key issues that had bitterly divided them in the past.
Chief among these was Sinn Fein’s insistence on legislation to promote and protect the Irish language, which the DUP has strongly opposed. It believed Sinn Fein was trying to achieve by political means what its paramilitary counterparts in the Irish Republican Army had failed to achieve through years of violence: to destroy the “Britishness” of Northern Ireland. While the DUP’s concern may seem alarmist to outsiders, the idea of the Irish language achieving equal status alongside English is powerfully symbolic. Predominantly Catholic nationalists, many of whom speak Irish or at least wish to protect the language as part of their cultural identity, were previously a minority in Northern Ireland. Now, they occupy a majority in many areas, and are approaching parity in numbers even in historically Protestant-dominated Belfast. Unionists fear that official recognition of the Irish language would further strengthen nationalists’ ambitions to eventually realize a united Ireland.
As a compromise, the recent agreement brokered by the British and Irish governments promised to create an Irish language commissioner and introduce new requirements for public bodies in Northern Ireland to provide services in Irish. For balance, similar commitments were included for the Ulster Scots dialect, which is spoken by some unionists. Under the deal, any future proposals related to language issues would need to be agreed upon by the DUP and Sinn Fein, the joint leaders of the power-sharing government.
London and Dublin both played critical roles in allowing Sinn Fein and the DUP to reach an accord. Because the Conservative government that emerged from the British general election had a strong hand to finally pass a Brexit deal in Parliament, British and Irish leaders could refocus their efforts on restoring power-sharing in Northern Ireland, their two governments having themselves been at odds during the previous Brexit talks.
Importantly, the British and Irish governments offered significant financial support to Northern Ireland as part of their deal, but only if the local parties agreed to restore power-sharing. It was a shrewd incentive to foster compromise at a time when Northern Ireland was facing a growing crisis in its chronically underfunded health care system. With nurses in Northern Ireland beginning to go on strike over low wages, the British and Irish governments were able to mobilize public opinion in Northern Ireland and put more pressure on Sinn Fein and the DUP to end their feud.
Boris Johnson’s recent Brexit deal has created a host of new problems that the recently reopened Northern Ireland Assembly will need to confront.
For now, normal government services have resumed in Northern Ireland, but there are still significant challenges ahead, many of them related to Brexit. Britain’s plans to leave the European Union were complicated perhaps most of all by Northern Ireland, and Johnson was only able to get a workable Brexit deal by allowing the region to effectively stay in the European single market, thus remaining largely under EU rules and regulations. That solution avoided the prospect of a reestablished hard border with Ireland, as the only land crossing between the U.K. and the EU, and with it fears of a return to “The Troubles,” the decades of sectarian conflict that ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
However, with the rest of the U.K. leaving the single market, Johnson’s deal will instead create a barrier for the exchange of goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. This “border in the Irish Sea,” as it is termed, is a great source of concern for Northern Irish unionists. Many feel it will increase their sense of detachment from Great Britain and erode their sense of “Britishness,” similar to their concerns about an official recognition of the Irish language.
Meanwhile, although Johnson promised British voters he would “Get Brexit Done,” that is far from guaranteed. The U.K. has formally left the EU as of Jan. 31, but it is now in a transition period, with a deadline of December to negotiate a new trading relationship with the EU. Most observers doubt that such a complex task can be completed in that time frame.
The easiest way to achieve a new trade deal, of course, would be for the U.K. to stay closely aligned with EU regulations and standards, which would also allay the concerns of unionists in Northern Ireland, minimizing their sense of divergence from Great Britain. However, there are strong pressures on Johnson to fully break with the EU. After all, Brexiteers argue, what would be the point of Brexit if the U.K. remains aligned with the same EU rules and standards that it sought to unburden itself from with the referendum? Worse still, aligning with the EU on trade issues without actually being part of the bloc would mean not having any voice in how these rules and standards are made. And what would happen to the U.K.’s much-vaunted new trade deals with other countries, most notably the United States? Brexiteers believe those deals depend on the U.K. being able to decide its own terms of trade, independent of the EU.
Johnson’s Brexit deal does allow the restored Northern Ireland Assembly to have a say in whether the region will remain in the EU’s single market after 2024. However, as unionists no longer enjoy a majority there, and even nonsectarian groups like the Alliance Party are strongly pro-EU, it seems unlikely that the Assembly would vote to depart from EU regulations and standards. Over time, then, Northern Ireland’s businesses, farmers and others who will have to continue working with EU rules may begin to turn to officials in Dublin, who, unlike their counterparts in London, will retain a voice in shaping them. If that fosters increased cooperation between the two parts of Ireland, which seems likely, it would heighten unionists’ fears of support for Irish reunification, which the Good Friday Agreement allows in the event of majority support in Northern Ireland.
Brexit is still a vexing challenge for Northern Ireland, and for the newly restored government in Belfast. All that has changed is that the threat of a hard Irish border has instead become a de facto border in the Irish Sea. The resulting disruption in the sense of unionists’ identity is likely to destabilize the delicate balance between Northern Ireland’s two opposing communities, boding ill for the prospects of a workable system of power-sharing, and with it, long-term peace.
Peter McLoughlin is a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, where he focuses on contemporary political history in Ireland and Northern Ireland. He recently completed a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship at Boston College.
Source: BBC
