Tag Archives: Stormont House Agreement

Northern Ireland’s ‘Fresh Start’ agreement will bring short term stability but does not itself resolve the underlying problems

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Alan_Rialto2

Alan Whysall discusses developments last week in Northern Ireland, arguing that the ‘Fresh Start’ agreement will bring stability in the short term but does not itself resolve the underlying problems. This blog follows up earlier posts outlining Northern Ireland’s current political difficulties here, and possible ways forward here and here.

After some months of stand off, and ten weeks of negotiations involving the main parties and the British and Irish governments, things moved quickly last week. A political deal on most of the problematic issues in the Stormont House Agreement (SHA) of last December, and more recent concerns about paramilitarism, was announced by the First Minister and deputy First Minister on Wednesday. The Assembly quickly moved on Thursday to give effect to it. Then the First Minister, Peter Robinson, announced his departure from that office and the leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party, probably around the turn of the year.

Immediate threats to stability at Stormont now appear to be averted, at least until after the Assembly elections next May. If, as appears likely, the DUP and Sinn Féin are again working closely together, a positive momentum in politics (as in 2010-12) may bring advances. But serious potential challenges lie ahead. And the ‘Fresh Start’ the deal claims to be will need a new approach to create the right political conditions.

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Is Einstein right about Northern Ireland?

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Last month Robin Wilson wrote a blog attributing Stormont’s continued instability to what he sees as Westminster’s inflexible approach to Northern Ireland’s constitutional arrangements. In this post Alan Whysall argues that there is limited hope that institutional reform will offer a way forward in present circumstances. Rather, the political climate in Northern Ireland needs to be changed, and the effort must come primarily from people there. 

Robin Wilson’s recent blog channeled the Einstein view of Northern Ireland’s current political difficulties: summed up in the proposition that the situation never changes, but that the remedy offered by London remains stubbornly the same.

A lot of the analysis is hard to dispute. There are serious underlying failings in the present system.

The immediate causes of disruption, to do with welfare and paramilitary activity, are being addressed in talks between the governments and the parties. It seems increasingly likely, with the DUP and Sinn Féin changing their rhetoric significantly, that a way will be found to resume ostensibly normal working – assuming that there is reassurance in the report on paramilitarism due imminently.

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Almost unnoticed, a new Agreement has been negotiated to try to end political deadlock in Northern Ireland

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Brian Walker offers a comprehensive overview of the Stormont House Agreement, passed just before Christmas. Although it attracted little comment from the outside world, the Agreement sought to take action on longstanding issues underpinning the recent deadlock.

The background

At first sight, apart from coinciding with great festivals of the Christian calendar, the contrast between the Stormont House Agreement negotiated by the Northern Ireland parties two days before Christmas and the historic Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998 (GFA) could hardly be greater. The GFA brought thirty years of violence to an end and the Assembly into precarious existence. Stormont House passed with little comment from the outside world and even at home. Although the executives of the two main parties the unionist DUP and the republican Sinn Fein endorsed the deal, it is far from clear what exactly has been agreed. True, the threat of breakdown was never far away in the outworking of the GFA. Towards the end of last year rumbles of impending collapse were heard again but this time they lacked conviction. No one has an interest in collapsing the system today. All the same, the need for a basic examination of power sharing had become pressing as relations had soured. With sporadic trouble in the streets and the continuing threat of violence from republican dissidents, the leading parties the DUP and Sinn Fein were torn between their roles as sectarian champions and their responsibilities as partners in government, with the former too often winning out.

The all-party consociational form of government the GFA introduced had indeed been successful in locking opposite political poles together. The big question for the negotiations at Stormont House, a residence for UK ministers, was whether the system could allow for breakout from the communal constraints to produce something closer to “normal” government for a “normal” society. So after weeks of talking about an extending agenda of deadlock, the parties seem to have felt they could not afford to walk away with nothing.

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