Over the past week, it looked as if a new interim approach to governing Northern Ireland was about to be announced.
Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said last Thursday in Mr Stormont’s absence that he would table legislation to “support Northern Ireland departments to meet the immediate and clear challenges they face in stabilizing public services and public finances”. Announced.
This suggested something between direct regulation and “indirect regulation,” which is the current management autopilot.
The Irish government appears to be giving London space. Hours earlier, in Davos, the BBC reported that when asked about Dublin’s role in Plan B, Leo Varadkar said: “It will not be chosen.”
But when the bill was introduced in Westminster on Wednesday, it simply brought Stormont’s recovery deadline forward by two weeks to February 8th. Heaton-Harris kicked the can down the road again, albeit not very far.
If the DUP fails to meet the new deadline, Stormont’s door will remain open. The real meaning of last week’s pantomime is that time is running out for indirect control. If devolution is not quickly restored, there is no longer any good reason to leave Northern Ireland in limbo.
During last week’s public sector strike, Stormont’s political parties, trade unions, the head of the Northern Ireland civil service and the Labor opposition in London all called on Mr Heaton-Harris to intervene and resolve pay disputes. If such widespread direct rule intervention is justified for public sector paychecks, why not for outstanding decisions about health care, education, and infrastructure? Those distinctions are arbitrary.
The first serious legal challenge to indirect control was brought this week by the Children’s Law Center in Belfast. He plans to argue that Stormont’s budget was set without due process.
Andrew McCormick, a former senior civil servant, went further in an article in the Belfast Telegraph last week, calling indirect rule “an affront to democracy and an unprecedented departure from constitutional principles”.
He argued that this was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and thus the Windsor Framework.
Direct rule is not such a fundamental outrage that Northern Ireland should remain largely ungovernable for any period of time if Stormont falls.
In the case of the fall of Stormont, indirect rule became the default mainly because ‘British-only’ direct rule was no longer acceptable to nationalists. This strength of opposition is a relatively recent phenomenon, with little sign of it when the DUP threatened to collapse Stormont in 2015. But when Sinn Féin resigned two years later, he was hoping to counter accusations that he was simply handing power back to London. . The government unearthed documents from the 2006 St Andrew talks, in which the two governments threatened the DUP with a new UK-Ireland partnership agreement unless devolution was restored. This meant Plan B must be “a form of collective authority”, Sinn Féin argued.
Following the collapse of Stormont in 2017, parliamentary elections were held within three months and London postponed direct rule. Three months later, his DUP trust and supply deal was signed in Westminster with the Conservatives. Combined with the deteriorating Brexit climate, direct rule became untenable to widespread nationalism, including the Irish government.
Most of these reasons have since become unnecessary. They leave behind the political reality that nationalism will not tolerate direct rule without a strengthened role for Dublin. You need to respond to that, but you also need to be aware of its somewhat random occurrences. Direct rule is not such a fundamental outrage that if Stormont were to fall, Northern Ireland would have to be left largely ungoverned, even for an extended period of time.
The DUP may spend the rest of the year sitting idle as the UK government collapses. A Labor government could then take over, but it could still take months or years to persuade Stormont to reinvigorate the country. Direct rule could be introduced quickly as a stop-gap measure, with safeguards and input from Dublin developed improvised.
The debate over Dublin’s role in Plan B rages on between two absurdities. Few people in Northern Ireland seem to realize that London and Dublin barely speak to each other. And it seems that there are very few people in the Republic who are completely unaware of this debate.
It will take time for the two governments to reconcile their differences and reach a tentative agreement.
As Alliance leader Naomi Long pointed out last weekend, the Republic is “restricted” to a consultative role in Northern Ireland by the Belfast Agreement. Moving beyond that will require significant renegotiation, similar to Stormont’s reforms to deal with major party vetoes. These changes could be explored in parallel, sequentially or as alternatives, but they would all take time and create tensions, during which time devolution would remain stagnant or the DUP and Sinn Féin may threaten to undermine devolution. Indirect rules should not be your only option.
One immediate role for Dublin will be to demonstrate that London has no objection to making an emergency decision at Stormont. Is direct rule still “British only” if Britain effectively requires Ireland’s consent?