After Northern Ireland’s elections: devolution or dissolution?

Since the NI elections for the Stormont Assembly on 9 March the focus of attention has shifted to 26 March - the date by which the two main parties in NI (Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party) have to agree to share power in a devolved executive or see Stormont dissolved in favour of indefinite rule from London.

For its part, SF leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have pressed the DUP to recognise the outcome of last week’s elections as an endorsement of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the devolved political institutions it set up, and have demanded they agree to share power with SF. The terms of the GFA insist that all parties have to agree to establish an executive or it cannot happen.

In turn, this week DUP leader and arch protestant bigot, Ian Paisley, has made the right emollient noises after meetings with NI secretary Peter Hain and Tony Blair. 'We must have a settlement. We have made promises to the electorate and we must seek to fulfill those promises,” he said.

So will we get an Assembly up and running and where will it lead?


The results of the elections

Of the 108 seats in the Assembly, the DUP got 36 members elected, and Sinn Féin 28. The Ulster Unionists (UUP) have 18 MLAs, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party has 16 MLAs. The Alliance Party got seven seats. The loyalist Progressive Unionists hung onto their one East Belfast seat, while Brian Wilson in North Down becomes the Green Party's first candidate to be elected to the Assembly. Independent Dr Kieran Deeny retained his seat in West Tyrone.

Republican dissidents and the small socialist groups won no seats. Eamonn Mc Cann stood in the Foyle on a Socialist Environmental ticket and got a creditable vote of 2045. McCann was seen as a candidate of struggle due to his leadership of a militant occupation of the Raytheon factory to try and block its military sales to Israel. He was the only candidate in the election PR supporters in Ireland argued to vote for.

In general terms, the elections revealed an entrenched polarisation between the nationalist and unionist communities. Symbolic of this was the fact that not a single second preference vote was transferred between Dodd (DU) and Adams in West Belfast.

Specifically, the elections confirmed the trend established since 2000, and especially after the collapse of the Assembly in 2002, for the more “moderate”, and hitherto majority, parties of nationalism (SDLP) and unionism (UUP) to be eclipsed by the rise of the republicans of SF and the anti-GFA DUP. On the Protestant side, the DUP increased its share of the vote by 4.4%. And Sinn Fein saw its vote rise by 2.6%.

The rise of the DUP during the last 10 years from minority anti-Catholic ranters within unionism to its leading voice, reflects the way it has skillfully manipulated the fear and phobias of the protestant community and especially its working class, faced with the GFA and the Assembly.

The protestant “community” has much changed in the last two decades, as the relatively unified “Orange bloc” that ruled the pre-1973 NI state for itself and discriminated against the Catholic minority, has fragmented. The UUP was the first bourgeois, business party in the 1990s to recognise the importance of “doing business” with the more economically and culturally dynamic Irish Republic in the south, which up to then had been reviled as a priest-ridden, Catholic backwater.

Slowly, the economic importance of the border began to dissolve; it even become a hindrance and an anachronism in the context of an enlarged European Union. The UUP and its then leader David Trimble were brought on board the “peace process” that gradually evolved in the early 1990s as Britain and the IRA/SF recognised that neither of them could “win” the military war against each other.

Once the Tory government under John Major acknowledged that British imperialism had no longer any strategic interest in keeping NI as part of the United Kingdom (or resisting a united Ireland if the majority of the people of NI wanted it) then the Adams leadership of SF set course for abandoning the armed struggle and becoming good bourgeois politicians, the SDLP at their side and the UUP pressing them and co-operating with them.

But the UUP paid the price. A booming Celtic Tiger in the south and a 16-year-lomg economic upturn in Britain may have been good for Ulster business, but the Protestant working class has profited little from it. The central axis of Protestant workers’ privileged position in NI up until the 1980s – manufacturing, shipbuilding- has been decimated and not replaced with much else, except low paid service jobs.

Meanwhile NI’s catholics have done relatively better from the public sector, civil service job creation under direct rule; they are also better educated. And all while, the protestant workers live in “fear” that one day they become a minority in their “own” state and find themselves unwilling and unloved citizens of a united Ireland, no longer British, or at least half-British. And yet, as their economic position deteriorates and despite this, this was what made them “superior” and hence they cling to it fiercely.

It is this that fuels the murder squads and sectarian hatred of a minority of loyalists drawn to the UDA, UDF and LVF paramilitaries; it is this that the DUP has demagogically preyed upon without offering the slightest whiff of a progressive democratic alternative to the issues of the problems of the health service, water charges and lack of well-paid jobs, things that bedevil the Protestant working class community.

Instead the DUP has rallied the Unionist electorate around it by denouncing the minor concessions made to SF during the last nine years (e.g. prisoner release, bans on loyalist marches) even though they are small change compared to the major concessions on SF’s part (IRA disarmament, acceptance of the unionist dominated police force – the PSNI).

But now it is put up or shut up time for Paisley and the DUP leaders. They made their reputation on always “saying ‘no’”; on opposing the GFA, of refusing the sit with SF “terrorists” in any power-sharing Executive. But what now that SF have given them all they asked for?

The DUP election manifesto demanded the removal of "terrorist structures" in addition to weapons decommissioning, and that republicans’ "delivery" of support for the police and law and order (still conditional) be "tested and proved over a credible period." And MPs Nigel Dodds, Gregory Campbell, William McCrea and David Simpson have made no secret of their view that the period available between the election and March 26 is unlikely to suffice.

But Paisley’s critics on the right of his party refused to criticise him during the election campaign (unlike UUP leader David Trimble’s party critics in 1999 and 2003). So it is likely that Paisley will finally say “yes”, if not on 26 March then shortly after, allowing him to grandstand against SF and bargain hard for even more billions of pounds for NI from Gordon Brown’s coffers as the price for signing up; not to mention the handsome sums on offer from Dublin too. Set against the price of refusing to agree to devolved government – direct rule from London with a huge helping of Dublin input – Paisley will do a deal before Blair leaves No. 10.

Sinn Fein’s game plan
And what of SF? Having delivered the surrender of the IRA and obtaining four ministerial seats at Stormont, Adams holds out the prospect of a united Ireland by 2015 to SF’s supporters. He suggests that by then the protestant community will be in a minority in Northern Ireland and SF will have enough electoral presence and leverage in the South to deliver an all-Ireland referendum in favour of one Ireland, even in the northern electorate.

In the meantime it will be pork barrel politics as each side of the confessional divide seeks to grab a big a slice of development funds as possible to support “their community”. And of course, with office comes responsibility. Just as SF has sought to dampen and repress the resistance on the streets in the last years when Catholic youth have risen up against loyalist attacks, so in office they will be required to prove their bourgeois respectability by backing the PSNI in practice when it cracks down, or arrests suspected republican dissidents etc.

The truth is that NI is a deeply divided society and the GFA entrenched and institutionalised that divide just as we said it would back in 1998 when PR supporters urged people back then to vote no in the referendum on it.

The two communities are even more divided now geographically, by housing ghettos and “peace lines”. Education is almost totally segregated by religion.

The whole set up of Stormont – with its confessional requirement to state which side of the divide you represent, with its insistence on decisions to be made by majority votes in both sides of the sectarian divide – squeezes the life blood out of a working class based, progressive and democratic politics.

And this structural flaw in NI’s political set-up will ensure that the two communities do not “spontaneously converge” as a result of state-directed investments or economic policy and as the prospect (or threat) of a united Ireland becomes politically alive it will be debated out within this framework.

The future of the national question?
Already the debate on the websites and bulletin boards between Shinners and Dupers after the elections shows the fragility of the “peace process” and the forces that are in play that will undermine the new Stormont.

Unionists fear the executive will lead to a united Ireland in which they are prisoners. Some unionists demand that the issue of future “sovereignty” be “taken off the agenda” if they are to play ball with power-sharing. Others demand that 70% or more of the NI population should have to agree to any proposal to unite Ireland, or even 50% + 1 of the protestant community.

Sinn Fein correctly says there can be no unionist veto over any moves to unite Ireland again after 75 years and counting of a forcible, undemocratic and bloody partition. But at the same time SF have no vision of a united Ireland other than one ruled by today’s corrupt, bourgeois, pro-US, neo-liberalising parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael (even if as they hope in coalition with SF).

This is no basis upon which to transcend the sectarian divide within the NI working class. A revolutionary, socialist and democratic proposal is to establish an all-Ireland constituent assembly, that sets aside both the confessional rules of Stormont and the deeply reactionary constitution of the Irish Republic.

In such a CA, democratically elected candidates could debate out the forms of legitimate autonomy for various communities or semi-nationalities like northern unionists that did not amount to a veto on the unity of Ireland or the sovereignty of an elected national government.

At the same time socialist and revolutionary democratic parties would present proposals to such a CA that aimed at ripping up everything that defends corporate-led globalisation, private property in the means of production, privileges any church or religion, discriminates against ethnic minorities, women or gays. It would present the working class of Ireland, whether nominally catholic or protestant, with a programme that could unite them as a class against green and orange capitalists, who will find far more unity with each other than working class members of “their community”.

Only a socialist republic of the 32-counties of the island of Ireland will resolve the bitter antagonisms that beset the NI working class, since it will remove the foundations upon which green and orange bosses and capitalist farmers continue to manipulate and reproduce their hold over the working class.

Wed 14, March 2007 @ 20:47