In Northern Ireland, ‘a Protestant state’ finally has a Catholic leader

BELFAST — Northern Ireland was drawn up, a century ago, to create an unassailably secure British Protestant majority within its new borders. So when Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill finally gained the necessary cross-community votes Saturday to become the U.K. region’s leader after a two-year battle, even her most ardent critics recognized the powerful symbolism of the moment.

In a Stormont Parliament Building where Northern Ireland’s founding father and first premier, James Craig, once observed he led “a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state,” the Irish republican O’Neill vowed to be “a first minister for all” as the first leader from the Irish Catholic side of the divide.

“To all of you who are British and unionist, your national identity, your cultures, your traditions are important to me," O'Neill declared to the unionist benches on the far side of the Stormont chamber. 

"Let’s walk this two-way street together, let’s meet one another halfway. I will be doing so with an open hand," she said, her voice slightly breaking with emotion, "and also with heart.”

That will prove difficult — even dangerous — to do in a land where, three decades after its rival paramilitary groups ended retaliatory shootings and bombings that claimed thousands of lives, some of those outlawed gangs still sit like coiled snakes in the darker corners of an unfinished peace process.

The most menacing and criminally active of these groups, the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force, maintain power bases in east Belfast within a short drive of Stormont. Their militant banners flutter from lampposts alongside the Union Jack — a flag that O’Neill’s Sinn Féin hopes one day to replace with the green, white and orange tricolor of the neighboring Republic of Ireland.

The U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord of 1998 envisioned that, by now, a sustained unity government led equally by British unionists and Irish nationalists would have delivered reconciliation and stability for Northern Ireland. A Belfast marked by rival flags and scarred by high “peace walls” of concrete, steel and barbed wire that divide rival communities should have been consigned to history.

It hasn’t yet worked that way in a system that makes it easy — much too easy, its many critics say — for either side to pull the plug on power-sharing in favor of renewed head-butting.

Sabotaging Stormont

Stormont has barely worked at all since the Brexit vote of 2016, which created complex new problems in a land where joint EU membership had blurred the border with the rest of Ireland, and where competing British and Irish identities in the north never stop tussling for the upper hand.

Sinn Féin, as it neared overtaking the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), triggered a three-year collapse in 2017. Soon it became the unionists’ turn to sabotage Stormont, when the launch of new post-Brexit trade rules made it easier to trade with Ireland, an EU member, than with the rest of the U.K. — a shock to unionists who had backed Brexit on the risky assumption it would make that land border with the south more real again.

The DUP withdrew its first minister exactly two years ago Saturday, a step that left the rest of the executive limping along until its legally required collapse eight months later. The DUP ensured it couldn’t be saved because, after Sinn Féin achieved its breakthrough victory in the assembly election of May 2022, the DUP used its position as the largest unionist party to stop the new assembly from functioning at all.

That DUP blockade finally was lifted Saturday on the back of two painstakingly negotiated deals: the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework agreement that eliminated many, but not all, of the checks and restrictions on British goods arriving at Northern Ireland ports; and this week’s DUP-U.K. Safeguarding the Union agreement that aims to strengthen Northern Ireland’s economic place in the U.K. and cut Windsor-level checks at Northern Irish ports more quickly. Perhaps critically, unionists at Stormont will gain a new ability to delay or limit, if not prevent, the local rollout of new EU goods laws.

On Saturday, when the Northern Ireland Assembly jointly elected O’Neill as first minister and the Democratic Unionists' Emma Little-Pengelly as deputy first minister, the shared sense of relief could be felt in every quarter of the house — except from Jim Allister, the lone unionist die-hard in the 90-member chamber opposed to working with Sinn Féin in any circumstances.

“Smashing Sinn Féin” was the DUP’s policy until 2007, too. But Little-Pengelly stressed her willingness to work with O’Neill now that the DUP — or at least a majority of its members — had accepted the revised Brexit trade deal on offer.

The four-party coalition they now jointly lead — despite the disparity in their titles, O’Neill and Little-Pengelly must reach joint positions to keep the Stormont show on the road — faces a string of immediate crises connected to the long power vacuum and a deepening sea of red ink.

Demands and priorities

Britain is providing the executive an extra £3.3 billion to start patching holes in services and pay long-delayed wage hikes that just triggered the biggest public sector strike in Northern Ireland’s history. The trouble is, the head of Northern Ireland’s civil service, Jayne Brady, has already told the new leaders that these eye-watering sums are still too small to pay the required bills. The U.K. expects Stormont to raise regional taxes, something local leaders have been loath to do.

If anything can unite unionist and republican politicians, it’s their shared demand for the U.K. Treasury to keep sending more moolah — even though the British government already has committed to pay Northern Ireland over the odds into perpetuity at a new rate of £1.24 versus an equivalent £1 spent in England.

Money demands and spending priorities should underpin short-term stability at Stormont. But a U.K. general election looms within months and DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson wants to reverse his party’s losses to Sinn Féin. That could be complicated by the fact that he’s just compromised on Brexit trade rules in a fashion that distresses and confuses many within his own divided party, leaving him vulnerable.

To strengthen his leadership, Donaldson boosted pragmatic allies and sought to neuter less reasonable opponents in Saturday’s DUP moves at Stormont.

The assembly’s new non-partisan speaker will be DUP lawmaker Edwin Poots, who defeated Donaldson for the party leadership in 2021 only to be tossed out almost immediately.

That move puts Poots — who used his previous role as Stormont’s agriculture minister to block essential resources for the required post-Brexit checks at ports — into a new strait-jacket of neutrality.

Little-Pengelly, by contrast, is one of Donaldson’s most trusted lieutenants and a Stormont insider. He put her into his own assembly seat when, shortly after the 2022 election, Donaldson dumped it in favor of staying an MP in London.

While Stormont is never more than one crisis away from another collapse, for Saturday, peace reigned — and an Irish republican, committed to Northern Ireland’s eventual dissolution, is in charge of making the place work.