This crisis is serious because it is Sinn Fein pulling the plug

Posted by Jim on January 18, 2017

Sinn Féin spent ten years trying to show Unionists how The North could work if Unionists could live on equal terms with the rest of the people here. The DUP spent those ten years proving they couldn’t. Only they can prevent The North working.
Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast.Wednesday, January 18, 2017

WHAT’S the way out of this one? Make no mistake, the collapse of the executive and assembly is the worst crisis the Northern  institutions of the Good Friday Agreement have faced since 2001 for a number of reasons.

The collapse sixteen years ago was caused by David Trimble walking out because the IRA had not decommissioned at the speed he wanted them to. Trimble could never leave such matters to the bodies set up to oversee them, in that case the International Decommissioning Commission.

The subsequent walk-outs and collapses were also mainly caused by Unionists setting various conditions for Sinn Féin, on one occasion aided and abetted by the RUC getting themselves in a twist about their own informers in the Republican Movement.

This collapse is different in nature and type. It’s the first time Sinn Féin has walked away from institutions in the last eighteen years. That’s why it’s so serious. They have pulled the plug but still both Unionist parties and the SDLP don’t get it. Indeed the only person up at Stormont apart from Sinn Féin former MLAs who does understand is inevitably Jim Allister.

On Monday,  Allister correctly told the BBC that Sinn Féin have taken a ‘strategic decision’ to shut down the Executive and Assembly because it was not delivering. Full marks for reading Gerry Adams’s speech to the party’s Cúige Uladh, and believing him. Of course, given the ability level of the average Unionist MLA at Stormont,  Allister has only to close one eye to be king, as a former Nationalist party leader said of the old Stormont.

Few noticed that while announcing Sinn Féin would not nominate a Deputy First Minister,  Michelle O’Neill said, ‘we [Sinn Féin] will not be back in this chamber’ until they had a satisfactory resolution of the matters of equality of status and parity of esteem the DUP’s denial of which provoked Sinn Féin into pulling the plug.

Therefore,  when the election takes place , Sinn Féin will again not nominate anyone to an Executive. There are three weeks before our proconsul [ the Secretary of State]has to call another election if there is no Executive. In those three weeks there is no chance of the DUP eating humble pie, and demonstrating a firm purpose of amendment not to sin again by reciting an act of contrition. There is equally no chance of the proconsul calling another election — on the principle that repeating the same action, over and over again,  and expecting a different result is a sign of madness.

What will happen? The most likely outcome is a very lengthy period of the Assembly meeting as a talking shop, as in 2008 when Sinn Féin boycotted the Executive after the refusal of the DUP to honour their 2007 commitment to devolve policing and justice. In this case it could be years while negotiations take place to find a way to ensure the DUP honors the agreements they have signed up to at St Andrews and Fresh Start.

In the meantime parties are on election footing. Sinn Féin have the initiative and the DUP are on the back foot unwilling to accept that the election is about their bad faith and what Sinn Féin chair Declan Kearney called their ‘institutionalized bigotry’. Yet they can’t face the voters if they admit the election is about the ‘cash for ash’ scandal. So they will adopt the mendacious line that it’s an attack on Unionism and an attempt to bring down their leader. That doesn’t augur well for talks afterwards.

Still, the Assembly is more important to the DUP than Sinn Féin which has bigger fish to fry in Dublin. The DUP don’t realize that pulling the plug and treating Stormont with contempt has energized Sinn Féin supporters who have been wanting the party to stand up to the DUP for years,  the more stridently since Foster took over to lead like the antediluvian rural Unionist she is.

Sinn Féin spent ten years trying to show Unionists how The North could work if Unionists could live on equal terms with the rest of the people here. The DUP spent those ten years proving they couldn’t. Only they can prevent The North working.