With the same groans of “It can’t be that time again” as the clocks go forward tonight and we lose an hour, the first election posters are being spotted on lampposts across Northern Ireland.
ow depressing.
The traditional sorry catalogue of lost opportunities can be trundled out again. Not that any party will dwell on its role in the failure to deliver on NHS reform, education, Renewable Heating Incentive (RHI) recommendations, infrastructure, legacy or the looming chronic hardships as the cost of living soars.
It’s us who have to live under this dysfunctional governance who will have to reflect on the decay of services and confidence. Three years worth of devolution out of the last five were lost with a click of the fingers. It’s hard to remember when Stormont had any successes to highlight; when it might have gained the support of the public so much that people might say: “Yes, let’s keep that working because we’ve benefitted so much from it” … the way governments elsewhere succeed and develop common interests.
Not here. For some years now we’ve been keeping a secret from the other jurisdictions in these islands. They’ve thought Northern Ireland was flourishing in peace and developing with a degree of self-direction.
The truth was only glimpsed in flashes — here, relating to Brexit and the backstop, now the protocol; there, lit up by occasional gunfire and burning vehicles. Yesterday’s appalling hoax security alert during Simon Coveney’s visit in north Belfast is the latest incident to draw unwelcome attention to our failures.
Dublin has been more aware of the emergence of a new confidence in nationalism than any seem to have been anywhere else. No one has seemed particularly bothered by the disquiet in unionism.
Maybe they don’t have to be bothered. Maybe that’s a problem the unionists need to sort out themselves with their British partners, just as nationalism has sorted out its priorities with Dublin. Certainly, Sinn Fein and the SDLP appear to have stolen a march on the other parties. Their candidates beam down from posters at every road junction, while there’s little sign of Alliance (usually first out of the traps), and the various unionists so far are letting the fading flags from last year’s Twelfth do their work for them.
Perhaps this is indicative of that nationalist confidence. While Sinn Fein and SDLP will still have a battle with each other, they sense this Stormont poll will see them both make substantial ground as the unionist vote proves more brittle. For ‘Ireland’, it’s the Bring It On Election.
For unionism, however, fragmented when it’s never needed to be stronger, unable to strategise a way forward, it’s very much the election of Sorry, Could You Hold On? We’re Not Quite Dressed Yet.
A disturbing political reality is dawning. While this election will inevitably be fought on Orange and Green lines, the outcome will make zero difference to the real lives of ordinary people.
True, many will be wound up by talk of a border poll or the protocol’s constitutional issue, but ultimately that will only foment the sectarianism that our politicians have managed against all odds to sustain throughout a pandemic and 24 years on from the Good Friday Agreement.
Anyone who thought that common suffering would help people identify a common cause with each other here is again proven seriously mistaken. The politics of opportunism has run riot. It used to be thought that it was “in everyone’s interests” to see the Executive work; the fact it worked at all was, for a while, a source of optimism and some pride.
It hasn’t been that way for a long, long time. Now, it’s the fact that it isn’t working that seems to be “in everyone’s interests”, both unionist and nationalist.
For unionists, it shows that enforced coalition and the d’Hondt system were never sustainable formulas for stability; post-protocol, it feels a flawed version of democracy. For nationalists, it shows that even with fair representation, Northern Ireland is simply not viable as a democratic entity.
Surely that’s a baleful prospect?
Stormont is unlikely to return soon. Despite the clutch of last-minute achievements held aloft on Thursday, we don’t have an Executive. Even if, by some miracle, an agreement was cobbled together, who has faith in its durability? Collapse and suspension has been the norm, not the exception.
There’s a malaise about politics here that has seeped into the public’s DNA. That disdain infects attitudes to policing, justice, schools, social equality. Ask someone what they think of Stormont and you’ll likely be told that it’s useless. Indeed, that appears the one thing practically everyone here agrees on.
Of course, there are hardworking MLAs. Yet the cynics have a point. After all, what might Northern Ireland have looked like with proper governance?
The pandemic is not being well handled. But it only aggravated the crisis in our health service with its chronic waiting lists. Had Stormont not disappeared for three years, necessary reforms would have been implemented. People who have paid national insurance all their working lives might get the treatment they’re entitled to when they need it.
Better husbandry of the public purse could have assisted those many families crushed by huge increases in energy and food bills. Making increasingly distant ends meet is soul-destroying. If the Executive was functioning, it had £300m to help those in direst need.
Stormont could have prioritised solutions to the legacy of the Troubles. It could have progressed reconciliation with inventive measures to address division, poverty, lack of opportunity. So much depended on nothing more controversial than goodwill.
Legacy wouldn’t only be mentioned when important cases drag their way through the courts because there’s literally no other route open for redress. Others wouldn’t feel their hurt didn’t count. Reconciliation would now be a shared theme of every policy.
If Stormont worked, then the constitutional core of the protocol would have been settled and we’d be exploiting the “best of both worlds” right now. Constantly telling unionists “I told you so” doesn’t help business by fixing practical problems or restoring stability.
More than just 18 of the 44 recommendations after the RHI fiasco would have been implemented.
All of it obvious. All of it achievable. None of it achieved.
In fact, now you think of it, if it wasn’t for the Pavlovian trigger of Orange and Green, who would genuinely bother to trek out to a booth on May 5?
Ordinary politics certainly never brought out much of a vote here.
