Written by Luca Melis; edited by Charlotte Lewis
“We in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin”.
Edward Carson, Ulster Unionist Party Leader, July 12th 1920, in Belfast.
That was Sir Edward Carson, a wealthy Dublin barrister who dedicated his life to Irish Unionism in opposition to the Home Rule movement. Valorised by Unionists as the “father of Northern Ireland”, Carson was a proud British Imperialist who despised Republicanism even more than he despised Oscar Wilde’s dating habits. For those interested in how Ulster Unionism’s modern hero destroyed the life and career of one of Ireland’s most lauded writers, here is some further reading. Today, an imposing statue in his honour stands defiantly outside the Stormont parliament building in east Belfast. It is reasonable to assume that if Carson were alive today to witness the ascension of a Sinn Féin First Minister to the Northern Irish government, an aneurysm would soon follow.
Earlier this month, Michelle O’Neill, a politician from a working-class Republican family whose father served in prison for his I.R.A. membership, assumed the role of leading Stormont out of a two-year boycott by the Democratic Unionist Party (D.U.P.). The symbolic significance of this new status quo, in a state that was engineered to maintain a British Protestant ruling class in perpetuity is hard to overstate. As O’Neill acknowledged, it's a scenario that her grandparents and parents never thought possible. This development has unsurprisingly reignited discussions about Irish unification in the near future. The prospect of a Sinn Féin government in the Republic would significantly bolster the movement's P.R, and would present a generational opportunity to finally take the question seriously at a state and public level. In the short term, it seems Sinn Féin would need to convince a growing minority of non-aligned voters on the benefits of unification. Broader trends of globalisation and secularisation have come to weaken that traditional Republican-Unionist binary, as the North’s population becomes more multinational and less invested in those historical divides. In her opening speech, O’Neill was careful to keep her language bi-partisan, focusing mostly on fostering dialogue and cooperation with Unionists on bread-and-butter issues like healthcare, cost of living and public services. Her newly formed government, bound to equal power-sharing with Unionists, faces a gluttony of challenges exacerbated by the D.U.P.'s tradition of throwing tantrums over anything that frightens them.
In protest to what they perceived as an undermining of their place in the Union, the D.U.P. under Jeffrey Donaldson forced a collapse of Northern Ireland’s legislature in January 2022, following the imposition of post-Brexit checks on some goods entering the North from Britain. Predictably, the societal impacts of Unionist pearl-clutching have been disastrous. Northern Ireland’s public services have all been stretched to their limits post-Covid. N.H.S. waiting lists are among the longest in the U.K. This includes 37,000 women who are currently on gynaecology waiting lists, and 10,000 children seeking mental health services. The average waiting lists for Northerners are twice those of the Republic of Ireland. The absence of government has been felt most acutely in people’s pockets. Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers initiated strike action last month, after a collapsed government meant that scheduled pay rises were shelved indefinitely. In sectors such as teaching and nursing, Northern Ireland’s wages fall far behind the rest of the U.K. An environmental crisis also emerged last year. Lough Neagh, the U.K. and Ireland’s largest freshwater lake was contaminated with an enormous toxic algae bloom that is hazardous to humans and animals. Years of mismanagement coupled with state-sponsored apathy left the waterbody supplying 40% of the region’s drinking water posing serious public health risks.
With all of this in mind, the return of Stormont this month was broadly welcomed. It remains to be seen how effective the current round of power-sharing will be at delivering material benefits to ordinary people. Public trust in Stormont as an institution remains low, for obvious reasons. Even with the executive promising to make major investments to calm public anxiety, there is little reason to assume the D.U.P. won’t pull the rug out again. Their ineptitude and selfishness over the past two years have laid bare the limitations of power-sharing. In its twenty six years of existence since the Good Friday Agreement, the devolved government has been non-functioning for an astonishing 40% of that time. A conversation surrounding not only the function of the Assembly, but its very existence as an institution is long overdue. If not for the aspirations of Irish unification, for the nearly two million people who call these six Ulster counties home.
A Sinn Féin First Minister may not radically change the machinations of power in Stormont, but it has left a permanent crack in the wall of partition. Edward Carson’s statue, for now, remains outside the Assembly. For his sake, it’s a good thing that his back is turned to parliament.
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