One of the objects of the Belfast Agreement was to decouple Northern Ireland’s constitutional future from day-to-day politics. Instead of polarising around the constitution, parties would have more leeway to focus on social and economic policy – or “normal politics”.
In one sense, in this respect at least it was a major success. After consistently recording some of the highest turnouts in the United Kingdom, voter participation slumped in the years after 1998; the imperative to get out and vote was gone.
Yet neither politics nor commentary really adapted to this new reality. Indeed, the opposite happened. The Democratic Unionists and Sinn Féin first overtook their moderate counterparts, the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP. Then, abetted by the witless Peter Hain, they used the St Andrews Agreement to pull up the ladder after them.
After St Andrews, the symbolically-important post of First Minister was nominated not by the largest designation (unionist or nationalist), but by the largest party. Voters who cared about such things had every incentive to pile in behind the biggest dog on their side; those who wanted more from politics started switching to the Alliance or stopped voting.
Commentators, meanwhile, continued to talk and write as if Sinn Féin’s electoral progress directly presaged a threat to the Union, even though the Agreement has decoupled the two things and surveys consistently show a strong minority of Catholic voters would vote to remain in the UK in a border poll.
All of this is important context for assessing the results of last week’s Northern Irish local elections, which saw Sinn Féin overtake the DUP to become the Province’s largest party in local government.
Some, such as Sam McBride, have argued that this is simply an inevitable reckoning with the Province’s changing demographics. He opened a (somewhat controversial) column in the Belfast Telegraph thus:
“The Sinn Féin tidal wave which has swept Northern Ireland can be traced back to maternity wards in the years after the Good Friday Agreement in which Catholic births dramatically overtook those of Protestants.”
Perhaps. But others have pointed out that the supposed tidal bore of demographic destiny isn’t obvious in the actual data. There was also nothing inevitable about Sinn Féin being the beneficiary; the laundering of the memory of the IRA’s terror campaign to younger generations of voters could, and should, have been more rigorously challenged.
But he is right that these results, and the deeper trend they reflect, pose an existential challenge to what I have called capital-U Unionist politics, if not necessarily to the Union itself.
The maintenance of the pre-1998 party system in Northern Ireland has been to Sinn Féin’s advantage. As the SDLP has declined, they have cemented their position as the party of nationalism in a way that the DUP, challenged by both the UUP and the hard-line Traditional Unionist Voice, has not.
Worse, this plurality has undermined Unionism in the headcount horse-race without broadening its appeal. Barring some fitful efforts by various UUP leaders to move in a more liberal direction, all three offer variations on the same, Unionist, theme.
There is no analogue of the old Northern Ireland Labour Party, which was firmly pro-UK but offered voters something distinct on normal policy; the Alliance Party, founded as a liberal unionist party, takes mostly pro-UK votes but is conspicuously neutral on the constitutional question, and often seems disposed to row in with the nationalists on key issues such as the sea border.
None of this was inevitable. The brief flowering of NI21 showed that a modern, pro-UK party could draw support from Catholics who don’t mind being part of this country but are alienated by the historic baggage of capital-U Unionism. But that collapsed in egomaniacal farce, and burned a lot of goodwill in the process.
In the wake of the result, people are now floating once again whether the UUP should merge with the DUP. Yet as McBride points out, the old comfort blanket that totting up the combined Unionist vote would mean coming out on top is gone.
And the logic of so-called unionist unity would always end up here, because a party united by nothing but Unionism could only ever appeal to voters animated by the sounds and symbols of Unionism. It might maximise the vote of an individual party, but it would shrink the overall electorate for pro-UK parties – as, indeed, the limited offering of the past few decades has already done.
Such a move would thus be worthwhile only because it might create space in pro-Union politics for a new party.
(I think a revived Northern Irish Labour Party would be the obvious candidate – although this would require either unlikely cooperation from UK Labour or ministerial intervention to overrule a scandalous Electoral Commission ruling that a local party could not use the designation ‘Labour’, even though the national party refuses to stand.)
But it would be far better if these results prompted a much more extensive reconfiguring of pro-UK politics in Northern Ireland, with liberal, conservative, and progressive unionists all making their own cases, tailored to the electorate of 2023.
To some extent, the Belfast Agreement has militated against this. One of its biggest flaws as drafted (as opposed to the various iniquities that have flowed from its ‘spirit’) is that it casts Northern Ireland as a waiting room with only one exit door.
Nationalists are free to present a vote for unity with the Republic as an opportunity for great change. But unionists cannot sell a the Union on like terms; there is no victory condition whereby they can persuade voters to permanently choose the United Kingdom, and thus scant means or incentive to do the hard work of selling it to non-Unionists.
Renegotiating the Belfast Agreement to hold open the possibility of a decisive vote in either direction would be a worthwhile unionist objective. But the work of building a majority for that hypothetical eventuality should begin now.
Such fragmentation will feel deeply counter-intuitive to some. As in Scotland, where the SNP have consolidated the separatist vote, the urge to try and take them on in the headcount game will be powerful – especially as material perks such as ministerial salaries will be on the line.
But Scotland also shows that a separatist party can enjoy a hegemonic position in elected politics without voters being sold on its core objective. Sinn Féin may yet find itself in similar straits.