Northern Ireland is governed, internally, by a consociational Legislative Assembly – that is to say, power is shared by representatives of different or antagonistic social groups (OED Shorter), whether they like it or not.
The two parties who have dominated for longest the Executive and the positions of First and Deputy First Minister seemed, for the best part of a decade, to like it quite a lot. The number of ministries allocated to each party is determined by the D’Hondt method, which operates in more than thirty other territories worldwide, including Scotland and Wales, though elsewhere it is the number of representatives in the Assembly, rather than the number of seats at the cabinet table, that are so determined.
Our D’Hondt system requires that all MLAs designate themselves as Catholic, Protestant or Other, which is a bone of contention for some. The largest parties get first dibs, which for the past thirteen years has largely meant the DUP and Sinn Féin making a grab for Finance and Economy. There is an element of noughts-and-crosses – exie-osies, as we prefer – about it: closing off one route sometime leaves you open to another. There was uproar among Unionists in an earlier Assembly when Sinn Féin plumped for Education and installed as minister Martin McGuinness. Virtually his last act before the suspension of the Assembly in 2002, following the uncovering of an alleged IRA spy ring at Stormont, was to abolish the Verbal Reasoning Test, aka 11-Plus, for post-primary education. (A decision a good many of us here had been rooting for, for years.) Unfortunately, he didn’t have the time, or the forethought, to put anything else in its place or explain how pupils were supposed to move now from one stage of their education to the next, with the result that grammar schools began to offer entrance exams of their own devising. Or rather, Protestant grammar schools banded together to offer one lot of exams (three papers in total), Catholic grammar schools another lot (two papers), so that now some ten- and eleven-year-olds, whose parents want to cover all the bases, can be faced with five papers in the November and December of their final year of primary school – a system that has been cited as increasing segregation not just on religious but also economic grounds, the single biggest predictor of whether children will go to non-grammar schools being whether they are in receipt of free school meals.
The Justice Ministry has up to now been omitted from the grab, it being one of the articles of the St Andrews Agreement that the post would be elected by cross-community vote, pretty much ruling out either a DUP or Sinn Féin minister, or any too-strong shade of Orange or Green for that matter. The Alliance Party – the epitome of otherdom – was the obvious candidate, and held the post from the devolution of policing and justice powers in 2010 until 2016 when – exasperated by the tightening grip of the DUP and Sinn Féin on most of the instruments of government – they joined with the SDLP and the UUP in deciding to leave the Executive and form an official opposition. There followed a temporary scramble to form a government until Clare Sugden, an Independent Unionist, was identified and voted in by the DUP and Sinn Féin, taking up her post three months short of her thirtieth birthday. It’s tempting to say that if she hadn’t existed, the DUP and Arlene Foster, and Sinn Féin and Martin McGuinness, would have had to invent her, but in fact she was well able for them both. She accused them of ‘posturing’ and ‘feathering their own nests in terms of keeping their own constituents right’ when that Renewable Heating scandal broke, and questioned why Sinn Féin, which had ‘long held values that we don’t punish someone without investigation, without knowing the facts’ (I only read the reports, I can’t vouch for the straightness of her face), was calling for just that in the case of the First Minister, who it wanted to resign. ‘Arlene and Martin may have reneged on their responsibilities to do their jobs, but I will not be doing that,’ she said, ‘because I have integrity.’
And of course, the First Minister not being able to exist without the Deputy First Minister, as soon as McGuinness went, so did the Executive.
*
I understand our politics can be exasperating. I really do. (They bug the hell out of me.*)
In the course of a discussion about Brexit (I caught it on YouTube, my algorithm now offering me Brexit discussions in the way it once offered me Teenage Fanclub John Peel Sessions), Professor Brigid Laffan, Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, Florence, says, with something close to disbelief, that ‘the DUP didn’t want the Good Friday Agreement. They didn’t sit in those negotiations, they opposed it, they opposed it in the Referendum and now they’re the ones with the political power over that part of Ireland.’
Which is perhaps mixing up two not entirely related things. The DUP are the ones with political power over this part of Ireland in the sense that they are the ones giving the Conservatives their single-finger working majority.† That is because they have ten of our eighteen MPs, which they gained with 36 per cent of the vote in the last general election – a 10 per cent swing from the election before that and a full 6.5 per cent more than the next nearest party, Sinn Féin. (On the day that Boris Johnson prorogued parliament, Sinn Féin reiterated their abstentionist policy saying, seriously, what’s the point of taking your seat if you and the other 640-odd can be turfed out that easily?‡)
But Professor Laffan is right in terms of Northern Ireland’s devolved administration: the DUP didn’t vote for the Good Friday Agreement. They looked at one stage as though they might be forced by it into full-blown retreat. So, either they did something remarkable or someone obviously fucked up somewhere along the way.
Or the British and Irish governments entered into a subsequent agreement with ‘the parties’, but in reality with the DUP and Sinn Féin, that everyone else in the world appears (reasonably: you have enough on your plates) to have forgotten, which created the conditions for those two parties to enter into government together.
It is difficult now to remember but the first power-sharing Executive here was led by the UUP and the SDLP. Their party leaders – David Trimble and John Hume – shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize. (Though it was Hume’s own deputy, Seamus Mallon, who was lower-case ‘d’ to Trimble’s O in the FM combo.) Bono called them on stage – in their shirtsleeves! – during a ‘Yes’ gig in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall in May 1998, ahead of the Good Friday Agreement confirmatory referendum, and raised their hands above his head. ‘Two men, taking a leap of faith, out of the past and into the future.’§
Even at that stage, though, much of the energy and interest of the British and Irish governments was devoted to the parties then standing third and (most particularly) fourth in the polls, the party, that is, doing the invisible three-legged race with the organization that had the capacity to explode one-tonne bombs in the centre of London.
In the years that followed, the governments’ determination to keep that party in the process, no matter what, exposed the ‘coalition of the centre’ on both flanks. The UUP were called out repeatedly by the DUP for their stance on continued IRA activity and the foot-dragging over arms decommissioning. The SDLP for their part doubled-back so often to make sure Sinn Féin were keeping up – or not being left behind – that when the latter suddenly burst past them, they had nothing left in the tank with which to respond.
The real carve-up – the moment that our Assembly politics took on the shape they have retained right down to today – was ushered in by the St Andrews Agreement. The Assembly had been suspended for four years, since 2002, dissolved in fact, and Direct Rule from London had been reintroduced. And here it is maybe worth taking a second to reflect that of the twenty years since it first met (it existed in shadow form for a year before full powers were devolved in December 1999), the Assembly has been suspended – or dissolved – for getting on seven and a half of those years. The current hiatus still has a couple of years to go before it catches up on the 2002 breakdown, which occurred after the uncovering of an alleged Provisional IRA spy ring within the Parliament Buildings at Stormont. The Sinn Féin (and IRA) member at the centre of the allegations, Denis Donaldson, a close associate of Gerry Adams from their days in Long Kesh (later, Her Majesty’s Prison Maze), was subsequently exposed as a British agent – or exposed himself, as it were, at a press conference, flanked by Adams and Martin McGuinness – and took himself off to the wilds of Donegal where he lived alone in a house without electricity or running water and where, just four months later, in April 2006, he was murdered by a member, or members, of the Real IRA (the IRA, of whatever designation, being, in the matter of informers, merciless, and not in the least concerned with due process).
At times, the whole history of our Assembly reads like a novel by a writer whose desire for plot twists far outstrips any interest in health or education, the mundane business of government. During those years after 2002, the DUP and Sinn Féin overtook the UUP and the SDLP. When it came to St Andrews, therefore, Sinn Féin and the DUP were now the main negotiators and (though all the other parties did sign up too) the document largely reflected those parties’ concerns. (In one telling comment, David Ford, leader of the Alliance Party at the time, said his party would not be able to recommend the Agreement to its supporters ‘without more detail of what exactly was agreed’ – he was supposed to be in the fucking talks – especially in ‘side deals’ between the governments and the DUP and – separately, that is – Sinn Féin.) As well as the headline-grabbing paragraphs on the devolution of policing and criminal justice – and the commitment of Sinn Féin to endorse the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) – there were also changes to, among other things, the way the First and Deputy First Minister were appointed and to ‘community designation’: the obligation on MLAs to declare themselves as Unionist, Nationalist or Other. In the political landscape of the early 2000s, Other was pretty much synonymous with the Alliance Party, though there was also a single Green MLA… The ‘other’ kind of Green, that is.
As Mick Fealty, founder of the independent news and opinion platform, Slugger O’Toole, wrote recently:
‘It’s important to view these two parties as a twosome, not least because that it is how the two governments have dealt with them from the negotiations at St Andrews onwards, and how, in turn, they’ve used such exclusive influence to squeeze smaller rivals. The cover offered to the DUP and Sinn Féin by the very confidentiality of those ‘side deals’, has had two effects. One, smaller parties have struggled for relevance in the eyes of their voters, and two, gradually it swallowed the ground available to them for compromise.’1
St Andrews also consolidated the Petition of Concern, a ‘safeguard’ in the Good Friday Agreement, whereby ‘a significant minority of Assembly members’ (the figure stipulated was 30 of the 108) could request that a decision be taken on a cross-community basis, that is (according to the text) ‘a weighted majority (60 per cent) of members present and voting, including at least 40 per cent of each of the nationalist and unionist designations present and voting’ (no room in there for ‘others’). The thinking was (the key is possibly in that word ‘minority’) that it would prevent one ‘side’ dominating the other, in matters of culture especially.
In fact, it came to be used as a way of vetoing any motion or legislation that was not to a particular party’s liking, which is presumably what is to be read into the DUP’s message to its supporters that (unlike the old ‘lousy’ Belfast Agreement) the St Andrews Agreement ensured ‘no significant decisions can be taken without unionist approval.’
Its use, if anything, only increased after 2006: 115 times in the most recent Assembly term alone. With more than thirty MLAs of its own during that term (meaning it didn’t need the support of other parties), the DUP led the way, raising eighty-six petitions. Sinn Féin (twenty-seven MLAs), with the SDLP, had recourse to the measure on twenty-nine occasions, and all the other parties a not-quite-handful of times each. Notoriously, five of the DUP petitions related to marriage equality, despite the fact that there was a small majority in the Assembly (small, but they would have accepted it if it was Brexit) in favour of reform.
Questioned about this on Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff in July 2018 – ‘How can you use a mechanism that is supposed to help and defend minorities against this [LGBT] minority?’ – the DUP’s Ian Paisley Jr said that the Petition of Concern was ‘given to the parties in Northern Ireland by Tony Blair. So, in his wisdom he handed out this veto to parties to use as they will… and all parties have used that veto on numerous occasions, almost a hundred occasions, for various pet projects.’ (My emphasis.)
In the absence of true collective decision-making, these ‘pet projects’ covered all areas of policy divergence between the Big Two in particular, from education to welfare reform, the latter being the subject of no fewer than forty-nine petitions, ending with the proposed Welfare Reform Bill going back to the House of Commons, in November 2015, to be legislated on there. (Shame they didn’t think then of doing the same for marriage equality.)#
But here’s the (if you’ll permit me) mad thing. Though Sinn Féin and the DUP have most often used petitions against one another, so to speak, neither has been busting a gut to reform or scrap it altogether. And it’s not as though they haven’t had their opportunities. To quote the wise and much-missed Aodán Mac Póilin, whose book Our Tangled Speech is one of the things currently keeping me sane: ‘Northern Ireland’s peace process is an attempt to accommodate the irreconcilable.’ The odds are stacked against anyone operating under its terms actually doing anything. It does, however, ‘[provide] ideal conditions for the politics of outrage, swagger and emblematic posturing.’ The next crisis is never far away. And the next crisis talks.
There was another round of protracted negotiations at the end of 2014, which produced yet another Agreement, the Stormont House Agreement, which in turn – after a temporary mass withdrawal, early the following autumn, of DUP ministers from the Executive∫ – and yet more negotiations – begat Fresh Start, in November 2015: ‘An agreement to consolidate the peace, secure stability, enable progress, and offer hope.’ (There was provision in the Fresh Start Agreement for new guidance on the much-abused Petition of Concern. That process was to be begun by the Executive Office, that is Sinn Féin and the DUP in tandem, putting a proposal to the Assembly Speaker within one month to limit the petition’s future use. By the time of the latest suspension, however, that had still not been done.)
As is standard, when parties agree to get back to doing the thing they have been elected to do, namely governing, the US president, his secretary of state, the Irish and British governments praised them for their momentous achievement, though not quite as much as Sinn Féin and the DUP praised themselves. On the anniversary of that agreement, six months after the restoration of the Executive, in November 2016, the DUP and Sinn Féin released a statement advertising the fact that they were getting along famously, complete with photograph of smiling ministers artfully (and pointedly) mingled, and jibes at the parties who had finally given up any hope of being able to influence the Executive from within and gone into opposition (‘Imagine if we had followed the example of others and decided the challenges of government were just too daunting’).
Two months later, Sinn Féin withdrew from the Executive and brought down the Assembly.
*
The official line is that it was all brought crashing down by the scandal around the RHI scheme. Certainly, it would have been enough on its own to bring any government down.
Renewable heating covered three main forms: solar water heating, ‘deep geothermal, ground source or air source heat pumps’ (no, me neither) and biomass, or wood pellet, boilers. There were two parts to it: domestic, introduced in 2014, and non-domestic, introduced two years earlier. The latter was administered by Ofgem, the government office for the regulation of the gas and electricity market in the UK.
In Northern Ireland the scheme resulted in hundreds of customers being paid more in incentives for burning sustainable fuel than the fuel itself cost. Very simply (it came to sound like a mantra), ‘the more you burned, the more you earned’. The minister responsible for introducing it, at the Department of Enterprise, was Arlene Foster. It has since emerged that at the time she was recommending its adoption to the Assembly, she hadn’t read the regulations. As the anomaly came to light and legislation was being prepared to end it, there was a last rush of applications, a number of which came from people related to DUP members and advisers. It was almost as though someone had put the word out.
All this had been known within the Executive Office months before. Certainly, it had been known when Sinn Féin and the DUP issued that joint statement in autumn 2016, telling everyone (not least the so-called ‘smaller parties’ – including of course the two largest parties of yore) how brilliantly they were doing in government.
The question of exactly Who knew What When, How they then reacted – and Why – has been the subject of a public inquiry that at the time of writing has yet to publish its findings. The only question that can at present be answered with confidence is Where these boilers were located: around a third were in poultry farms, many in Mid Ulster and Tyrone. The largest single recipient had thirteen boilers for his sheds – and his tanning salon sideline – each piped to run off a separate meter to maximize profits, which were expected to total £2.5 million by the time the scheme closed. And he had previously been cited as an example of good practice by the Department of Agriculture (Minister at the time, Michelle O’Neill, now Northern leader of Sinn Féin: her department organized fifty-eight workshops to promote the scheme).2
That there was a whiff of more than just burning pellets from the DUP side of the chamber was unarguable. The relatives of one special adviser had eleven boilers between them. Another special adviser – seemingly believing that the money was coming out of the Westminster Exchequer – told a colleague it was an opportunity to ‘fill our boots’. (Whatever the findings of the inquiry, its hearings have shone a light on the role of such special advisers – SPADs – at Stormont: co-opted by political parties and having the status of temporary civil servants. Shone a light too on how both the DUP and Sinn Féin regarded the rest of the Assembly. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, Sinn Féin Finance Minister, told the inquiry that ‘it was Sinn Féin’s decision not to “yield”’ to a bill – passed in the Assembly by a margin of two-to-one, though with the SDLP abstaining – that placed restrictions on who could and could not be a special adviser.Ω
There was, though, a suggestion that Sinn Féin’s decision finally to pull the plug had, as often in the past, as much to do with the party’s longer-term ambitions south of the border. And then there was the matter of Martin McGuinness’s health. There had been rumours that he wasn’t well, of trips abroad cancelled, and he had been out of the public eye for some time, but his appearance on the January afternoon that he called a press conference to announce his resignation as Deputy First Minister was truly shocking. And the sigh he made as he sat down to speak – as though something irrevocable was about to be uttered… It was one of those moments where even those who would not normally give a person the time of day use the phrase, ‘I mean on a human level…’
There were other aggravating factors, of which the possible consequences of the EU Referendum was undoubtedly one. The partners in government had campaigned on opposite sides – Sinn Féin countering the DUP’s ‘Leave makes the Union (with Great Britain) stronger’ message with a call to ‘vote to put Ireland first and vote Remain in the EU’. The Referendum, though, had been and gone several months by the time the two parties’ Executive Ministers mingled and smiled for their all-getting-along splendidly snap. Two days before Christmas, with the RHI scandal deepening and relations between the two main parties worsening, the DUP Minister for Communities, Paul Givan, announced – by email to the organization concerned, Líofa – that his department was withdrawing funding for an Irish language scheme that helped some hundred people a year who could not otherwise afford it to spend time in the County Donegal Gaeltacht area. (‘Happy Christmas,’ he signed off, ‘and happy New Year.’ This a man with a Diploma in Advanced Management Practice.) The impression grew that not only would the DUP never support legislation to recognize the Irish language – another long-running point of contention between them and Sinn Féin (and other parties, it has to be said, in favour of an Irish Language Act) – it would go out of its way to thwart and belittle it. An impression that was reinforced by Arlene Foster’s comment (she claimed in relation to Sinn Féin, rather than the demand for an Irish Language Act specifically, as if it made a difference) that if you feed a crocodile it keeps coming back for more.
McGuinness’s resignation and his party’s refusal to nominate a successor had triggered an election, which saw Sinn Féin come within 1,170 first preference votes≈ of the DUP – or 0.2 per cent – on an increase of almost 4 per cent, in contrast to the DUP’s drop of 1.1 per cent. For the first time in the nearly hundred years since Partition, non-unionists formed a majority in a Northern Ireland Assembly. (That almost seismic shift – journalist Eamonn Mallie in fact referred to it as ‘an earthquake’ and ‘the Fall of the Berlin Wall of Stormont’3 – drew some of the attention from the fact that the Alliance Party, home of the ‘others’, gained over 2 per cent of the vote.)
Added to the fact that a majority in Northern Ireland had voted Remain in the EU Referendum, this could look like – and was interpreted as – a rejection of the DUP’s stance on Brexit as well. At the June general election called by Theresa May, however, the DUP not only held its ground, it gained more, as again did Sinn Féin. With the exception of a single independent Unionist, in fact, the two parties won all of the eighteen seats on offer. It had taken twenty years but the two parties who provided the First and Deputy First Ministers to the first power-sharing Executive – the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party – were effectively wiped out as electoral forces.
The BBC map of the results suggests a repartitioned Northern Ireland along DUP/Sinn Féin lines. It also suggests a division – often alluded to in conversation – west and east of the (river) Bann. Actually, if you squint, Northern Ireland looks like a Sinn Féin head wearing a DUP wig. (OK, so you really, really have to squint.)
Of more immediate moment, however, was the fact that the two seats the DUP had picked up gave them exactly the number that Theresa May required to form a minority government. Cue all those cartoons in the London newspapers. Cue all those ‘who are those people?’ questions. Cue all this that I am writing. (What can I say? Go ask the people who voted them in if you want your money back.)
In February 2018, after the collapse of the (then) latest talks aimed at getting the Assembly up and running again, documents were leaked showing that the DUP had in fact contemplated – indeed, had agreed in principle to – a stand-alone Irish Language Bill. Although it would have stood alone only in the way that members of the Three Degrees or the Supremes stand alone, as two other bills would have been simultaneously introduced (an Ulster-Scots Bill and a Respecting Culture and Diversity Bill). The DUP, perhaps afraid that it would be promoted as a (flashing lights) Diana Ross and (smaller print) the Supremes, canvassed opinion at the more vividly Orange end of the political spectrum… and baulked. Then walked.4
Sinn Féin might themselves have had some explaining to do, had that deal gone ahead. In their case, why, having foregrounded the broader ‘rights agenda’ as a precondition for restoring the Executive, they were prepared to go back into coalition with the DUP without any guarantee on marriage equality. (A stance that confirmed the suspicion of some LGBT people I know that the party had all along been using marriage equality as a way of putting the DUP on the back foot.)∂ And why, despite calls from many quarters for its reform, it seemed happy to return to government with the DUP with that damn Petition of Concern mechanism still intact.
The votes in the House of Commons on 8–9 July 2019 in favour of marriage equality and abortion reform radically altered the landscape here, though perhaps with the unlooked-for consequence of putting off even further a resumption of the Stormont Assembly. The Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Bill seemed at the time it was moved to be a fairly insignificant piece of parliamentary business, a mere formality: Karen Bradley – still Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – seeking a (further) deferral of a date for assembly elections here, an admission that the talks restarted in May were going nowhere and not even fast.
In the growing guerrilla (guerrilla? It’s not far off civil) warfare between parliament and the Executive, however, there are no mere formalities any more. Benches that would normally be empty – because nobody, but nobody who doesn’t represent the place usually sticks around for Northern Ireland business – were suddenly packed. Opposition MPs tabled amendments to the bill, on – among other things – reform of abortion law and legislation on equal marriage, both of which had hitherto been designated as ‘devolved matters’. Both of those were carried (and carried in some haste into law) with the proviso that they would only come into effect if the Northern Assembly was not up and running by 21 October, which some might say was a disincentive to any party in favour of those reforms to go back into government before that date.π5
As Conor McGinn, the Northern Irish-born Labour MP who introduced the equal marriage amendment, said, ‘At the minute, however, the Assembly and the Executive exist in the ether, or as a concept, not in reality, so if they cannot make this law, we will make it here, because, as I have said often, rights delayed are rights denied.’
Former BBC journalist and now regular Slugger O’Toole contributor, Brian Walker, wrote, ‘MPs are for once not prepared to leave out Northern Ireland, or treat it as a weird and semi-mythical place, as if dreamed up by the likes of Tolkien or Pullman and all too suitable as the backdrop to Game of Thrones.’∆
There were a few more cynical mutterings that opposition MPs might have seen the amendments as a way of having a go at the DUP: some of that Sammy-Wilson-style barracking from the back benches had not gone down well, still less had the self-importance of a party propping up an unpopular government.
The amendments, though, didn’t end there. The Northern Ireland Bill soon became something of a supermarket trolley into which opposition MPs – within as well as without the Conservative Party – piled as much as they could fit in the time allowed them. Dominic Grieve, former Attorney General for England and Wales (not forgetting Advocate General for Northern Ireland), succeeded in getting in an amendment calling for the Secretary of State to report back to the House of Commons at fortnightly intervals on progress towards the restoration of the Stormont institutions, with a further requirement that a motion for MPs to vote on be tabled. In the view of the Independent, ‘Crucially, this motion will be amendable, allowing MPs to add clauses to rule out no-deal. If the Commons is prorogued at the time, the amendment… states that it must be recalled to sit for at least five days.’ The Times, meanwhile, quoted Grieve as saying that no-deal would mark the beginning of the end of the Union, making the Northern Ireland Bill a ‘perfectly legitimate place to start looking at how one might make sure no-deal Brexits are fully debated before they take place.’
Northern Ireland was now the absolute centre of British politics. Brexit and the attempt to reanimate our long-suspended institutions had overlapped. Which was why early in this book I said that the Northern Ireland Bill might yet turn out to be the most important piece of legislation to come before parliament in a generation… a claim that viewed again from (real-time check) half past ten on 29 August, the evening of the day after Boris Johnson, PM–MU, applied to the Queen to prorogue parliament, sounds, admittedly, as creaky as the Sam’s Grill sign in Bad Day at Black Rock. The DUP – it almost goes without saying – were the only other party in parliament who welcomed that prorogation.** Arlene Foster declared that it was an opportunity to review her party’s confidence and supply arrangement, to ensure that its priorities aligned with those of the government, to which ‘Turkeys voting for Christmas’ has been one of the milder responses. Turkeys, more like, flogging all their possessions and moving to this Christmas place with suitcases full of stuffing.
I was in Montreal when the equal marriage and abortion votes went through. You know how it is, you wait and wait and wait for a piece of socially liberal legislation and then the moment you go away, two come along in a quarter of an hour. (Just a couple of days before I left, I was watching a BBC NI current affairs programme in which a leading marriage equality campaigner said he and his partner were going to have a civil partnership, seeing no prospect of legalization any time soon.) My elder daughter was unconvinced. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ she said. Not quite eighteen years she has lived here. Scepticism already runs deep.
*
In Northern Ireland, after those Commons votes, attention focused again on the Irish language. There is a plain obligation in the St Andrews Agreement for an Irish Language Act, though the DUP has long tried to dismiss it as an annex (three-quarters of the agreement consists of annexes), added without their being consulted.
Since the Stormont House and Fresh Start agreements, that obligation has become – under the heading ‘Outstanding Commitments’ – an endorsement on the part of the British and Irish governments of ‘the need for respect for and recognition of the Irish language in Northern Ireland, consistent with the Council of Europe Charter on Regional or Minority Languages.’
An altogether more slippery form of words, the exact interpretation of which the DUP and Sinn Féin continue to squirt (I am truly sorry I started on this sentence) back and forth between them. In brief, Sinn Féin will not return to Stormont until the Irish language issue is dealt with, while the DUP say that Stormont is the proper place for the issue to be dealt with: come back in and we can sort it out there.
From Montreal I travelled with my family to Ottawa where, on the night of 12 July – of all nights – I stood in front of the Parliament Buildings (which bear more than a passing resemblance to the Palace of Westminster) watching a show called Northern Lights: a moving-image projection onto the façade, which was, essentially, a history of the federation, with accompanying commentary, in English and in French. Words in it, indeed, to the effect that Canada’s two languages are its peculiar and particular strength. Canada, it has to be said, has this language thing down pat. 2019, significant anniversary of so much at home, marked fifty years there of the passing of its Official Languages Act. The bilingual street signs, the packaging… it’s as much about design as anything. You can look at them whatever way you want. Listening to the commentary up at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, I am not entirely sure that the French and the English are direct translations of one another. Each seems at moments to be advancing the story a little, a sleight of hand, or ear, perhaps (my spoken French is not that good and yet I feel somehow I am getting it all), and I think of the times I have listened to the poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa – the way she moves when she reads, and sometimes speaks, between Irish and English, never saying ‘and now I am translating from this one to that one’ – so that I can nearly believe that I speak Irish. I don’t.
*
My younger daughter (who like her sister has a little Irish learned from my wife, who brought it with her from Cork††) is teaching herself sign language while she is on holiday. She tells us she has opted for British sign language (BSL) over Irish (ISL) and asks us if there is a Northern Irish variant. We don’t know. We look it up and, unsurprisingly perhaps, the answer is yes, or no, depending on who you ask. It is generally agreed that there exists a distinctive local usage – a marriage of ISL syntax and the BSL lexicon, but some, including the UK government (which recognizes ISL and BSL in Northern Ireland), refuse to accept that this merits the designation NISL.
We wonder which of the two (or three) is used in Stormont, the courts or whether both (or all) are. We read up on the efforts of people in the deaf community to have a sign language act introduced in Northern Ireland: Scotland has one, the Republic of Ireland too, but, as the BBC reports, ‘without a functioning Stormont assembly, legislation for sign language in Northern Ireland cannot be introduced.’
The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure estimates that there are 17,000 severely or profoundly deaf individuals in Northern Ireland. Of this deaf population, there are 5,000 who use sign language as their preferred means of communication: 3,500 use BSL and 1,500 use ISL (Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, 2011). Another survey suggests that of ‘7,000 users of sign language in Northern Ireland, approximately 2,000… use ISL and 5,000… use the Northern Ireland sign variety that is referred to by various groups as BSL, BSL-NI, NI-BSL, and NISL.’
There are echoes in all of this of the debates around Ulster-Scots (does it merit the label ‘language’ at all?), on which Aodán Mac Póilin is equally forensically – and occasionally irreverently – insightful and enlightening. ‘Linguistic conflict in Northern Ireland may be unique in that only a small proportion of the population can speak Irish or Ulster Scots, and fewer again speak either on a regular basis.’
The suspicion of the Irish language among unionists is that it is not just about the Irish language. Sinn Féin has repeatedly hinted at other agendas. That doesn’t mean that there are other agendas. In fact, the hint is more than enough to wind some unionists up, which might itself be the agenda. As Aodán Mac Póilin said, ‘in the political culture of Northern Ireland, opposing sides tend to believe each other’s propaganda.’
Mac Póilin was as tireless and passionate (and humorous) an advocate of the Irish (or any) language as you could hope to meet, and as clear-sighted as anyone I have heard or read: ‘[t]he Irish language movement… contains some of the finest people I have ever met, but it also has its fair share of tunnel-visionaries, messiahs, linguo-masochists, uber-grammarians and grant pimps. And I haven’t even started on the politicians.’
I first met him while making a documentary (‘More of it Than we Think’) for BBC Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s on the subject of Protestant culture, in the course of which he cheerfully reminded me – and whoever had not been moved by that documentary-on-Protestant-culture strapline to switch to another channel – that northern Protestants played a hugely significant part in reviving the Irish language in the post-Famine years of the late 1800s; that Irish belongs to everyone.‡‡
And it does, whether they live on the island of Ireland or not. There are at the same time many for whom the language is inextricably bound up with their sense of Irishness. It is not a question of them politicizing the language, but of the language occupying a space in their political outlook. Our Tangled Speech highlights several examples from a pamphlet issued in the 1980s by Sinn Féin’s Cultural Department, conflating the Irish language with the thirty-two-county republican project: ‘it is our contention that each individual who masters the learning of the Irish language has made an important personal contribution to the reconquest of Ireland’; ‘every phrase you learn is a bullet in the freedom struggle.’ That, both the individuals quoted (one is a friend of mine) might with reason say, was then: we are living, and speaking, in changed times. They might though recognize that it may take some people a little more time to shake entirely the feeling that by embracing the language they are betraying their own political beliefs.
But we are the more, all of us, for our several languages.
*
A Canadian postscript. Most evenings that we are away I have been listening to my daughters watching The Good Place, the Netflix series in which a character, played by Kristen Bell, finds herself against her expectations, and the evidence of her earthly life (up to and including the circumstances surrounding her death§§), in a version of paradise.
Possibly.
The entire series might have taken its inspiration from ‘Duck Amuck’, the 1953 Daffy Duck cartoon scripted by Michael Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones, in which Daffy has to react to ever more preposterous changes to the scenery (snow one minute, palm trees the next) and even to his own body shape – by a pencil-wielding hand that keeps intruding on the frame, and that is finally revealed to belong to Bugs Bunny.
Over the two seasons of thirteen 22-minute episodes of The Good Place – there are another thirteen to come; I don’t imagine they will change much – the characters engage in repeated discussions about what constitutes the Good Place and who deserves to be in it, as opposed to the Bad Place.
The constant back and forth between the Good Place and the Bad Place bleeds into the things I am reading, into the whole Brexit debate: ‘Come on, you guys, I know this isn’t perfect, but I need more time to build my case. It’s either this or back to the Bad Place.’
We leave Canada for Belfast, with Season Three still ahead of us.
* I say ‘the hell’ obviously because I hardly fucking know you.
† From this line alone will you be able to plot the precise moment of my writing this page. By the time I stood waving it off to copy-editing that majority was a minority of 40.
‡ In the autumn of 2018, those ten DUP MPs were temporarily nine when Ian Paisley Jr was suspended from parliament – and the party – following the revelation that he had accepted (and failed to declare) an all-expenses-paid family holiday from the Sri Lankan government, on whose behalf he subsequently lobbied parliament. Bizarrely, he claimed in a Daily Telegraph interview to have gone there to discuss possible post-Brexit trade deals. In 2013. Clearly he knew something none of the rest of us did. And clearly he was doing something similar the following year when he accepted another holiday to the Maldives paid for in part by a cabinet minister there.
§ Stuart Bailie devotes an entire chapter to this gig in Trouble Songs, as well he might: he MC-d it.
# The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Ben Wallace, appeared to refer in the House of Commons in the course of the second reading of the Northern Ireland (Welfare Reform) Bill to an instance of the petition being used in relation to caravan legislation. If it was anywhere else, I would say he might have been joking.
∫ ‘… mass’ but not total: Peter Robinson left Arlene Foster in place as Finance Minister and acting First Minister. After all that acting it was no great surprise when – on Peter Robinson’s retirement in January 2016 – she stepped into the role of First Minister full-time… for a year.
Ω Sinn Féin regard the bill – put forward by Jim Allister – as discriminatory in its stipulation that no one with a past conviction could be appointed special adviser. The impetus for the bill was a campaign by Ann Travers, whose sister Mary was murdered by the IRA, against Sinn Féin’s appointment of Mary McArdle, who had gone to prison for her role in that murder. Just try that phrase again though: ‘decision not to yield’ to a bill passed in your own legislative assembly. And you thought you heard it first this summer.
≈ A few of their 224,245 votes were cast by voters dressed in crocodile costumes.
∂ In Eamonn Mallie’s pithy observation, ‘Sinn Féin needs to demonstrate that rainbow placards on lampposts were about more than electoral gain.’
π Nigel Dodds, DUP, claimed it was driving a coach and horses through the Good Friday Agreement. There have been a lot of coaches and horses being driven about the place this summer: the only professions a no-deal Brexit will favour: border guards, coach-and-horses drivers, and chip-shop workers.
∆ I’d like it on record that I held off to p. 77 before mentioning it.
** Boris Johnson had not seen fit to tell the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in advance what he planned to do, even though Northern Ireland, with its own devolved Assembly suspended, would be left in an especially parlous position. It was, in the opinion of Simon Hoare, chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, an ‘absolute scandal’.
†† That would be Munster Irish, the Queen’s Irish as my wife jokingly refers to it, a very different thing from Ulster Irish.
‡‡ Following my interview with him for the BBC NI programme, he sent me a letter with the etymologies of both our surnames, proving that they were, essentially, one and the same.
§§ Accident involving supermarket trolleys… there but for the grace of [choose your deity] go we all. And, yes, I am trying hard not to think about that Northern Ireland Bill metaphor.