Newton Emerson: Push to restore Stormont must not ignore reality

A line from Jurassic Park seems apt as Northern Ireland attempts to navigate Brexit and restore Stormont in the next four weeks: we have all the problems of a major theme park and a major zoo.

Brexit has strangely simmered down as an issue since October, when prime minister Boris Johnson reached his Brexit deal with the EU. Nationalists are broadly content with a sea border arrangement reached in a handshake with Leo Varadkar. Unionists are horrified, yet the deal is so obviously their fault they have nobody else to blame. In any case, last week's UK general election has made it a done deal, causing an interlude of stunned passivity. The sea border and EU regulations will return to the agenda with a vengeance at the start of trade agreement talks, with an entertaining wrinkle: unionism will discover its only hope of mitigating barriers inside the UK will be working with the Irish Government. However, that is for the far-off future of February.

In the meantime, Stormont talks have commenced, with every expectation of success, or at least sufficient progress, by the legal deadline of January 13th.

On the one hand, this is offensively easy. Although everyone is avoiding the expression "oven ready", any deal will reheat large parts of the February 2018 draft deal between Sinn Féin and the DUP, when republicans abandoned their red lines only for unionists to get cold feet over Orange Order objections.

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For both parties to slap this back on the table as soon as their votes start falling suggests Stormont’s absence was only ever about intransigence and grandstanding.

On the other hand, the task of restoration still seems impossibly difficult.

There is a consensus devolution cannot return without fundamental reform, otherwise it will just collapse again. This should not be confused with breast-beating about rights and respect – that was just the spin Sinn Féin put on its demands, echoed by its supporters and support groups, who will fall into line if the party reaches another agreement.

Irish language Act

The supposedly crucial issue of an Irish language Act is slightly different: campaigners forced this on Sinn Féin and will inevitably be disappointed with the outcome, partly because it is the nature of campaigners never to be satisfied and partly because their demand for a bilingual public sector is undeliverable. But Sinn Féin knows those complaints are coming and will have priced them into any deal, as it did in 2018.

Restoration’s real challenges are the scale of administrative dysfunction exposed by the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal and a need to rethink powersharing that goes beyond tweaking unionist and nationalist vetoes.

A new deal should be more than the 2018 draft deal or a stitch-up between the two largest parties

On public administration, there have been suggestions of scrapping Northern Ireland’s self-contained civil service and bringing it into the UK system. While that is unlikely, it indicates the extent of the problems uncovered. Fixing them will be the work of years.

On powersharing, we have entered a three-bloc era of unionist, nationalist and other, throwing basic assumptions of the Belfast Agreement into question. Rather than confronting this, the rush back to Stormont appears to be about blocking it: Sinn Féin and the DUP do not want to trigger an Assembly election after January 13th that would see them lose seats to Alliance.

There is even a push to reverse Stormont’s evolution. A formal opposition emerged in 2016 but Sinn Féin and the DUP now want the SDLP and UUP back in the Executive to provide them with political cover.

Preparatory work

Some serious preparatory work has been done. All five main parties and the British and Irish governments took part in focused talks earlier this year on the nuts and bolts of institutional reform. Points from this appeared in the DUP’s general election manifesto and can be discerned in recent Sinn Féin statements. A new deal should be more than the 2018 draft deal or a stitch-up between the two largest parties.

On Tuesday, Northern Secretary Julian Smith said any agreement must address major issues head-on and not just "paper over the cracks", while insisting this can be reached imminently.

Tánaiste Simon Coveney stressed the parties have been discussing the same issues for months so "now is the time to get this done".

However, the public has hardly noticed these discussions while Brexit rows and electoral battles have raged.

The 2006 St Andrews agreement contained flaws that led to the current crisis. But the talks were lengthy and high-profile, allowing the public to engage with the issues and buy into the deal. Implementation was phased in carefully over six months, with a transitional Assembly preceding election to a full Assembly.

Lessons from this should be learned. For most people in Northern Ireland, a deal next month will appear to have been rustled up by Sinn Féin and the DUP in panic at the Alliance surge, after three years of trying to benefit from sabotage and stalling.

That is not going to help rebuild confidence in Stormont.