Changes to the voting mechanism for choosing ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive could help the middle ground and encourage trust, proposes Philip McGuinness
The continuing problems with the full implementation of the Good Friday agreement hinge on the crucial issue of trust. The unionist parties clearly do not believe Sinn Féin's claim to be a completely democratic party, exclusively committed to peaceful means of achieving its aims.
The republican movement points to the British army watch-towers in south Armagh and wonders why they are still deforming the landscape. Sinn Féin representatives repeat the claim that unionists "don't want a Catholic about the house".
One failing of the Good Friday agreement is that it has helped to collapse the political centre in Northern Ireland. This has happened in two ways.
Firstly, some Assembly parliamentary mechanisms have excluded the centrists. For example, the d'Hondt weighting mechanism for appointing ministers to the Stormont Executive helps the bigger unionist and nationalist parties.
In the 1998 Assembly elections, middle-ground parties (Alliance and the Women's Coalition) won eight seats but gained no ministry, whereas the SDLP and UUP - with fewer than half the seats - occupied two-thirds of the 12-member Executive.
Another example of excluding the moderates is the method for choosing a First Minister. In November 2001 the Alliance members had to designate themselves as a unionist party in order to save David Trimble. If they had not agreed to position themselves under this partisan label then Mr Trimble would not have been elected.
The second way that the political centre has been collapsed is that the continuing high levels of mistrust result in every election becoming intense contests within both major blocs to show who is toughest towards the opposite side. In 2001 the moderate confessional parties, UUP and SDLP, lost votes to the centrifugal momentums of DUP and SF.
Given that the North is situated in a zone of demographic change, it is likely that within three to five years the unionist bloc will become a minority. This is not to say that nationalists will become the majority; rather, the middle-ground parties will be situated at the crucible of political change in Northern Ireland. Or will they?
Under current Assembly structures as outlined above the middle ground is powerless. Given that the past 35 years are essentially the story of the progression towards moderation of the extremes, it is surely sad and ironic that the middle ground itself is now a cold house for voters.
A key question for long-term generation of trust and encouragement of a truly inclusive settlement in Northern Ireland is: how can trust and moderation be indelibly woven into the tapestry of political life? One way is to change how the First Minister, Deputy First Minister and Ministers are elected.
Consider the following way of electing people to the First and Deputy First Ministries. A candidate would need at least five Assembly members to nominate him/her. Any nominated candidate would have to put their name forward to the Assembly.
The 108 members would then vote on whether they believed each candidate to be committed to exclusively democratic means, with a 70 per cent vote (76 MLAs) required.
All such nominated candidates are then placed before the people to vote in a PR election. All candidates are progressively eliminated until there are only two candidates left. The candidate with the greater vote at this stage becomes the First Minister, while the other becomes Deputy First Minister.
The great advantage of such a system is that it would force candidates to look for preferences from both the centre and from moderate voters on the other side. As the North heads towards demographic stalemate it becomes more unlikely that a majoritarian would win out over a conciliator because of their inability to attract transfers from outside their community.
In short, the election system outlined above would encourage moderation and discourage extremism. The 70 per cent threshold needed in the Assembly would ensure that all parties had to be acceptable to some extent to the opposite side.
Regarding the election of the 10 ministries, this could be done by the Assembly members using PR rather than the d'Hondt mechanism.
Again, the 70 per cent threshold could apply to encourage all parties on a non-sectarian, exclusively democratic path. If a ministerial candidate gained more than the quota of 10 votes, he/she would be elected.
The effect of this would be that Assembly members from parties who were not represented in the Executive, currently 18, would have some power over who becomes minister, rather than power being shepherded by the four bigger parties.
Many politicians would decry the above changes, considering them to be changing the agreement. But the Good Friday agreement is an attempt to put the hopes and dreams of a majority of both Catholics and Protestants into workable language.
It is probably unavoidable that deep-seated aspirations of tolerance, justice and democracy cannot be exactly formulated into words.
The agreement reflects human aspirations towards a peaceful society. If we put the agreement on to a pedestal as an end in itself it will quickly wither under the arid gropings of spin-doctors and legalistic wordsmiths.
On the other hand, if we regard the agreement as the equivalent of a constitution, then surely amendments to the agreement can be put to the people in a referendum? Constitutions are organic; they evolve over time as amendments are carried. The Good Friday agreement belongs to the people, not just to the politicians.
The recent (October 17th) BBC Hearts and Minds survey of attitudes towards the Good Friday agreement showed both huge slippage in unionist support for it - now less than one-third - and an acceptance by a majority of both Sinn Féin and SDLP voters that it should be renegotiated.
The changes outlined above would necessitate amending paragraphs 15 and 16, which consist of one short sentence each. Put another way, the price of ensuring a non-sectarian and purely democratic Executive is the adjustment of less than a half of one per cent of the agreement.
It is evident from the latest suspension of the NI Executive that the issue of trust will be crucial in determining whether an Executive is ever elected again by the Assembly.
• Dr Philip McGuinness is a lecturer at Dundalk Institute of Technology where he manages the Electoral Research Unit