Britain is providing the executive an extra £3.3 billion to start patching holes in services and pay long-delayed wage hikes that just triggered the biggest public sector strike in Northern Ireland’s history. The trouble is, the head of Northern Ireland’s civil service, Jayne Brady, has already told the new leaders that these eye-watering sums are still too small to pay the required bills. The U.K. expects Stormont to raise regional taxes, something local leaders have been loath to do.
If anything can unite unionist and republican politicians, it’s their shared demand for the U.K. Treasury to keep sending more moolah — even though the British government already has committed to pay Northern Ireland over the odds into perpetuity at a new rate of £1.24 versus an equivalent £1 spent in England.
Money demands and spending priorities should underpin short-term stability at Stormont. But a U.K. general election looms within months and DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson wants to reverse his party’s losses to Sinn Féin. That could be complicated by the fact that he’s just compromised on Brexit trade rules in a fashion that distresses and confuses many within his own divided party, leaving him vulnerable.
To strengthen his leadership, Donaldson boosted pragmatic allies and sought to neuter less reasonable opponents in Saturday’s DUP moves at Stormont.
The assembly’s new non-partisan speaker will be DUP lawmaker Edwin Poots, who defeated Donaldson for the party leadership in 2021 only to be tossed out almost immediately.
That move puts Poots — who used his previous role as Stormont’s agriculture minister to block essential resources for the required post-Brexit checks at ports — into a new strait-jacket of neutrality.
Little-Pengelly, by contrast, is one of Donaldson’s most trusted lieutenants and a Stormont insider. He put her into his own assembly seat when, shortly after the 2022 election, Donaldson dumped it in favor of staying an MP in London.
While Stormont is never more than one crisis away from another collapse, for Saturday, peace reigned — and an Irish republican, committed to Northern Ireland’s eventual dissolution, is in charge of making the place work.
BELFAST — First its government collapsed. Then austerity began to bite. Now fresh elections are set to be cancelled, and tens of thousands of workers are going on strike.
This is Northern Ireland in 2024 — a land of political deadlock, public sector cuts and mass labor unrest, with neither British ministers in London nor local powerbrokers the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) willing to do what is needed to restore a coherent government in this ever-divided corner of the United Kingdom.
Nearly two years after the DUP first sabotaged the Northern Ireland Executive — the cross-community government at the heart of the region’s decades-old peace process — its leadership appears no closer to ending its boycott on cooperation with Sinn Féin. The Irish republicans overtook their DUP opponents as the most popular party at the last Stormont election in May 2022, but have been waiting ever since to lead a government under a power-sharing system the DUP refuses to revive.
Similarly unwilling to fill the political vacuum is Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, who refuses to resume “direct rule” from Westminster. Northern Ireland was governed directly from London through most of its decades of bloodshed during the 20th century, and through a previous collapse of powersharing at Stormont between 2002-07.
At least partly filling the vacuum over the past year have been Northern Ireland’s senior civil servants, abandoned to run their country without the help of elected politicians. They protest they lack both the power and democratic mandate to make essential spending and cost-cutting decisions — a weakness that has left public services to wither from within.
This long-running crisis has triggered months of labor unrest, finally reducing Northern Ireland to a standstill on Thursday as 16 unions staged the region’s first coordinated mass strike in a half-century. It may not be the last.
“This is a campaign we will continue,” said Gerry Murphy of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. “This is a campaign we will win.”
Labor pains
More than 170,000 workers — nearly a fifth of the entire workforce — shut down schools, transport links, non-emergency healthcare and almost all government-funded services on Thursday in a mass demand for long-withheld pay raises.
The promised salary hikes were secured in principle years ago as part of wider U.K. labor agreements, but most of this money has yet to reach paychecks and pensions in Northern Ireland because the relevant Stormont ministers aren’t in office. In their absence, the U.K. Treasury is withholding the required funds.
That was supposed to change as part of a conditional funding package that Heaton-Harris presented to local parties last month in a bid to break the DUP logjam. If Democratic Unionist leader Jeffrey Donaldson agreed to lead his party back to Stormont, Heaton-Harris announced, the U.K. would provide £3.3 billion in exceptional financial supports to make the relaunch of power-sharing a success. Included in the package: £584 million for the outstanding pay claims.
But to the exasperation of other parties, and despite Donaldson’s own efforts to telegraph a coming move, the DUP leader failed to persuade his most powerful deputies to grasp the offer as a moment for compromise.
Donaldson since has insisted that talks with U.K. government officials will drag out indefinitely until the DUP wins further concessions on Northern Ireland’s complex post-Brexit trading arrangements, which unionists fear are pushing the economy toward a united Ireland.
The DUP leader failed to persuade his most powerful deputies to grasp the offer as a moment for compromise | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Indeed, dangling billions in front of the DUP seems only to have backfired. Heaton-Harris has repeatedly said the £3.3 billion will not be forthcoming until the DUP returns to Stormont — a condition that both British unionists and Irish nationalists have denounced as blackmail.
Mass unrest
Reflecting that anger, tens of thousands of striking workers braved freezing conditions on Thursday to march in central Belfast, Londonderry and Enniskillen, venting their anger and demanding their salaries be boosted to the levels of their professional peers in England, Scotland and Wales.
As one example, they cited how a newly qualified teacher in Northern Ireland earns around £24,000 a year, versus £30,000 elsewhere in the U.K. Official U.K. statistics indicate that public sector workers in Northern Ireland have seen the value of their incomes fall by 11 percent in real terms during the past two years of government collapse.
Heaton-Harris, an arch Brexiteer who was appointed to the post by ex-PM Liz Truss during her brief Downing Street reign, has struggled to find any pressure point that works on Donaldson, whose DUP is frequently cited as the most stubborn political party in Europe.
Heaton-Harris’ most common threat — to call an early election for Stormont — has proved particularly absurd because it would potentially help the DUP. Donaldson would hope to claw back ground lost to politicians representing the moderate middle ground, who did unusually well in the 2022 vote.
Indeed, the prospect of fresh elections is one reason why Donaldson keeps playing for time. Accepting a deal now — and so accepting the current post-Brexit trade arrangements are here to stay — would likely split his party and drive support toward Traditional Unionist Voice, an even harder-line unionist rival that rejects working with Sinn Féin in all circumstances.
Reflecting that anger, tens of thousands of striking workers braved freezing conditions on Thursday to march in central Belfast | Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images
And so the stasis — and the misery — looks set to continue.
The unions behind Thursday’s mass strike have vowed to conduct a rolling series of similar protests until Heaton-Harris untethers their pay demands from any proposed DUP sweetheart deal.
But Heaton-Harris looks poised to kick the Stormont can down the road yet again, meaning Northern Ireland’s public services keep suffering via piecemeal funding half-measures.
The minister is expected to unveil emergency legislation next week that gives both himself, and Northern Ireland’s permanent secretaries, a new “hybrid” mix of powers and responsibilities over the region.
But a former permanent secretary who oversaw the Brexit process in Northern Ireland, Andrew McCormick, said Heaton-Harris’ mismanagement of the situation to date meant neither the Stormont mandarins nor the secretary of state himself “have a legal basis for the strategic decisions that are needed. The government can and should change course as a matter of urgency. Abdication is not acceptable.”
The legislation also is expected to delay, once again, the legally required date for the next Stormont election to early 2025 — by which time a U.K.-wide general election will likely have ended the Conservative government’s 14-year reign and turned Northern Ireland into a problem for the British Labour Party.
DUBLIN — Sinn Féin has scaled new electoral heights in Northern Ireland. They can thank the Stormont-wrecking antics of their sworn enemies, the Democratic Unionist Party, for making it possible.
The Irish republicans had been tipped to finish a strong first place in Northern Ireland’s council elections last Thursday, overtaking Jeffrey Donaldson’s DUP along the way. But even Sinn Fein’s wildest hopes were eclipsed as the weekend’s results built to a crescendo over a marathon two-day count.
When final results were declared in Belfast City Hall after midnight Saturday, Sinn Féin had won 144 seats, a 39-seat gain that more than doubled expectations. Its 30.9 percent share of the vote marked a historic high, two points better even than last year’s poll-topping Northern Ireland Assembly election — a performance that should have propelled the party’s regional leader, Michelle O’Neill, into the first minister’s chair for the first time.
But O’Neill has been denied the chance to lead a cross-community executive, as the Good Friday peace accord intended, because the Democratic Unionists — used to finishing first — have spent the past year blocking the formation of any government at Stormont. The current rules of power-sharing require both Sinn Féin and the DUP to participate.
According to analysts and other party leaders, the DUP’s obstructionist tactics may have galvanized support with unionist die-hards — but also triggered waves of new support for their traditional enemies from voters sick of the deadlock.
“Jeffrey Donaldson has become the greatest recruiting sergeant possible for republicans. The longer Michelle O’Neill is blocked from becoming first minister, the more voters are driven into the arms of her party,” wrote Suzanne Breen, political editor of the Belfast Telegraph.
Social Democratic and Labour Party leader Colum Eastwood, who competes with Sinn Féin in Irish nationalist areas, said his own moderate party’s grassroots had switched to Sinn Féin in unprecedented numbers because the DUP had exhausted their patience.
“They’re very annoyed that Michelle O’Neill hasn’t been able to become first minister,” said Eastwood, whose party — one of the architects of the Good Friday breakthrough a quarter-century ago — suffered heavy losses amid the Sinn Féin-DUP showdown.
“They want politicians to get back to work and deal with the issues besetting our community,” Eastwood said. “Now it’s over to the DUP to get on with it.”
Still waiting
When or whether the DUP actually does so remains far from certain, given that its own vote held up well at Thursday’s election.
Donaldson and other senior DUP figures have spent the past three months picking holes in the British government’s Windsor Framework, the successor post-Brexit trade deal for Northern Ireland designed to reduce — but not eliminate — EU-required checks on goods arriving from the rest of the United Kingdom. Unionists argue such checks effectively place Northern Ireland partly outside the U.K., and on a slippery slope toward a united Ireland, Sinn Féin’s ultimate goal.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had hoped the Windsor Framework compromise package would have persuaded the DUP to resume cooperation at Stormont with a strengthened Sinn Féin.
Jeffrey Donaldson said that his party’s resilient performance showed most unionists would rather have no Stormont than accept “barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.” | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
But Donaldson told reporters at Belfast City Hall that his party’s resilient performance — it won 122 of the 462 seats on Northern Ireland’s 11 councils, the exact same total as in the 2019 election — showed most unionists would rather have no Stormont than accept “barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.”
“The DUP have polled strongly despite everything that has been thrown at us,” said Donaldson, who now wants Westminster to pass unspecified legislation reinforcing Northern Ireland’s constitutional ties to Britain. “The U.K. government must move to ensure that our place in the United Kingdom is not only respected, but protected in law. The mandate we’ve been given reinforces that message.”
His immediate predecessor as DUP leader, Edwin Poots, said while others expected the party to end its Stormont sabotage now that the election was out of the way, such a move remains unlikely unless the U.K. government finds extra support for Stormont’s ailing finances.
“We’re ready to go back but we need to get more than what’s currently on the table,” Poots said. “If we went back into the assembly and executive in the morning, with this budget, the first task of every minister would be to implement cuts. It’s imperative that we get a package to ensure this will not be the case.”
O’Neill, who spent much of the weekend joining in jubilant scenes with Sinn Féin activists, expressed exasperation that the DUP might string others along indefinitely for many months longer.
“I am not accepting the autumn as a timeframe for a restored executive, as a lot of people are suggesting. There shouldn’t be any more delays. Let’s do it Monday morning,” she said.
Joining O’Neill in Belfast was Sinn Féin’s overall leader, Mary Lou McDonald, a Dubliner whose eye remains on a bigger prize: leading a government in the neighboring Republic of Ireland for the first time.
Sinn Féin, the only party contesting elections in both parts of Ireland, wants as part of its Irish unity strategy to gain the reins of power in both jurisdictions simultaneously. For decades a fanciful dream — and a unionist nightmare — this scenario has become a probability.
The party’s growth to become the top party in Northern Ireland is matched south of the border by McDonald’s successful efforts to build Sinn Féin into the dominant opposition party in Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s parliament. It has topped every opinion poll for years and looks likely to win the next general election, which must happen by 2025 but could come sooner.
As McDonald and O’Neill together ascended the steps of Belfast City Hall, Sinn Féin activists cheered their party’s rising expectations of gaining power in both the Dáil and Stormont, with McDonald as prime minister in Dublin and O’Neill as first minister in Belfast — if the DUP ever relents.
LONDON — Joe Biden is not someone known for his subtlety.
His gaffe-prone nature — which saw him last week confuse the New Zealand rugby team with British forces from the Irish War of Independence — leaves little in the way of nuance.
But he is also a sentimental man from a long gone era of Washington, who specializes in a type of homespun, aw-shucks affability that would be seen as naff in a younger president.
His lack of subtlety was on show in Belfast last week as he issued a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — return to Northern Ireland’s power-sharing arrangements or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. business investment.
The DUP — a unionist party that does not take kindly to lectures from American presidents — is refusing to sit in Stormont, the Northern Ireland Assembly, due to its anger with the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, which has created trade friction between the region and the rest of the U.K.
The DUP is also refusing to support the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework, which aims to fix the economic problems created by the protocol, despite hopes it would see the party reconvene the Northern Irish Assembly.
The president on Wednesday urged Northern Irish leaders to “unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning.”
However, American business groups paint a far more complex and nuanced view of future foreign investment into Northern Ireland than offered up by Biden.
Biden told a Belfast crowd on Wednesday there were “scores of major American corporations wanting to come here” to invest, but that a suspended Stormont was acting as a block on that activity.
One U.S. business figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Biden’s flighty rhetoric was “exaggerated” and that many businesses would be looking beyond the state of the regional assembly to make their investment decisions.
The president spoke as if Ulster would be rewarded with floods of American greenbacks if the DUP reverses its intransigence, predicting that Northern Ireland’s gross domestic product (GDP) would soon be triple its 1998 level. Its GDP is currently around double the size of when the Good Friday Agreement was struck in 1998.
Emanuel Adam, executive director of BritishAmerican Business, said this sounded like a “magic figure” unless Biden “knows something we don’t know about.”
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. told POLITICO that U.S. politicians for “too long” have “promised some economic El Dorado or bonanza if you only do what we say politically … but that bonanza has never arrived and people are not naive enough here to believe it ever will.”
“A presidential visit is always welcome, but the glitter on top is not an economic driver,” he said.
Joe Biden addresses a crowd of thousands on April 14, 2023 in Ballina, Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Facing both ways
The British government is hoping the Windsor Framework will ease economic tensions in Northern Ireland and create politically stable conditions for inward foreign direct investment.
The framework removes many checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and has begun to slowly create a more collaborative relationship between London and Brussels on a number of fronts — two elements which have been warmly welcomed across the Atlantic.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market, to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, and the U.K.’s internal market.
“That’s like the world’s most exciting economic zone,” Sunak said in February.
Jake Colvin, head of Washington’s National Foreign Trade Council business group, said U.S. firms wanted to see “confidence that the frictions over the protocol have indeed been resolved.”
“Businesses will look to mechanisms like the Windsor Framework to provide stability,” he said.
Marjorie Chorlins, senior vice president for Europe at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Windsor Framework was “very important” for U.S. businesses and that “certainty about the relationship between the U.K. and the EU is critical.”
She said a reconvened Stormont would mean more legislative stability on issues like skills and health care, but added that there were a whole range of other broader U.K. wide economic factors that will play a major part in investment decisions.
This is particularly salient in a week where official figures showed the U.K.’s GDP flatlining and predictions that Britain will be the worst economic performer in the G20 this year.
“We want to see a return to robust growth and prosperity for the U.K. broadly and are eager to work with government at all levels,” Chorlins said.
“Political and economic instability in the U.K. has been a challenge for businesses of all sizes.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market | Pool photo by Paul Faith/Getty Images
Her words underline just how much global reputational damage last year’s carousel of prime ministers caused for the U.K., with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey recently warning of a “hangover effect” from Liz Truss’ premiership and the broader Westminster psychodrama of 2022.
America’s Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy, grandson of Robert Kennedy, accompanied the president last week and has been charged with drumming up U.S. corporate interest in Northern Ireland.
Kennedy said Northern Ireland is already “the No. 1 foreign investment location for proximity and market access.”
Northern Ireland has been home to £1.5 billion of American investment in the past decade and had the second-most FDI projects per capita out of all U.K. regions in 2021.
Claire Hanna, Westminster MP for the nationalist SDLP, believes reconvening Stormont would “signal a seriousness that there isn’t going to be anymore mucking around.”
“It’s also about the signal that the restoration of Stormont sends — that these are the accepted trading arrangements,” she said.
Hanna says the DUP’s willingness to “demonize the two biggest trading blocs in the world — the U.S. and EU” — was damaging to the country’s future economic prospects.
‘The money goes south’
At a more practical level, Biden’s ultimatum appears to carry zero weight with DUP representatives.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson made it clear last week that he was unmoved by Biden’s economic proclamations and gave no guarantee his party would sit in the regional assembly in the foreseeable future.
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson told POLITICO.
“But fundamental to the success of our economy is our ability to trade within our biggest market, which is of course the United Kingdom.”
A DUP official said U.S. governments had been promising extra American billions in exchange “for selling out to Sinn Féin and Dublin” since the 1990s and “when America talks about corporate investment, we get the crumbs and that investment really all ends up in the Republic [of Ireland].”
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson said | Behal/Irish Government via Getty Images
“The Americans talk big, but the money goes south,” the DUP official said.
This underscores the stark reality that challenges Northern Ireland any time it pitches for U.S. investment — the competing proposition offered by its southern neighbor with its internationally low 12.5 percent rate on corporate profits.
Emanuel Adam with BritishAmerican Business said there was a noticeable feeling in Washington that firms want to do business in Dublin.
“When [Irish Prime Minister] Leo Varadkar and his team were here recently, I could tell how confident the Irish are these days,” he said. “There are not as many questions for them as there are around the U.K.”
Biden’s economic ultimatum looks toothless from the DUP’s perspective and its resonance may be as short-lived as his trip to Belfast itself.
This story has been updatedto correct a historical reference.
BELFAST — A top-level British diplomatic mission designed to soothe tensions over the Northern Ireland trade protocol instead opened new divisions Wednesday when the leader of Sinn Féin was unexpectedly barred.
U.K. government officials offered conflicting explanations for blocking Mary Lou McDonald from the Northern Ireland Office meeting with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. He had traveled to Belfast to brief local party leaders on Monday’s breakthrough with the European Commission on making post-Brexit trade arrangements work better in what remains the most bitterly divided corner of the U.K.
McDonald’s exclusion triggered a boycott of the meeting by Sinn Féin, the largest party in the mothballed Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as its moderate competitor for Irish nationalist votes, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). It propelled the Belfast talks to the top of an Irish news agenda bored stiff by the long-running Brexit protocol dispute — and played straight into the hands of Sinn Féin, which lost no time in denouncing perfidious Albion.
“Apart from this being utterly bizarre, I mean beyond bizarre, it’s extremely unhelpful,” McDonald said nearby the Northern Ireland Office headquarters in central Belfast, where Cleverly hosted the talks attended by only three of the five parties from Northern Ireland’s collapsed power-sharing government.
“It’s a bad message and a bad signal if the British Tories are now behaving in this petulant fashion and saying that they would seek to exclude people from the very necessary work that needs now to be done,” McDonald said.
British government officials initially defended McDonald’s exclusion on the grounds that she is not an elected member of the Stormont assembly — a condition not cited or enforced on many similar political gatherings dating back to McDonald’s February 2018 elevation to the Sinn Féin leadership.
McDonald represents central Dublin in the Republic of Ireland parliament, reflecting Sinn Féin’s status as the only major political party contesting elections in both parts of Ireland. Since 2020 she has led the parliamentary opposition to the coalition government of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin.
An explanation circulated by the Northern Ireland Office to journalists said its meeting invite had specified attendance by Michelle O’Neill, McDonald’s party deputy and the senior Sinn Féin politician north of the border.
O’Neill and McDonald had planned to attend together, as has been common. Both similarly plan to meet Varadkar and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer when they make separate visits Thursday to Belfast.
“The leader of Sinn Féin in the [Northern Ireland] Assembly was invited and remains invited. Her attendance is a matter for Sinn Féin. But she was not excluded,” the U.K. government said, referring to O’Neill.
Others quickly pointed out an evident contradiction. Leaders of two other parties — the Democratic Unionists’ Jeffrey Donaldson and the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood — had been invited, even though they, just like McDonald, have no role at Stormont.
Cleverly’s office circulated a second explanation citing a different protocol — diplomatic protocol — as the real reason not to permit McDonald through the door.
Those officials cited Ireland’s December 17 Cabinet reshuffle in which Martin replaced Simon Coveney as foreign minister. This meant, they said, Cleverly needed to hold a face-to-face meeting with Martin before he could do the same with opposition leader McDonald.
Irish nationalist and center-ground politicians dismissed both explanations. They noted that U.K. government leaders already have met dozens of times with Martin, who served as prime minister for the first half of Ireland’s planned five-year government.
In Dublin, senior officials also questioned the U.K.’s stated rationale.
“I’d like to think we wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to offer this insult up on a plate to Sinn Féin. It seems such an obvious point to make, but the parties in Northern Ireland should be free to choose who represents them at any table. This is normally never an issue. This shouldn’t be made an issue,” one official told POLITICO. “Citing the rules of diplomacy for this move boggles the mind.”
Cleverly and Chris Heaton-Harris, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland who also took part in Wednesday’s meeting, declined comment.
Donaldson — whose party is blocking the operation of the Stormont assembly and formation of a new cross-community government in protest against the trade protocol — said he wouldn’t comment on whether it had been right or wrong to exclude McDonald.
But he said Cleverly and Heaton-Harris had reassured him in the behind-closed-doors meeting that any agreement on reforming the trade protocol must meet his party’s core demands. These include an end to any EU controls on British goods arriving at local ports that are destined to remain within Northern Ireland.
“They recognize that a deal with the EU that doesn’t work for unionists just isn’t going to fly,” Donaldson said.
