The Future of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

Alliance Party leader David Ford opened a new political can of worms when he attacked the sectarian politics of the province at his party's general assembly this weekend. This is an old theme with the party, which was founded in order to end sectarian politics.  Although the bulk of Ford's criticism was directed at the ruling duopoly of the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein, it was the other two Big Four parties, the Ulster Unionists (UUP) and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), that reacted most fiercely to the criticism. Why is this?

Alliance was founded by reform unionists and liberal Catholics in April 1970 to provide a pro-union reform party that opposed discrimination and the "border politics" that dominated the province. Four months later the SDLP was founded and saw the rival Alliance Party as a luxury that the province could not afford because it deprived the SDLP of votes and seats. Alliance for most of its existence has been limited to only the lowest of the three tiers of government--local councils as the assembly was not in session and the party lacked sufficient votes to win a seat at the Westminster parliament. But since 2007 this has changed with an Assembly in existence for an entire term and Naomi Long elected as the MP for Belfast East in 2010. The latter deprived DUP leader Peter Robinson of his longtime seat and prevented the UUP from winning it.  

But the DUP and Sinn Fein between them control most of Northern Ireland's parliamentary seats. The UUP lost its last seat in 2010 when its sole remaining MP defected from the party over its alliance with the Conservative Party.  Alliance is threatening to strip the UUP of many of its liberal supporters and members and has two seats in the Executive to the UUP's one.  This is because when the justice ministry was created in 2010 to devolve policing powers to the province, both the DUP and Sinn Fein saw Alliance leader David Ford as the natural choice as a neutral minister. And Alliance's percentage of the vote and seats in the Assembly won it another seat by right on the Executive. In order to appease the UUP and the SDLP the Big Two agreed to abolish the Department of Employment and Learning (DEL). This was the other ministry held by Alliance. As a result a majority of Alliance members favor having Ford give up the justice ministry.

In the summer of 2001 Alliance deputy leader Seamus Close, an Alliance MLA from Lagan Valley, told this blogger that sectarian political boundaries would begin to break down once the Assembly had held a full term under the Good Friday Agreement. This has not happened noticeably. This is because in Northern Ireland voters have basic identities as unionists, nationalists, or other and vote within those communities. For the average unionist voter his choice of parties is among the DUP, the UUP and the Traditional Unionist Voice, a splinter group from the DUP. For nationalists the choice is between Sinn Fein and the SDLP. Alliance gets its votes mainly from those who define themselves as neither nationalists nor unionists--usually members of mixed marriages and their offspring or middle class non-church attenders. But the population of the other group may be slowly increasing over time as more nationalists and unionists get accustomed to using their lower-preference votes (under the PR-STV franchise system used in Northern Ireland each voter casts multiple ranked votes but only one is counted) for Alliance. This normally occurs in majority unionist constituencies in the Greater Belfast area.  

It is not so much that Alliance has grown dramatically, but rather that the UUP has shrunk so much that renders the former as a mortal threat to the latter. And the SDLP needs all the votes it can get to hold on to its position against Sinn Fein.

The DUP Moves to Consolidate

Two items of recent interest in Northern Ireland. First, the DUP and Sinn Fein got together and agreed to abolish the one department controlled by Alliance in the Executive, as of right. Presently Alliance controls two departments, Employment and Learning (DEL) and Justice, with the first being on the basis of the d'Hondt distribution and the second because when Justice was devolved to Northern Ireland the Big Two could only trust giving it to Alliance. Employment and Learning has been divided between two other departments (Education, probably Regional Development). Both the UUP and the SDLP only have a single ministry and they both have many more Assembly members (MLAs) and councillors than Alliance.

Now Justice Minister and Alliance leader David Ford is seeking a guarantee from the Big Two that his ministry will remain in Alliance hands for the remainder of this Assembly's life. This may seem like he is going a tad too far. But it should be remembered that the first time that Alliance was in a power-sharing government, back in 1974, the DUP and the Shinners--or rather the armed wing of the Republican Movement (as the Republicans refer to it or SF/IRA as the unionists refer to it)-- de facto colluded to bring down that government. The IRA went on a bombing offensive and the three main unionist parties cooperated with the Loyalist Association of Workers to bring down the government through a general strike. Former UUP leaderDavid Trimble and his former IRA advisor Sean O'Callaghan used to reminisce about how they both operated against the power-sharing government of 1974. So it may be natural on Ford's part to doubt the veracity and good intentions of the Big Two.

DUP leader Peter Robinson, fresh from pacifying the UUP over Alliance's disproportionate share of the Executive, has now called for unionist unity. As I see it, the UUP has basically two choices: either quit the Executive and go into a vigorous opposition with the SDLP that gives the voters a real alternative to the Big Two or negotiate the best terms possible for a merger. But don't expect Tom Elliot and present leadership of the UUP to get a good deal now. The best prizes were handed out to the UUPers who defected from Trimble's leadership in 2000 led by Jeffrey Donaldson. The UUP is today in the same position that the DUP was in under the leadership of Ian Paisley in the 1970s. Except that Paisley had his Free Presbyterian Church to fall back upon both as alternative employment and as an irreducible membership base for his party. The UUP has no similar base. It could join with the tiny Conservative Party, but that was already tried and failed.