An Opposition Strategy for the Northern Ireland Assembly

This past weekend the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) held its annual conference. With the party no longer running the Assembly, nor possessing even a single Westminster MP, the issues at stake seemed to be much less weighty than in previous years and this was reflected in the coverage--or lack thereof--that the conference attracted in the Ulster press. The most important event at the conference did not actually take place inside it, but rather outside when a group of members held a discussion on an opposition strategy for the party.

When the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated in the late winter and spring of 1998, the emphasis was on attracting a critical mass of support for the GFA by sharing out power in the Executive as widely as possible. It was contemplated that the UUP and Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which negotiated most of the first strand of the agreement (internal arrangements for Northern Ireland) among themselves, would remain the dominant parties in their respective communities for some time. This did not pan out--within three years Sinn Fein had overtaken the SDLP as the largest party among nationalists and two years later the DUP did the same to the UUP among unionists. It took another two years to confirm the DUP's dominance in the general election of 2005. Those involved in the Northern Ireland peace process spoke in terms of "sufficient consensus"--a term borrowed from South Africa--which meant in practice that the UUP, SDLP, and Sinn Fein were all in agreement on something. The UUP and SDLP because they were the largest parties in their communities and Sinn Fein because it spoke for the IRA.  After 2003 it was established that sufficient consensus meant the DUP as well--because without support from the DUP consensus was not stable on the unionist side. After 2007 the meaning of sufficient consensus soon became narrowed in practice to include just the dyarchy of the DUP and Sinn Fein.

Under the GFA, ministries in the Executive are divided up using the d'Hondt method which means that they are divided up proportionately based on the share of seats in the Assembly for each party with the largest party choosing a ministry followed by the next largest etc. in successive rounds until all the ministries are disposed of. This was designed to bribe all the major parties to support the GFA. But there was no provision for an official opposition--only a marginalized opposition of tiny parties like the PUP, Alliance, and initially the UKUP and UDP as well. The main priorities were to keep the shooting and bombing stopped and stabilize the peace in that order. Now that those have been accomplished it is time to seriously start thinking about making provision for an official opposition.

But that might not be so easy because the ruling DUP/Sinn Fein dyarchy want to continue feeding at the trough, suckling off the teets of the British taxpayer, and if possible completely destroying their respective rival parties. During the IRA's long war the leading members of the SDLP were periodically harassed by the Republican Movement that denounced them as collaborators with the British occupation. It was for this reason that former SDLP leader John Hume referred to the Republicans as fascists. And since 2003 there have been periodic proposals to create a new unified unionist party out of the DUP and UUP, which in practice would mean the former absorbing the latter.  If the Ulster Unionists want to modify the GFA to create an official opposition with funding, they will have to win the support of both the SDLP and Alliance for their project and then together convince London to call a review conference to modify the Agreement. This may, unfortunately, be beyond their capacity. Let's hope not.

Why Sinn Fein and the DUP can both afford to lose a seat

In my most recent post, on UK redistricting and Northern Ireland, I stated that both Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists (DUP) could afford to lose a seat as a result of redistricting. This post explains why this is the case.

If one looks at a map of Northern Ireland after the most recent UK Westminster parliamentary election, one sees that the entire west of the province--except for the northwestern corner-- is colored green for Sinn Fein. The exceptions are the Foyle consituency around Derry, which the SDLP won, and the County Londonderry seat, which the DUP took. Now if one looks at the east of the province one sees the orange color of the DUP except for the light green of the SDLP in South Belfast and in South Down, and the yellow of Alliance in East Belfast. The DUP has eight of the provinces eighteen seats or just under half; Sinn Fein has five; the SDLP has three; and Alliance one with independent Lady Sylvia Hermon in North Down. We have already said that the South Belfast seat is going away leaving the SDLP with only two seats.

If as a result of the redistricting in the west the DUP loses one seat it will still have more seats than any other party. If Sinn Fein loses a seat it will still have twice as many seats as its nationalist rival, the SDLP. In 2010 Sinn Fein retained the Fermanagh and South Tyrone seat by only four votes against an agreed unionist candidate drawing votes from both UUP and DUP voters. The UUP has broken its formal link with the Conservative Party, thus opening the door for a possible return of Hermon to the UUP, putting it once more on the Westminster map. If the two main unionist parties can again agree on a comprise candidate for the Fermanagh and South Tyrone seat and the SDLP again goes its own way, it is conceivable that the seat could flip to being unionist. 

In any case, the Good Friday Agreement with its consociational structures of division within the Assembly and Executive of all parties into unionist, nationalist, and other categories has effectively made the real competition intracommunal rather than intercommunal. That is, no party gains a real advantage for being the largest party in the province, but only for being the largest party within its sectarian community. The First Minister and Deputy First Minister are de facto co-first ministers because one needs the support of the other. Sinn Fein had in fact proposed that the titles be formally changed to co-first ministers but the DUP objected. The DUP did this so that it could milk extra votes out of the danger of Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein becoming first minister from the UUP. The controversy over the name and cap badge change from Royal Ulster Constabulry to Police Service of Northern Ireland at the turn of the century demonstrated how much unionists are hung up on symbols. The unionist voters need to be reassured over the loss of their hegemony in the province with symbols. That is what much of the annual marching/parades controversy is about every year.

In reality, since the Good Friday Agreement was implemented on a stable basis in 2007 following IRA decommissioning of weapons in 2005, the province has been run as a sectarian carve-up with Sinn Fein running the west and center and the DUP running the north and east. The other three main parties are left to fight over the crumbs. In the Executive and the Assembly the two parties cooperate to run the province smoothly, much more smoothly than the UUP and SDLP ever did between 1999 and 2002. This is because the DUP and Sinn Fein don't have to worry about their own sectarian agitation, or that of their sectarian rivals who were amateurs at the sport.

If in the Middle East Israel and Palestine are ever transformed into a single state as a result of the inability to implement a two-state solution, expect much the same type of symbolic conflict between Jewish extremists and Muslim extremists along with much real conflict.

The Troubles of the SDLP

Yesterday Margaret Ritchie announced that she would be stepping down as leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland after less than two years on the job. The party had performed poorly in the election for the Northern Ireland Assembly in May and her deputy, Patsy McGlone, had announced that he would be challenging her in the mandatory leadership election. Her previous challenger, Dr. Alasdair McDonnell, is expected to also contest the election.

Ritchie is the fourth leader of the SDLP. The party was formed in August 1970 out of the remnants of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the body that formulated the strategy of civil rights marches as a means of protesting anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland at the start of The Troubles in 1968. The SDLP was a de facto shotgun marriage of NICRA and two representatives from two other parties, Republican Labour and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, to unite all six of the nationalist members of the Stormont Parliament (the forerunner of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was closed down in March 1972). The party advocated a united Ireland and non-violence as well as an end to discrimination and social democracy. The first leader chosen was Gerry Fitt, who was the only Westmister (British parliament) MP out of the six founding members. But the de facto leader of the party during its first decade was John Hume. In 1979 Fitt was ousted after he advocated cooperating with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in support of voluntary power sharing. Hume took over the party and remained the leader for the next 22 years. During that time he launched the Northern Ireland peace process with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and the Irish government in Dublin.

Hume voluntarily retired as leader of the SDLP in 2001 and named his protege, Mark Durkan, as his successor. Durkan presided over the decline of the party as the other nationalist party, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, overtook it. This first occured in local government elections in 2001 and was then confirmed in the next Westminster election. Durkan benefitted from being the annoited successor to the charismatic Hume. Durkan then stepped down as leader in early 2010 at age fifty to concentrate on serving as MP for his Foyle constituency that he had inherited from Hume. Ritchie, the MP for South Down, beat McDonnell to emerge as the new leader.

The SDLP's decline is due to a number of factors. First, it has never developed an efficient electoral machinery for fighting elections. This really hurt when going up against Sinn Fein, which benefitted on election day from the help of the military wing of the Republican Movement. Sinn Fein and the IRA had developed a very efficient party machinery that had people impersonating voters--the old, sick, and alcoholic who didn't vote--at the polls. Second, once the peace process got going many nationalists wanted to reward Sinn Fein and the IRA for ending the war. So they lent their votes to the Republicans, and eventually the loan became permanent. Third, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair had a policy of appeasement toward the Republicans in order to keep the peace process on track. Sinn Fein became expert on extorting tribute from London in exchange for doing what they had already signed up to do in the Good Friday Agreement. As a result the two moderate parties who had negotiated the GFA, the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists, suffered at the hands of the electorate. Unionist voters punished them for the IRA's failure to disarm and the British policy of appeasement; nationalist voters rewarded Sinn Fein for the benefits that they extracted at (offstage) gunpoint from the British. Here is an article (go to the link on the site for the Belfast Telegraph article by Liam Clarke) discussing the problem's of the party under Ritchie's leadership.

The UUP has actually declined in recent years more sharply than has the SDLP. The only real solution to the problems of both parties is by their weaning themselves from the teets of the Northern Ireland Office and the Executive by going into opposition. This is difficult because the Good Friday Agreement was designed to get all parties to participate and share power rather than to provide voters with efficient democratic government. The way to do this is to form a pact between the two parties in which both go into opposition and present themselves to voters as an alternative government with their own policies. This might prove difficult, as, according to Clarke, those who elected Ritchie last time wanted the party to remain the same and not adapt to new circumstances. The GFA should also be modified to allow for an official opposition as at Westminster. The mother of parliaments has given birth to a bastard child and it needs to be restrained and reformed.  

The Northern Ireland Troubles

Not only is Northern Ireland internally the closest settler and foreign society to Israel, the Northern Ireland Troubles that lasted from late 1968 to 1998 are the closest native-settler conflict to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The other two contenders are the conflicts between the Native American Indians (or Amerindians) and the United States and the conflict between the ANC and the South African government from 1961 to 1994.

The conflict between the Indians and the settlers can be instantly dismissed as not very comparable because Indians are a racial group rather than a people--they are composed of hundreds of peoples. These peoples fought individual conflicts with the settlers, often aligning themselves with various of the European powers: the French, the British, the Spanish, and the United States itself. At best they formed small alliances or confederations of peoples to take on the British and the Americans as during Pontiac's Rebellion of 1759 during the French and Indian War, during the early 1790s in the Ohio Valley, during the War of 1812, during the Red River War of 1874-75, and during the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. After the end of the War of 1812 the Indians lacked a powerful foreign ally--the Spanish were a weak ally until 1819. Thus, after the American Revolution the Indians rarely proved to be an existential threat to the American settlers as the Arabs were until 1982.

The South African liberation struggle is a much closer fit. But the whites in South Africa were always a small minority. The ANC was never a serious military challenge to the South African government. In fact internally within South Africa it was the paramilitary South Africa Police rather than the South Africa Defense Force that was responsible for fighting the "terrorist" threat. And although there were divisions among both the black majority and the white minority, these were never nearly as deep as the divisions on both sides that characterized the Northern Ireland and Middle East conflicts.

The Northern Ireland conflict can be said to have had four or five logical start points: the oldest was the Ulster plantation of 1607 when entrepreneurs began settling Scots and English families in Ulster; the next is 1886 when the unionists first organized in opposition to the first Home Rule Bill; the next is 1912 when the Ulster Covenant was signed by nearly all the unionist families in the province in opposition to Home Rule and the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force was organized; the next was the creation of Northern Ireland through partition in 1921-22; and finally October 1968 when a march of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was attacked by Paisleyites. The last is the conventional starting point of The Troubles.

The Troubles began as a reactionary unionist backlash to a nationalist and liberal drive for reforms that would end the inequality in the province. This soon escalated into major interethnic strife in August 1969 that led to intervention by the British army in order to restore order. The interethnic strife was accompanied by widespread ethnic cleansing of Catholics from mixed neighborhoods in Belfast and Derry and some ethnic cleansing of Protestants from Catholic neighborhoods in retaliation. The Provisional Republican Movement was created as a traditionalist "splinter" group from the mainstream Irish Republican Army (IRA) in December 1969 and January 1970 with some assistance from a group of rebel ministers in the Dublin government. (The ministers offered to provide arms to the splitters as long as they did not operate in the Republic of Ireland.) In early 1971 the Provisional IRA began an insurgency against the British state in Northern Ireland and the Official IRA soon followed suit. The two groups competed for over a year until the Official IRA declared a ceasefire in May 1972 that soon became permanent. In late 1974 the splinter Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) split from the Official IRA and it began an armed struggle in 1979 with the assassination of the Conservative Party spokesman on Northern Ireland, Airey Neave, in the parking lot of the House of Commons.

Over the thirty years of The Troubles there were some 3500 deaths due to conflict violence and thousands more wounded, many maimed for life. The majority of those killed were killed by republicans with the vast majority of these killed by the Provisional IRA. Republicans were responsible for more Catholics killed than were the British security forces. The prostate loyalists killed over 900, mostly nationalists but a few unionists--some killed in intergroup feuds and others in cases of mistaken identity, as well as a few members of the security forces. The loyalist paramilitaries were heavily involved in criminal activities such as protection rackets and building fraud. The republicans were also involved in criminal activities but mainly as a means of funding their anti-British armed struggle. With the loyalists the struggle was more used as a cover to legitimize criminal activities.

The unionists were a majority of over 60 percent of the province's population at the time of partition and this has dropped to just over 50 percent by the end of the century. But on the island as a whole the unionists are about a fifth to a quarter of the total population. Thus there is a situation of a double majority/double minority--the nationalists are a majority on the island, but a minority in Northern Ireland; the unionists are a minority on the island but a majority in the province. This is similar to the status of Arabs and Jews within Israel and the region. But unlike the Middle East or Southern Africa there is no regional core and periphery in the British Isles.

The goal of the republicans had always been politicide--the destruction of the British province on the island of Ireland. This is similar to the Arab goal of destroying Israel before 1979. And this is still the goal of many Palestinians, especially the Islamists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If Northern Ireland were destroyed as a British province the unionists would have the choice of either living under Irish rule or emigrating across the Irish Sea to a Britain that is in many ways culturally foreign to them. This is the same dilemma that whites faced in South Africa and that Jews face in Israel. The main difference is that as British citizens the unionists have a guaranteed refuge in mainland Britain, whereas many Afrikaners lack a natural refuge (many English-speakers have emigrated to Britain and Australia), and many Jews would lack a natural refuge.

In Northern Ireland the republicans backing armed struggle were always a minority within the nationalist population of the North as a whole. Sinn Fein never polled more than 40 percent of the nationalist vote and usually polled about a third. The remainder went to the SDLP, which was opposed to armed struggle but did support Irish unity through persuading the government in London to coerce the unionists into a united Ireland. Among the Palestinians armed struggle has since 1948 always been a position with majority support as far back as surveys have been taken. There is no real Palestinian equivalent of the SDLP in terms of the support that it received. The closest thing is Abbas's Palestinian Authority after he took over following Arafat's death in November 2004.

The Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 was essentially a negotiation among the British and Irish governments, the Ulster Unionist Party, and the SDLP. The republican and loyalist paramilitary parties were restricted to largely negotiating terms for prisoner releases and decommissioning of weapons. Throughout the negotiations the UUP refused to speak directly with the Sinn Fein delegates, whom they regarded as terrorists and murderers.

In my next post I will examine the conditions that led to the Northern Ireland peace process and compare them to those that prevail in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today.