At the Alliance Party conference on Saturday, Naomi Long majored on reform of the Stormont assembly; her recurring theme.
Some of her proposals are feasible but the chief one is based on Alliance’s fundamentally flawed analysis of the north as an entity.
Undoing the arrangements agreed at St Andrews in 2006 to give the DUP a fig leaf for entering the executive could work and might even be accepted gratefully by the DUP.
As that party often does, it made a serious mistake insisting that the largest unionist party and largest nationalist party must nominate the First and Deputy First Minister.
They did this for two reasons. First, they didn’t want their voters to see them voting for Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister, and secondly, they assumed the largest unionist party would a) always be the DUP and b) would always be the largest party in the assembly.
So, maybe they’d be interested in going back to the original method and collectively voting for FM and DFM, but that would mean admitting their mistake.
As for Long’s more fundamental proposals, they’re non-starters.
The Good Friday Agreement is based on the political theory of consociationalism, which in the north means giving equal status to the two communities, nationalist (Irish) and unionist (British).
In other similar places like Belgium (many of whose citizens also don’t accept that it’s a country), it’s Flemish (Dutch) and Walloon (French), with some Germans added in.
Despite futile attempts by the NIO (and PSNI) to talk about “all communities”, the two communities on whom the GFA is predicated remain the dominant political and societal entities.
Recent figures show that the north remains the least diverse place in these islands. There’s little indication that will change.
Naomi Long insists that Alliance shouldn’t be ‘other’ but be on equal footing with nationalist and unionist parties.
That can’t be, because the GFA allocates priority to the parties of the two ethno-political blocs. Equality of status and parity of esteem apply to Alliance members as to everyone else as far as human rights legislation goes, but not in politics.
Alliance and supporters in the media valiantly talk up “a third force”, “the others”, the “don’t knows”. Naomi Long has even talked of a “united community”.
Well, that may be so among Alliance members, but it sure ain’t the case in society.
The north is not a united community, never has been, never will be for historical, cultural and religious reasons.
After all, for a start, people can’t even agree what to call the place. One lot want to preserve this benighted place, the other lot want to abolish it.
Long, writing to her supporter Micheál Martin and to our proconsul, urging them to avail of a window of opportunity, is wasting her time. Essentially what she’s asking is for the two governments to step in and alter the preferences of 80% of voters at the behest of 15%. Really?
Look, the premises of the GFA are based around the preferences of the 80%. It’s no good saying Alliance is only five or six points behind the DUP in some polls. Neither the UUP nor the TUV would support such proposals from Alliance.
It’s frustrating, exasperating for Alliance, but that’s the way the GFA is constructed because it reflects society and politics.
Furthermore, the two main blocs will fight to maintain the system.
Alliance’s proposals sound reasonable and rational, but that’s not the way politics works here. Bringing in legislation to boot the main party of one bloc out of the executive or stop them boycotting it is cloud cuckoo land.
Neither Sinn Féin nor the DUP would have any compunction about disrupting business. There’d be filibustering, sit-ins, walk-outs, boycotts. Their voters would back them. The history of the last 25 years at Stormont shows that.
Going to court to enforce legislation doesn’t work either because the courts have always shown reluctance to intervene in politics.
One example is Peter Robinson’s attempt to compel the proconsul of the time to hold an assembly election. It seemed the law was on Robinson’s side, but the court decided the timing of an election was a political decision.
Naomi Long is correct that the Executive is as stable as it was before the last collapse in 2022, but that’s the nature of the beast.
What she can’t see is that if the two governments tried to force her reforms through, it wouldn’t make the Executive any more stable or less prone to collapse.
The fundamental flaw in Alliance’s analysis is that you can have ‘normal’ politics here like a mini-Westminster. You can’t.