Sam McBride: Stormont could return even weaker and less accountable than before

After three years without a government, Northern Ireland may soon be returning to the ranks of those countries whose rulers are overseen by democratically elected politicians.
But the bad news: Based on what we now know, it could be deeply unstable – and perhaps even more dysfunctional than the last Executive.

It has been clear for weeks that the DUP and Sinn Féin were manoeuvring towards a position where it would be easier to compromise to restore Stormont.

The language of their manifestos, that which was left unsaid by Michelle O’Neill and Arlene Foster and their response to the health crisis all implicity pointed to a belief that the years of drift left them each vulnerable.

But was that a genuine desire to re-enter Stormont or merely an attempt to blunt public anger in the face of an election by pretending to be serious about devolution?

Whatever the true answer to that question, last week’s election results for the DUP and Sinn Féin – each devastating in their own way – conveyed the howls of an electorate unprepared to any longer accept either party’s explanations for the impasse.

Despite winning a Dáil seat on a low turnout in a recent by-election, Sinn Fein has been in the doldrums on both sides of the Irish border while the DUP has lost seats in two elections this year, seen unionism lose ground and faced a brain drain the longer that Stormont remains empty.

And crucially last week the party lost its central position in Westminster, leaving it without a hand on the levers of power anywhere outside councils.

On top of that, people are now suffering and dying because of the failure to either agree a restoration of Stormont or a move towards direct rule, with the crisis in the health service now reaching levels which are dangerous not only for patients but for any politician seen to be allowing it to continue.

Facing such grim circumstances, the DUP and Sinn Féin face few alternatives to a Stormont marriage of convenience.

We are told that reform of Stormont will be central to the talks. Yet in Kafaesque style that element of the talks has been as secretive as the Stormont which existed until January 2017.

Arlene Foster, Michelle O’Neill and senior civil servants talk about mending their ways and acting to such basic standards of government as minute-taking and obeying the law.

Yet it takes great faith to believe that largely the same people running largely the same system will produce a markedly different result.

We should be sceptical rather than cynical and it is possible that there has been a genuine damascene conversion. The greatest incentive towards improved behaviour is the glimpse of public fury which politicians and civil servants observed over the RHI scandal – followed by the recent electoral punishment for the DUP and Sinn Fein.

Allied to that is the realisation that the practices of Stormont ultimately proved destructive. What might in a state of hubris have seemed than an untopplable institution in which the DUP and Sinn Féin would forever be joint masters now must look very different on the other side of the RHI Inquiry’s probing into dark corners and three years of powerlessness.

However, there is at least one reason to believe that if Stormont returns in coming weeks it could be even less productive than that which spectacularly imploded three years ago.

In 2017, for the first time since 1972, Stormont finally came to have an official opposition, ending a position in which all but a handful of MLAs were members of governing parties.

The SDLP, UUP and Alliance joined smaller parties such as the TUV and People Before Profit in sitting outside the government. Thanks to the enterprising John McCallister, Stormont’s rules were changed to ensure speaking time for the opposition and the ability to ask questions of Stormont ministers.

What in any other society would be considered the basic building blocks of a democratic system radically altered how Stormont functioned, even if most of us could not fully see that at the time.

Recently the respected think tank the Institute for Government published a report on the Stormont vacuum. The authors spent time talking to senior Stormont civil servants and buried in their final report is this fascinating line: “The decision of the UUP and SDLP not to join the last administration created [an opposition] for the first time – exposing the executive to a degree of accountability that officials told us ministers found uncomfortable.”

For the first time, the Assembly became a chamber which wielded real power of its own, showing that executive power is only one form of governmental influence. Rather than being subservient to the Executive, the Assembly asserted itself as a genuine forum for debate and for minsters being held to account.

Although uncomfortable, that was ultimately in the Executive’s strategic interests it would only survive if seen to be part of a credible institution rather than one which artificially shut down challenge. But such a change carried risk for parties unused to such scrutiny and their handling of the new reality exposed the Executive’s inadequacies.

It is unlikely that Stormont would have fallen over the RHI scandal had it not been for an opposition harrying ministers, demanding answers, calling witnesses before hearings of Stormont committees and providing an alternative administration.

Some people – including perhaps some people in the NIO – might say that the collapse of Stormont is a good argument against opposition.

But that is a simplistic understanding of the scale of Stormont’s problems. The entire edifice was built on sand and if it had not fallen over RHI, it was probably inevitable that collapse would come over something else – and the longer spads, ministers and civil servants acted as they did unchecked, the more destructive they became.
The opposition parties had less than a year and, with the exception of Alliance, fared poorly in the Assembly election following collapse.

For that reason, they appear keen to go back in to a new Executive – and Sinn Féin in particular appears desperate to ensure that the SDLP commits to doing so, itself a hint of Sinn Féin concern at facing full-throated criticism rather than the necessarily muted variety possible from a government partner.

If that happens, then ironically a Stormont which fell in large part because of secrecy and a lack of accountability could be more secretive and less accountable.

And regardless of what happens with the smaller parties, a new Executive is likely to be weaker at the top. Arlene Foster is a greatly diminished figure from the politician who once presided over Stormont like a queen and who – it is now almost forgotten – was for almost a year an exceptionally popular leader of unionism.

Wounded after last week’s latest electoral disaster and fighting internally for her career as various DUP sharks circle, Mrs Foster is both weak within unionism and a leader who is now instinctively loathed by most nationalists.

Similarly, Michelle O’Neill carries none of the gravitas of Martin McGuinness and is now in an unprecentedly weak position for a Sinn Fein leader, with a third of her party having recently voted against her and in favour of John O’Dowd while she has shown an inability to make the sort of grand reconciling gestures which became associated with Mr McGuinness in his latter years.

This week the efforts at the talks, such as we can discern, appear to be around issues such as an Irish language act and reform of the petition of concern, something which is almost tangential to the scale of the problem.

Much is at stake: If devolution is rushed back and fails again, the public may not give it a third chance.