Northern Ireland may get nowhere with yet another set of talks

Northern Ireland’s political parties will have to switch their focus quickly from this week’s local government elections to hot-house talks, aimed at reviving the Assembly at Stormont. The British and Irish governments will convene a new set of negotiations on Tuesday.

At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the Prime Minister reportedly told colleagues that the process has gained “momentum” following the funeral of Lyra McKee, a 29 year-old journalist who was shot dead by republican paramilitaries in Londonderry. The murder led to a “renewed rejection of violence by the people of Northern Ireland,” who, “expressed their frustration at the current impasse and their desire to see devolved government restored quickly,” according to Theresa May’s spokesman.

Undoubtedly, the shooting has created a new atmosphere around the province’s political parties, whose leaders issued a joint statement condemning the incident and appeared together at events afterwards. The words of Father Martin Magill, who scolded politicians at the funeral for uniting only after the death of a young woman, were reported widely and resonated with mourners and the public.

That mood may have persuaded Sinn Féin and the DUP to take part in talks, but it doesn’t mean that their discussions are significantly more likely to be successful. The two largest parties say that they will negotiate in good faith but they also insist that they won’t compromise on divisive issues, like Irish language legislation and investigating the Troubles.

Sinn Féin collapsed power-sharing at the start of January 2017, supposedly because Arlene Foster refused to step down during an investigation into a renewable heating scandal. More than two years later that issue is more or less forgotten, but the party insists that its list of demands must be met before it will go back into an executive with unionists.

Ominously, its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has already asked the governments to devise a ‘Plan B’ that will deliver on Sinn Féin’s ‘red lines’ if the DUP rejects them.

The idea that the parties should cooperate so that Lyra’s death is “not in vain” is seductive, but it’s also facile. The fanatics who encouraged youths to riot in Derry and instructed gunmen to fire at the police despise the Stormont executive. They will try to shoot and bomb their way to an all-Ireland state whether or not there is devolved government.

If the democratic institutions in Northern Ireland were to work properly for a sustained period and tackle segregation, the atmosphere in communities where paramilitary groups operate might gradually start to improve. However, the Stormont executive, when it functioned, rarely legislated and refused to confront controversial social and economic problems.

Since the Assembly was introduced in 1998 under the provisions of the Belfast Agreement, it has been suspended regularly.

After they replaced the UUP and SDLP as Northern Ireland’s largest parties, the  DUP and Sinn Féin agreed to share power in 2007, when they signed they St Andrews’ Agreement. They were locked in talks over devolving policing and justice just three years later, which resulted in the Hillsborough Agreement. In 2014, the Stormont Agreement was needed to restore the institutions after the parties disagreed on welfare reform. Then, less than a year later, they were negotiating again, after police blamed the IRA for killing one of its former members, Kevin McGuigan, during a republican feud.

Irrespective of the fact that, on that occasion, its movement was literally accused of murder, Sinn Féin made further demands on welfare and Troubles inquests, before more money from Westminster facilitated the ironically titled ‘Fresh Start’ agreement.

Even if the latest set of talks results in yet another agreement, it is unlikely to remove the incentive for Sinn Féin – and, let’s be honest, invariably it is Sinn Féin that has to be appeased to get Stormont back up and running – to crash power-sharing in the future. Indeed, by intervening in this manufactured crisis rather than discharging its responsibilities properly and implementing direct rule, the British government arguably ensures that another impasse is more likely, months or years down the line.

The prospect of this round of talks resolving Northern Ireland’s problems has already been damaged by the way this insensitive Dublin government has elbowed its way to the front and centre of the process. The behaviour of the Irish foreign minister, Simon Coveney, confirms to unionists that his administration doesn’t care about the limits the Good Friday Agreement imposes on its involvement in the province’s internal affairs.

People in Northern Ireland are certainly fed up with the lack of progress at Stormont. In theory, they want politicians to get back to work and they think they’re doing a terrible job. Yet, almost certainly, they will go to polling stations this week and endorse the positions of Sinn Féin and the DUP regardless. If those two parties reach an accommodation in the impending talks, it will be worth very little if it does not take away the incentive for one of them to collapse power-sharing when it doesn’t get what it wants.