If Northern Ireland gets a power-sharing deal it could contain the seeds of the next crisis

Crisis talks to restore power-sharing have become a pre-Christmas tradition in Northern Ireland. This year, the political parties had one weekend to digest the general election results before the Northern Ireland secretary, Julian Smith, convened new negotiations.

The province’s devolved assembly and executive have not functioned since January 2017, when Sinn Féin collapsed the institutions at Stormont. That decision was supposedly taken as a protest against Arlene Foster’s refusal to step down as first minister while her role in the failure of a renewable heating scheme was investigated. Subsequently, the RHI scandal was scarcely mentioned, as republicans issued a series of “red line” demands they insisted must be met if they were to share power in Northern Ireland.

The latest talks are the most serious attempt to restore Stormont since February 2018. Back then, the DUP decided it could not accept a deal that included a far-reaching Irish Language bill. Unionists were suspicious that the legislation would be used to justify “affirmative action” to boost the number of Irish speakers in the public sector and impose costly, divisive dual-language signage.

This year, negotiations take place against a backdrop of NHS strikes and hospital waiting-lists that are by some distance the worst in the United Kingdom. In the absence of ministers at Stormont, wages in Northern Ireland’s health service have fallen seriously behind those in the rest of the UK. The Westminster government and civil servants, currently in charge of the public sector budget, are unwilling to make explicitly political decisions to resolve the dispute.

The DUP and particularly Sinn Féin lost thousands of votes in last week’s election, despite remaining the province’s two biggest parties. The perception is growing that people have lost patience with politicians’ failure to settle their differences. It’s difficult to defend the idea that a minority language and other so-called “rights issues” are critically important when voters’ friends and relatives are dying as they wait for an appointment with a doctor.

None of which necessarily means that Stormont will be restored, or that the health service’s issues will be addressed if the Assembly does come back. When the parties spoke to the press on Monday, the only consensus seemed to concern the need for a “big cash injection” from London, as described by Sinn Fein leader, Mary Lou McDonald.

Among Northern Ireland’s politicians, there is an expectation that each time they overcome a crisis in power-sharing and get back to work they’ll be rewarded with a windfall from the Treasury. And the belief seems widespread that profound social and political problems can best be tackled by spending copious amounts of taxpayers’ money.

The immediate health emergency in Ulster probably will necessitate a cash injection. However, things have deteriorated so badly because the Executive was not in place to respond to short-term pressures that worsened over three years of non-activity. More damningly, when power-sharing operated, a succession of Stormont health ministers failed to reform the province’s version of the NHS, despite commissioning a series of reports that spelt out exactly what needed to be done.

Successive policy reviews in 2011, 2014 and 2016 made broadly the same recommendations; fewer acute hospitals with a greater concentration of expertise and a shift of resources from hospital care to community care, so that more patients could be looked after at home or in half-way houses.

Far from planning to implement these changes before its suspension, the Executive was arguably further than ever from taking action. The Donaldson Review, published in 2014, gave specific advice about which services and hospitals needed to close, causing understandable consternation in some of the communities affected. When Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill became health minister in 2016, instead of putting it into practice and risking alienating some supporters, she commissioned a new report.

The document, written by Professor Rafael Bengoa, made largely the same points as Donaldson, but replaced concrete suggestions with more general statements of principle. Rather than overcoming local objections and political sensitivities, which was supposed to be the purpose of the report, the Executive used it to dodge making difficult decisions.

Back to the present day, and while Sinn Fein prioritises the Irish language, other parties are demanding institutional reform that will make it more difficult for one party to collapse the Assembly. The Alliance Party, which has been the main beneficiary of voters’ disillusionment with the DUP and Sinn Fein in recent elections, wants to change the ‘petition of concern’ mechanism, that ensures majorities of both unionist and nationalist MLAs are required to pass votes on sensitive issues.

That’s also been a long-term demand from moderate unionists, but it causes anxiety at a time when it looks like an Irish Sea border will be introduced against the wishes of pro-Union politicians in Northern Ireland.

Very typically, after nearly three years of arguments, Sinn Féin is trying to add yet another demand to the talks’ agenda. It now wants nationality law changed so that people born in Northern Ireland are not granted automatic British citizenship. It’s difficult to think of a suggestion calculated to be more offensive to unionists, whose entire outlook is shaped by a desire to be treated like the rest of the country. It’s an attack on the very building blocks of Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.

With the parties still divided by issues of that importance, there’s little optimism that there will be a deal that tackles the underlying issues that have caused Northern Ireland’s devolved government to stumble from crisis to crisis. The best voters in the province can hope for, is that taxpayers’ money buys another agreement to agree further down the line, and that approach has been proven always to contain the seeds of the next impasse.