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Theresa May speaking outside Stormont House in Belfast on Monday
Theresa May speaking outside Stormont House in Belfast on Monday. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
Theresa May speaking outside Stormont House in Belfast on Monday. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

The Guardian view on Northern Ireland talks collapsing: the lost language of power-sharing

This article is more than 6 years old
Party politics in Northern Ireland remains a grim zero-sum game. But the Conservatives in London have made things even more difficult

At the start of this week the British and Irish prime ministers went to Belfast. Such visits are less common than they were. So the word surrounding the meeting between Theresa May and Leo Varadkar was that they had arrived to bless a fledgling agreement between the Northern Ireland parties to restart power-sharing. Older heads warned that such optimism might be premature. The arrival of such senior figures could trigger the start of serious political battles, they said, not mark their ceremonial conclusion. And so it has now proved.

Two days on, the talks between the unionist DUP and the nationalist Sinn Féin have collapsed. The immediate reason is failure to agree on the terms of a new Irish language act, which Sinn Féin has promoted but against which much of unionist Northern Ireland is in revolt, causing the DUP to pull the plug. The danger is that both sides can now see more advantage within their own communities from failing to agree than from agreeing.

The two party leaderships seemed to have moved gradually closer since the new year on the main ostensible issues between them: the Irish language, marriage equality and the legacy of the Troubles. The renewable energy issue on which power-sharing collapsed in January 2017 appears to be history now. Efforts were indeed under way to finesse the Irish language issue by counterbalancing Sinn Féin’s call for a “standalone” language act with new laws on the Ulster Scots language and Northern Ireland cultural traditions.

The darker truth here is that Sinn Féin has chosen to weaponise the language question for political ends, less to protect a minority than to antagonise unionists. Unionists have duly been antagonised. The Gaelic language is the main tongue of a mere 0.2% of the Northern Ireland population. Around 10% claim to understand it to some degree (perhaps just a few phrases). But Sinn Féin does not do things accidentally. Its proposals have become a weapon of tribalism in communities where identity politics always looms large and divisively. Fears that Irish may be made compulsory in schools, that a language qualification might become a job requirement and that street signs would be made bilingual are not all well grounded. But some are. Bilingual road signs, for instance, would take the issue into every street in Northern Ireland, with pointless provocative effect.

Another glum truth is that the terms of Northern Ireland politics have been unhelpfully reset by two actions for which responsibility lies squarely with the Conservative party in London. The first of these is Brexit, and the seeming willingness of many irresponsible Tories to countenance a hard border in Ireland. The second is the pact between the Tories and the DUP, which undermines the British government’s role as a co-guarantor with Ireland of the power-sharing agreements of 1998. The two communities may indeed be enduringly suspicious of one another, as the language issue once again shows. But the current London government has all but abdicated from its responsibility to bring them together. In fact it has made things worse.

It is possible, as some unionist sources are saying, that the standoff might have been avoided if the prime ministers had stayed away and allowed the parties to strike a deal under less pressure. There are suggestions that the strands will be picked up again soon, perhaps leading to an agreement. Brinkmanship is indeed a grimly familiar part of such processes. But it is hard to be confident and not difficult to see sectarian reasons why both sides – Sinn Féin as much as the DUP – can live without an early resumption.

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