Theresa May’s visit to Ireland last week, when she provocatively reiterated her intention to scrap her commitments to the EU and Ireland, was further evidence of the toxic impact that her party’s pact with the DUP is having on the political process and the lives of ordinary citizens.
And when she in effect binned her own Chequers proposals in order to placate the Democratic Unionist party and their Brexiter allies, the people of Britain got a taste of what citizens in the north have been enduring for years. They saw what happens when political self-preservation trumps the rights of citizens and even the democratic process itself. It doesn’t matter what is right. It doesn’t matter what you voted for. The only thing that matters is clinging to power and giving the DUP what it wants in order to do so.
The power-sharing government in the north of Ireland collapsed 18 months ago when Martin McGuinness resigned in protest at a series of DUP-linked financial scandals and discrimination in government. Ever since then, every effort to restore them on the basis of equal treatment for all citizens has foundered. And that has been largely due to the British government’s refusal to confront the DUP’s anti-rights, anti-equality and anti-democratic agenda, which is preventing a restoration of the Stormont government.
The majority of parties in the north support marriage equality, language rights, access to coroner’s inquests and compassionate healthcare for women. But so reliant is May on Arlene Foster for her own survival that she refuses to challenge the DUP on their denial of these rights. In many cases, these are rights that May championed for citizens in Britain, but apparently people in the north need not apply. Quite ironic, given May’s Brexit stance on “constitutional integrity”.
The latest attempt to restore our assembly and executive will get under way when the British-Irish intergovernmental conference finally meets on Wednesday. Sinn Féin has been calling for this since February when the DUP refused to honour a draft agreement to restore Stormont and instead collapsed the negotiations. Under the auspices of the Good Friday agreement, this is the correct forum to redress the issues at the heart of the crisis.
However, it will only be successful if the British government leaves its reliance on the DUP at the door. The toxic pact between the Tories and the DUP has poisoned our political process for too long. It has been central to the failure to restore the institutions to date. The British government are supposed to be a rigorously independent co-guarantors of the Good Friday agreement. Had they been fulfilling that role, then they would have confronted the DUP’s refusal to embrace that agreement long before now.
Instead they placate, they pander and they provide cover for the fact that the DUP still refuses to share power on the basis of equal treatment for all citizens. The DUP feels so little pressure from London that they are adamant, bullish even, that they will not move on the issues of rights and equality that are at the heart of the crisis.
Discriminatory positions on marriage equality, language rights, coroner’s inquests and women’s health are simply unacceptable for any administration that wishes to describe itself as democratic and egalitarian.
In addition to these rights issues, there are a number of other areas that must be addressed as a matter of urgency, including Boundary Commission changes; policing board appointments; cross-border bodies; the all-Ireland single electricity market and, of course, Brexit. Resolving these issues at the intergovernmental conference and within the framework of the Good Friday agreement would present a clear pathway back to re-establishing the institutions. But that will require confronting the DUP. We will know very soon if Theresa May’s administration is finally prepared to do that.
