Is Gerry Adams in Trouble?

For those few of us foreigners outside of the British Isles and the American Northeast who pay attention to Northern Ireland, this has been an interesting two weeks. The president of Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the IRA, Gerry Adam's, brother was recently convicted of rape of his daughter when she was a small child. Gerry Adams is being faulted by the media not for being the brother of a convicted child molester but for failing to report his brother Liam to the police or at least keep him away from working with young children and for then lying about this to the public, the media, and the authorities.

When Liam Adam's faults first became public knowledge back in 2009 when his daughter Aisne lodged a complaint with the Police Service of Northern Ireland against him, Sunday Tribune Ireland editor Suzanne Breen exposed Gerry Adam's version of events as a pack of lies. She found photos of the two brothers together at public events after Gerry claimed that he had shunned his brother. At Liam Adam's first trial Gerry testified and he was not called to testify again at the second trial because his testimony was considered to be so unreliable.

Special Advisors and Political Advice: Problems of the SDLP

The last week has seen a number of problems with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Northern Ireland's moderate nationalist party that was opposed to the use of violence during The Troubles, largely of its own making. The Traditional Unionist Voice's sole Assembly member and leader Jim Allister proposed a bill to make it illegal for a party to appoint a special advisor who has a criminal record for an offense for which the penalty is five years or more in prison. This was in order to eliminate Mary McArdle, who was the sole person convicted in the murder of Mary Travers, the daughter of Northern Ireland judge, who was murdered during an attempt to murder the judge and his family after they left mass.

Sinn Fein wanted to file a motion of special concern against the bill, for which it needs 30 out of 108 MLAs. Sinn Fein has 29 MLAs, just one short of the total needed. But with all of the unionist parties supporting the bill, and with Alliance and the Green Party unwilling to side with Sinn Fein despite reservations about the bill, it looks like Sinn Fein will lose. But will it really lose? Since the start of The Troubles the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein--first as the publicity bureau of the IRA and then as its political wing--have been engaged in a process of ethnic outbidding as Duke University Law School Professor Donald Horowitz has labeled the process. The two each use the threat of the other to lure voters away from more moderate parties within their respective communities. For the nationalists the threat is seen as the return to the bad days of Stormont when the nationalists were second-class citizens discriminated against in employment, housing, and the franchise. For the unionists the threat is seen as both republican terrorism and a united Ireland in which they will be the minority. On the Northern Ireland/British isles blog Slugger O'Toole Sinn Fein supporters are already spinning this as discrimination against the nationalist community because it only applies to Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein is already spinning it as such.  No one enquires as to why the unionist parties do not appoint former terrorists as candidates or special advisors.

Ann Travers, the surviving sister of Mary Travers, has been an advocate of victims' rights and a natural candidate for Jim Allister because she is Catholic. When former Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon, who was also deputy leader of the SDLP under John Hume, came out of retirement to criticize his party for doing something that would be so offensive to unionists his party did an about turn. Sinn Fein will not get its bill and, if this bill is applied retroactively, Ms. McArdle will simply be appointed to another position within the party and a new special advisor will share his or her salary with the party. But Sinn Fein will have another issue with which to attack their nationalist rivals whom they regard as collaborators with the British.

It is about time that the SDLP's leadership got together and decided on a strategy for the party based on its natural electoral base: traditional Catholics who follow the lead of the Church hierarchy, middle class professionals, and nationalist democrats who oppose a party with a fascist ideology serving as the ruling party in the province. It must decide how to bridge the contradictions among these groups and how to attract new supporters. If it does not the middle class nationalists will either drift away to Alliance, Sinn Fein, or their Protestant equivalents in the "garden center party" of non-voters.

The Fate of Northern Ireland's New Pro-Union Party

Back in March I had a post about a new party being formed by two defectors from the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), Basil McCrea and John MacCallister, who had left the UUP over its decision to support an agreed unionist candidate in the mid-Ulster by-election. In May the party had its formal launch, but it still has yet to come up with a name for itself. Its main niche marketing distinction is that it advertises itself to be "pro-Union" rather than unionist, thus hoping to position itself somewhere between Alliance, which is agnostic or neutral on the border question, and the UUP. 

The Northern Ireland/British Isles blog Slugger O'Toole did a post on the launch of the party. The consensus on the thread was that in the next election McCrea would be reelected but MacCallister would lose to a UUP or DUP candidate. This in because McCrea seems to have a strong personal following in his constituency, whereas MacCallister was elected on the strength of the UUP as a party and will now lose to the party's replacement nominee. This will make the new party a one-man affair like Jim Allister's Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). The TUV represents the old DUP under Paisley before he did a 180 and entered into the Executive with Sinn Fein. The PUP represents a socialist unionism aimed at the loyalist working class. It is also vaguely connected with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) paramilitary organization out of which many of its representatives and leadership emerged, such as the late David Ervine and present leader Billy Hutchinson. Can the new party under McCrea find enough of a niche to survive?

Will Sinn Fein and the DUP slim away a few UUP MLAs?

Liam Clarke reported on a study done by the Belfast Telegraph in which present voting trends were projected on to a future Stormont assembly with only five or four seats per Westminster constituency rather than the present six. He reported that the UUP would be the biggest loser--reduced to only nine seats from its present 16. This is only one seat ahead of Alliance at present. If the UUP drops down to nine seats it will lose its second minister and be reduced to a single minister on the Executive like Alliance and the SDLP.

Alliance would not lose any seats because its members are all among the top four in each of its Greater Belfast constituencies. All the other parties would lose, but none to the same extent as the UUP.  The big loss would occur in the reduction from six to five seats and not from five to four. This is because the party now has many marginal seats scattered around the province, as opposed to Alliance, the SDLP and Sinn Fein who have their seats concentrated in a few geographic areas. The UUP has multiple seats--two each--in only two constituencies: Strangford and Upper Bann (David Trimble's old seat).

Alliance is concentrated in a "donut" around Belfast taking in Strangford, East Antrim, South Antrim and North Down. The SDLP is concentrated in Foyle, the former constituency of both John Hume and Mark Durkan; South Down, the former constituency of Eddy McGrady and Brid Rodgers; and in South Belfast.  The DUP is spread around the country but most concentrated in Co. Londonderry, Co. Antrim, and in Lagan Valley. Sinn Fein is most concentrated in the southwest of the province--west of the River Bann that splits the province in two and south of Co. Londonderry--and  in West Belfast. 

This would give the DUP incentive to reduce the number of seats per constituency, ostensibly as an economy measure. Sinn Fein could probably be talked into going along because of the marginal improvement it would give it over its rival, the SDLP. And Alliance could be counted to go along. The UUP and SDLP would not be strong enough by themselves to block such a reduction and there is a very good case to be made that the Stormont assembly is indeed much too large compared to other regional parliaments in the UK.  This is all the more reason why the two former leading parties should go into opposition. The Northern Ireland Office might be more opposed to weakening the official opposition than to weakening a few superfluous parties in the Executive.

Support for an opposition role in the SDLP?

The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) held its annual party conference in a hotel in Armagh this weekend. Two things were of significance. First, Party Leader Alasdair McDonnell managed to give his conference address despite the teleprompter (auto-cue), which was imported from England for the conference, not working properly. He apparently learned something from his last major performance. Second, the party addressed the need to consider going into opposition at some point. Deputy Leader Dolores Kelly called for the party to do this. This call and discussion was considered a positive sign by former UUP Deputy Leader John McCallister. He figures that the more discussion there is of this idea among senior party officials in both the SDLP and the UUP the greater the chance is of new legislation being introduced to support an opposition role at Stormont.  McDonnell, like St. Augustine, asked to be principled but not quite yet. He does not want the party to give up its single Stormont minister, Alex Atwood, who might then become his competitor for the leadership. So he wants to hold the other parties to account, but do this from the Executive rather than from the opposition benches.  No wonder Sinn Fein continues to dismiss the SDLP as irrelevant. 

Here is BBC Northern Ireland politics correspondent Mark Devenport's take on the conference.

Liam Clarke is reporting in the Belfast Telegraph that there  is considerable support for the opposition idea within the party. Former party leader Mark Durkan echoed Kelly's call for opposition and the SDLP's sole minister, Alex Atwood, said the idea should be debated. Clarke also reported considerable support among party activists for the idea. And here is Jim Allister, head of the far-right Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) praising the opposition idea.

David McNarry's Exodus

Former Ulster Unionist MLA for Strongford David McNarry announced yesterday that he was "bringing national politics to Northern Ireland" by joining the fringe United Kingdom Independence Party. The UKIP is known for opposition to Britain's membership in the European Union and is opposed to Britain's open immigration policy. It has seats mostly at the local council level on the British mainland. UKIP claims to be the only British party to openly contest seats in Northern Ireland. Most parties in Northern Ireland are unique to that province and are not organized in either Britain or the Republic of Ireland, the notable exception being Sinn Fein. Although many have links to British parties and attend their party conferences and vise versa. 

Is Mike Nesbitt ready for a Mid-Ulster By-Election?

Two days ago Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt announced that he was thinking about scrapping the position of deputy leader in the party. This was after he fired Deputy Leader John McCallister after McCallister publicly disagreed with the goal of unionist unity.  This follows the resignation of MLA and party veteran Ken Maginnis from the party after a public disagreement with Nesbitt over party policy towards homosexuals. And that followed upon earlier resignations. A refugee from one of those, David McNarry, has just announced that he is joining the UK Independence Party. Here a BBC story looks at the McCallister sacking and recent party controversies. The UUP is beginning to become a fair imitation of the party who couldn't shoot straight to paraphrase the name of an old Hollywood movie. Here Newsletter columnist Nick Garbutt defends John McCallister.

A Big Four without the UUP?

Traditionally Northern Ireland/Ulster party politics has been described in terms of the Big Four since the early 1980s thirty years ago: the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the Democratic Unionists (DUP), the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Fein. The first three had been active at least since the early 1970s; the UUP had been active since before World War I and had been the ruling party from 1922 to 1972 when London initiated direct rule. 

The UUP traditionally represented the interests of the wealthy upper class in Northern Ireland: the landed gentry and the manufacturers. In 1969-71 they were suddenly challenged from two directions at once. First, by the Alliance Party in April 1970, which had started out a year before as a pressure group pushing for more liberal and inclusive policies that would take into account the interests of the nationalist population, and from Ian Paisley's Protestant Unionist Party, which was opposed to that very inclusiveness and wanted that traditional unionist rule but with a fundamentalist Evangelical fervor. 

A new deal for Northern Ireland?

When the Good Friday Agreement aka Belfast Agreement was negotiated in April 1998 the emphasis was on getting the various paramilitary organizations to give up their weapons in exchange for a share of power in provincial and local government in Northern Ireland. Small parties, like the loyalist Ulster Democratic Party and the Progressive Unionist Party that represented the loyalist paramilitaries UDA and UVF respectively, were over-represented in the 1996 election that served to create the parties to the talks. The idea was to be as inclusive as possible. Now five years after the agreement was finally bedded down in 2007, many residents of Northern Ireland think that the agreement created an inefficient monster. The only real changes to the agreement were made in late 2006 at the resort of St. Andrews in eastern Scotland in order to allow the Democratic Unionist Party to claim it was signing up to a new agreement, but this was mere tinkering.

The DUP Moves to Consolidate

Two items of recent interest in Northern Ireland. First, the DUP and Sinn Fein got together and agreed to abolish the one department controlled by Alliance in the Executive, as of right. Presently Alliance controls two departments, Employment and Learning (DEL) and Justice, with the first being on the basis of the d'Hondt distribution and the second because when Justice was devolved to Northern Ireland the Big Two could only trust giving it to Alliance. Employment and Learning has been divided between two other departments (Education, probably Regional Development). Both the UUP and the SDLP only have a single ministry and they both have many more Assembly members (MLAs) and councillors than Alliance.

Now Justice Minister and Alliance leader David Ford is seeking a guarantee from the Big Two that his ministry will remain in Alliance hands for the remainder of this Assembly's life. This may seem like he is going a tad too far. But it should be remembered that the first time that Alliance was in a power-sharing government, back in 1974, the DUP and the Shinners--or rather the armed wing of the Republican Movement (as the Republicans refer to it or SF/IRA as the unionists refer to it)-- de facto colluded to bring down that government. The IRA went on a bombing offensive and the three main unionist parties cooperated with the Loyalist Association of Workers to bring down the government through a general strike. Former UUP leaderDavid Trimble and his former IRA advisor Sean O'Callaghan used to reminisce about how they both operated against the power-sharing government of 1974. So it may be natural on Ford's part to doubt the veracity and good intentions of the Big Two.

2012 Predictions for the Middle East and Irish Politics

After years of amusing myself by watching the pundits having their ignorance played back to them on Nightline and in rival press columns, I am publicly putting my predictions forward. As my crystal ball has been in the shop for decades I claim no special insight into the future. My predictions are based only on the future being like the recent past and present.

One, Netanyahu will call elections this year and will emerge as prime minister again. Whether he calls them before attacking Iran in order to gain a popular mandate for such an action or after is anyone's guess. I'm guessing that being cautious he will be reelected then move to attack Iran.

Two, continued Islamist victories in Arab Spring elections in Egypt and elsewhere will make Israel more cautious than ever (except towards Iran) and make Hamas and Hezbollah provocative.

Three, Egypt will attempt to unilaterally alter the peace treaty with Israel by ending diplomatic relations.

The Tories Prove that Northern Ireland is Different

Dervla Murphy, the Irish travel writer, entitled her 1970s travel book on Northern Ireland A Place Apart. I have long contended that one of the main things that sets it apart from both the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain is its party system. Until the simultaneous collapse of the Irish economy and Fianna Fail last year, no Northern Irish party had ever been more than a minor party in Ireland. As soon as the Workers' Party started to become a medium-size party after a decade in existence, it split with almost all of the Southern Irish TDs splitting off to form the Democratic Left in 1992. By then the Workers' Party had become a minor party in the North thanks to Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein itself remained a minor party until last year.

Alasdair McDonnell New SDLP leader

On Sunday Alasdair McDonnell, the member of parliament for the Social Democratic and Labour Party from South Belfast, was elected the new leader of the party beating out three other candidates including Deputy Leader Patsy McGlone and Environmental Minister Alex Attwood. His tenure got off to a rough start when he decided to give an acceptance speech from a lecturn without notes using a teleprompter (autocue in UK speak) that was badly positioned so that he was blinded by the glare of the lights and couldn't read his speech. Some commentators took this as a bad omen.

Irish Presidential Election Analysis

Last Thursday, October 27, Ireland held a presidential election and the results were officially published on Saturday. According to the Irish Times the results were a follows for the three leading candidates: Michael D. Higgins (Irish Labour Party) 39.6%, Sean Gallagher (Independent but unofficial Fianna Fail candidate) 28.5%, and Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein) 13.7%. The remaining four candidates together received 18.2% with none of them reaching seven percent. 

Martin McGuinness proved to be the kingmaker by accusing Gallagher on Monday night during a candidates' forum of taking a Fianna Fail contribution from a rich donor at an event a few years before. The accusation caught Gallagher off guard and he seemed to obfuscate in front of the cameras. He immediately went from being the frontrunner at 40 percent in the polls to the leading challenger. But by doing so McGuinness probably embittered a core Fianna Fail electorate, which will not forgive him nor Sinn Fein in the future. Sinn Fein slightly improved its standing over last year's general election, but received much less than the 14-18 percent that Mary Lou McDonald was predicting in the final week or the 20 percent that McGuinness polled at the start of the race. In comparison, Fianna Fail's unofficial candidate attracted a significant improvement in those constituencies that both FF and Sinn Fein contested last year.

An Opposition Strategy for the Northern Ireland Assembly

This past weekend the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) held its annual conference. With the party no longer running the Assembly, nor possessing even a single Westminster MP, the issues at stake seemed to be much less weighty than in previous years and this was reflected in the coverage--or lack thereof--that the conference attracted in the Ulster press. The most important event at the conference did not actually take place inside it, but rather outside when a group of members held a discussion on an opposition strategy for the party.

The Irish Presidential Race

On Thursday October 27 voters in Ireland--the Republic of Ireland--go to the polls to elect a new president. The presidency in Ireland is largely a ceremonial office devoid of any powers except for deciding on which party to turn to in order to form a government following an election. The presidency was created by the 1937 constitution written by Eamon de Valera. Until 1990 it was largely the property of Fianna Fail to hand out to worthy cultural figures and former senior party politicians. In 1990 Mary Robinson, a human rights lawyer running as an independent with the backing of both the Irish Labour Party and the Workers' Party, took the presidency away from Fianna Fail. Fianna Fail won it back in 1997 but ran Mary McAleese, a Northern nationalist and law professor at Queen's University of Belfast. She is now retiring.

In this election the main candidates have been four: Michael D. Higgins, a poet backed by the Labour Party; Sean Gallagher, a reality show star and former Fianna Fail member running as an independent; Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and number two in Sinn Fein; and David Norris, a former senator and gay rights activist. Norris has been badly damaged by the revelation that he wrote a letter on behalf of a former lover, an Israeli wanted for statutory rape of a Palestinian. He hasn't recovered. Martin McGuinness was off to a strong start but has faltered as victims of the IRA have stalked him and the Irish Independent and the Irish Times newspapers as well as TV questioners have openly challenged his version of his past. A poll from the Irish Times has Gallagher at 40%, Higgins at 25%, and McGuinness at 15%, with the other four candidates making up the remaining 20 percent.

The Progressive Unionist Party has a new leader. Will it make any difference?

It was announced yesterday that Billy Hutchinson, a former member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) arrested for a double murder in 1974 and a former member of the Assembly, will be the new leader of the sole remaining loyalist party, the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). He takes over from Brian Ervine, the brother of David Ervine, who was the leader of the party during its glory days from 1998 to 2003 and who served in the Assembly with Hutchinson. Hutchinson will be the fourth party leader in 18 months. After David Ervine's death Dawn Purvis took over as party leader and managed to retain his East Belfast seat in the Assembly. But then the UVF carried out a murder of a former Red Hand Commando prisoner who had criticized the continued criminality of the organization. Purvis then resigned from the party when its leadership refused to break the link with the UVF. There was a temporary interim leader before Brian Ervine took over. Now Ervine is giving up the position because he cannot afford to give up his job.

Martin McGuinness, candidate for Irish presidency

Last week Sinn Fein (SF), the all-Ireland party and political half of the Republican Movement, announced that Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness is its candidate for the Irish presidency.  SF's thinking is that with Fianna Fail not running, the party now has the opportunity to by-pass the once dominant Irish political party. McGuinness could conceivably come in as runner up in the election, thereby further mainstreaming SF within the Republic of Ireland. The election is to be held on October 27, 2011. McGuinness will have to take a leave of absence from his job as deputy first minister in Northern Ireland during the campaign. In Ireland the presidency is a largely ceremonial position.

During the peace process, SF's leadership spun a scenario to the Republican Movement's rank and file of a united Ireland coming about peacefully because the party would use its influence both within the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive and the Irish government in the Republic to bring this about. The projected date of unification was sometime in 2016, the centennial anniversary of the declaration of the Irish republic on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916 at the start of the Easter Rising. Until recently this was a fantasy because SF was a marginal party within the Republic and shunned by the other parties as a coalition partner. Hypocritically Fianna Fail and Fine Gael would urge Northern unionists to share power with Sinn Fein while the IRA still had its guns, while excluding it from power in the South for the same reason. Then last year the collapse of the Irish economy and of Fianna Fail's dominant status within the Irish party system seemed to make this dream feasible. But ironically, the same collapse made a majority of Northern nationalists opposed to unity with the Republic in the forseeable future.

McGuinness's nomination is also another sign of the eclipse of Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams. It was speculated after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that Adams remained outside of the Executive because he was being groomed for the bigger prize of the Irish presidency. Throughout the peace process Adams was the most popular politician in the Republic in public opinion surveys because of his role. But three things changed. First, the robbery of the Northern Bank in Dublin on December 20, 2004 exposed Adams to the scrutiny of the Irish press and his credibility was tarnished. He claimed not to have known any details of the robbery while he had been negotiating with the Democratic Unionists and British government on a power-sharing deal. Second, Ed Moloney's Secrets From the Grave tied Adams to the disappearance of Jean McConville, a young Belfast mother of ten, in the early 1970s when Adams was reputed to be a senior figure in the Belfast Brigade of the IRA. Moloney interviewed a number of senior republican and loyalist figures for Boston College's Troubles project with the stipulation that the interviews would only be made public upon the death of the subjects. When this occurred with Brendan Hughes, Moloney published. Third, in 2010 it was revealed that Gerry Adams was lying about his patronage of his younger brother, Liam, a suspected child abuser, within SF. Adams had kept his knowledge of Liam's sexual problems to himself allowing Liam to find work with young people. The press then exposed these lies. 

Adams was elected a TD (deputy in Irish Dail) last year from the border county of Louth. So he is still a marketable commodity. But if McGuinness someday ends up as Irish president, it will be like the guy who saves himself for his one true love only to have his best friend wind up with his girl. 

McGuinness was a 20 or 21-year old butcher's apprentice in Derry when he joined the IRA in 1971. Ironically, he originally joined the Official IRA but left it for the Provisional IRA after a few months because he was not interested in politics but in action. By the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1972 he was second in command of the Derry IRA. The Official IRA went on a permanent ceasefire in May 1972--22 years before the Provisionals did. After 1976 he and Adams wrested control of Northern Command from more moderate figures and made it the dominant force in the IRA. In the latter half of the 1980s he was IRA chief of staff and remained in that position well into the 1990s guiding the organization through the peace process. He also became Gerry Adams's deputy within SF and its chief negotiator during the Good Friday and subsequent negotiations. He also became education minister during the period of the First Assembly from December 1999 to October 2002. In the spring of 2007 when the peace process was resurrected it was McGuinness who became the partner of the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the DUP--the infamous Dr. No of Ulster politics. The two were dubbed the "chuckle brothers" by the media for their public shows of affection. McGuinness has always been more open about his past IRA background than Adams who to this day denies every having been a member of the IRA.

Why Sinn Fein and the DUP can both afford to lose a seat

In my most recent post, on UK redistricting and Northern Ireland, I stated that both Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists (DUP) could afford to lose a seat as a result of redistricting. This post explains why this is the case.

If one looks at a map of Northern Ireland after the most recent UK Westminster parliamentary election, one sees that the entire west of the province--except for the northwestern corner-- is colored green for Sinn Fein. The exceptions are the Foyle consituency around Derry, which the SDLP won, and the County Londonderry seat, which the DUP took. Now if one looks at the east of the province one sees the orange color of the DUP except for the light green of the SDLP in South Belfast and in South Down, and the yellow of Alliance in East Belfast. The DUP has eight of the provinces eighteen seats or just under half; Sinn Fein has five; the SDLP has three; and Alliance one with independent Lady Sylvia Hermon in North Down. We have already said that the South Belfast seat is going away leaving the SDLP with only two seats.

If as a result of the redistricting in the west the DUP loses one seat it will still have more seats than any other party. If Sinn Fein loses a seat it will still have twice as many seats as its nationalist rival, the SDLP. In 2010 Sinn Fein retained the Fermanagh and South Tyrone seat by only four votes against an agreed unionist candidate drawing votes from both UUP and DUP voters. The UUP has broken its formal link with the Conservative Party, thus opening the door for a possible return of Hermon to the UUP, putting it once more on the Westminster map. If the two main unionist parties can again agree on a comprise candidate for the Fermanagh and South Tyrone seat and the SDLP again goes its own way, it is conceivable that the seat could flip to being unionist. 

In any case, the Good Friday Agreement with its consociational structures of division within the Assembly and Executive of all parties into unionist, nationalist, and other categories has effectively made the real competition intracommunal rather than intercommunal. That is, no party gains a real advantage for being the largest party in the province, but only for being the largest party within its sectarian community. The First Minister and Deputy First Minister are de facto co-first ministers because one needs the support of the other. Sinn Fein had in fact proposed that the titles be formally changed to co-first ministers but the DUP objected. The DUP did this so that it could milk extra votes out of the danger of Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein becoming first minister from the UUP. The controversy over the name and cap badge change from Royal Ulster Constabulry to Police Service of Northern Ireland at the turn of the century demonstrated how much unionists are hung up on symbols. The unionist voters need to be reassured over the loss of their hegemony in the province with symbols. That is what much of the annual marching/parades controversy is about every year.

In reality, since the Good Friday Agreement was implemented on a stable basis in 2007 following IRA decommissioning of weapons in 2005, the province has been run as a sectarian carve-up with Sinn Fein running the west and center and the DUP running the north and east. The other three main parties are left to fight over the crumbs. In the Executive and the Assembly the two parties cooperate to run the province smoothly, much more smoothly than the UUP and SDLP ever did between 1999 and 2002. This is because the DUP and Sinn Fein don't have to worry about their own sectarian agitation, or that of their sectarian rivals who were amateurs at the sport.

If in the Middle East Israel and Palestine are ever transformed into a single state as a result of the inability to implement a two-state solution, expect much the same type of symbolic conflict between Jewish extremists and Muslim extremists along with much real conflict.

UK Redistricting: How it Will Affect Northern Ireland

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to use the formal title of the entity that most people refer to simply as the UK or Britain (not so great any more), is redistricting in a bid to make its parliamentary representation more uniform. Boundaries will be redrawn to organize about 72,000 eligible voters in each constituency and reduce the total number of seats from about 600 to 550. As its share in the loss Northern Ireland is expected to part with only two of its present eighteen seats. Until the 1980s the province had only a dozen seats, then add one and then another five. Here is a detailed article on the proposal by Liam Clarke of the Belfast Telegraph.

What will be the effects of this on politics in Northern Ireland? As I see it there will be two main effects. First, the two seats being sacrificed are in western Ulster--west of the Bann River that is mainly controlled by Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists (DUP)--and South Belfast. The South Belfast seat is being divided between West Belfast--a longtime Sinn Fein fiefdom--and East Belfast--presently held by Alliance, but traditionally held by the DUP. The SDLP, already in trouble because of its outdated electoral machinery and lack of a clear message, is about to lose one of its three remaining Westminster seats. In the past Belfast, as the province's capital and main city, has had four parliamentary districts: North, West, South, and East. South is now being split between West and East; West will lose its main loyalist area (the Shankill) to North. I haven't yet seen any maps showing the redivision of districts in the west of the province, but the net effect will be that either the DUP or Sinn Fein will lose one of its seats. Both can afford to take the hit. None of the three smaller traditional parties (UUP, SDLP, Alliance) can afford to take a hit. The real contests in the province take place within its sectarian divisions: Sinn Fein versus the SDLP among the nationalists, and the DUP versus the UUP among the unionists. The DUP has all but won its battle against the UUP. The SDLP is still hanging on but this will make the job of the new leader that much more difficult.

The second main effect is to reduce the size of government in the province down to a more appropriate size. For the Assembly each parliamentary district elects six representatives--thus the total size of the Assembly will be reduced from 108 to 96. If the number elected in each district were to be reduced further to only five the Assembly would end up with 80. This is about the size of the Assembly in the 1970s and 1980s. A unitary state like the UK does not need such an elaborate provincial legislature for its smallest province.  Northern Ireland, after all, consists of only six counties (which accounts for the old republican name for the province--the Six Counties). The Assembly has traditionally handled the three b's: bins, bogs, and burials. That is to say it has handled garbage collection, sewage, and burials as well as policing since 2007. It has a number of other administrative functions, but the most important ministries such as defense, foreign affairs, and the treasury are handled at the national level in London. Most Ulstermen and Ulsterwomen whether nationalist or unionist think that far too much is already spent on local and provincial government. The further reduction to 80 in the Assembly would probably be very popular.