British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took an unusual victory lap on Monday, visiting Belfast to celebrate the restoration of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government. His ministers reached a deal last week that brought disgruntled northern trade unionists into the territory’s assembly.
For Mr Sunak, who is fighting on so many other fronts, it was a rare unalloyed success — significant not only because it ended two years of political deadlock in Northern Ireland, but also because, some analysts believe, he could prop up a United Kingdom which seemed at risk of breaking up after Brexit.
By reviving self-rule in Northern Ireland, diplomats and analysts said, the spotlight would shift away from the tantalizing prospect of the north uniting with the Irish Republic and shine on everyday issues such as reducing hospital waiting times or raising wages. to the public workers.
“He was a head of steam building on the issue of Irish unity,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University in Belfast. “Nothing was working, everything was broken, so people were thinking about the alternative. If you have the institutions working, it takes the pressure off a bit.”
None of this means that the dream of a united Ireland has slipped away. Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party, has the largest number of seats in the assembly, a status that allowed its leader, Michelle O’Neill, to be installed as the first cabinet minister on Saturday, a moment laden with symbolism. He said he could foresee a referendum on Irish unification within the next decade.
For the first time since the 1921 partition that kept the North under British rule, Catholics form a majority of the population in the territory. In the South, polls suggest Sinn Féin, which has undisclosed links to the Irish Republican Army, could enter government after next year’s election.
However, Ms O’Neill did not mention Irish reunification in her official remarks after being elected first minister. This was no accident. Her aim, analysts said, is to reassure the public that Sinn Féin — in partnership with the Democratic Unionist Party, which favors remaining part of the United Kingdom — can govern effectively.
“It’s not in their interest to keep beating that drum,” said Bobby McDonough, Ireland’s former ambassador to Britain. “The focus in the coming years will be on the distribution of power and the operation of government.”
Mr McDonagh said the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, had a similar motivation. Having haggled with Mr Sunak’s government for nearly a year to improve the terms of the trade deal Britain struck with the European Union on Northern Ireland’s behalf, the party’s best case for staying in the union is to show it can to work constructively with the nationalists.
For Mr Sunak, a period of calm will ease tensions that have remained since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016. Northern Ireland voted 56% to 44% against Brexit and the resulting tensions are related to its unusual trading status as a part of the UK that shares an open border with EU member Ireland — divided unionists and played to nationalists’ advantage.
This, in addition to changing demographics in the North, has fueled hopes that Irish unity may come sooner than expected.
A similar dynamic prevailed in Scotland, where fierce opposition to Brexit sparked a surge in favor of secession from the United Kingdom (the Scots voted against leaving in a 2014 referendum). But there, too, the facts broke in Mr. Sunak’s favor: While support for independence remains steady at 50 percent, the party leading the movement, the Scottish National Party, is hemorrhaging support after a financial scandal with former its leaders.
In the case of Northern Ireland, diplomats say Mr Sunak deserves credit for methodically renegotiating the deal left by one of his predecessors, Boris Johnson, whose withdrawal agreement with Brussels left the North with an uncomfortable set of restrictions on trade.
“What it does is undo the damage that Boris Johnson did,” said Jonathan Powell, the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement, which introduced power-sharing and ended decades of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. .
Mr Powell also credited Julian Smith, the former Northern Ireland secretary, who said he held discussions with unionists, and John Bew, Mr Sunack’s foreign policy adviser and a Belfast native, who was deeply involved. in the attempt to rotate the trade unionists.
The British government has framed its deal with the DUP as a way to ensure Irish unification remains a distant goal. In a paper it issued on the terms of the deal, it said that, based on recent opinion polls, the government “does not see a realistic prospect of a border referendum leading to a united Ireland”.
Under the Good Friday Agreement, Britain will be obliged to call a referendum on whether Northern Ireland should leave the union if there is clear evidence that a majority in the North and South support it. In the North, polls show people would vote against leaving by double digits. In the republic, however, polls show a strong majority in favor of unification.
“We believe that, once devolved institutions are restored, Northern Ireland’s future in the UK will be secure for decades to come and therefore the conditions for a border vote are unlikely to be objectively met,” the government said. (Ms O’Neill’s comment about the timing of a border poll came in response to that statement.)
Mr Sunak, who met in Belfast with Ms O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, the DUP spokeswoman who serves as deputy first minister, said the deal with unionists would secure Northern Ireland’s place in join.
But Mr Sunak himself faces elections later this year, which analysts say could have uncertain consequences for the stability of the new government in the north.
If Sinn Féin took power in the South, some analysts said, it could strengthen the resistance of some voters in the North to seceding from the union. But it would also make the prospect of Irish unity more tangible.
“The debate about Irish unity should become more real,” Professor Hayward said. “Everyone understands that you don’t want to repeat the Brexit experience. They should manage it more carefully.”
