As Michelle O’Neill walked down the marble staircase at the Northern Ireland Parliament building on the outskirts of Belfast on Saturday, she appeared confident and calm. He smiled as applause erupted from supporters in the balcony. However, her determined walk and otherwise serious gaze conveyed the gravity of the moment.
The political party he represents, Sinn Féin, was shaped by the decades-long, bloody struggle of Irish nationalists in the territory who dreamed of reunification with the Republic of Ireland and annulling the 1921 partition that kept Northern Ireland under British rule.
Now, for the first time, a Sinn Féin politician holds Northern Ireland’s highest political office, a watershed moment for the party and the wider region as a power-sharing government is restored. The first ministerial role has always been held by a unionist politician committed to remaining part of the UK.
“As First Minister, I am wholeheartedly committed to continuing the work of reconciliation between all our people,” Ms O’Neill said, noting that her parents and grandparents would never have imagined such a day would come. “I would never ask anyone to move on, but what I can ask is that we move on.”
The idea of a nationalist first minister in Northern Ireland, let alone one from Sinn Féin, a party with historic links to the Irish Republican Army, was indeed once unthinkable.
But the story of Sinn Fein’s transformation — from a fringe party that was once the political wing of the IRA, to a political force that won the most seats in Northern Ireland’s 2022 election — is also the story of a changing political landscape and outcomes. the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the decades-long sectarian conflict known as The Troubles.
“It’s certainly symbolically very important,” said Katy Hayward, professor of political sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. “It tells us just how far Northern Ireland has come and in many ways the success of the Good Friday Agreement and the use of democratic and peaceful means to achieve cooperation.”
It is not yet clear what a Sinn Féin first minister will mean for the hopes of those who want to reunite the island after a century of separation. Although Mary Lou McDonald, the president of Sinn Fein, which leads the opposition in the Republic of Ireland parliament, said last week that the prospect of a united Ireland was now “within touching distance”, experts believe it remains far away.
For now, the territory’s two main political forces – unionists and nationalists – are locked together in the power-sharing arrangement set out in the Good Friday Agreement.
That deal had broken down over how Northern Ireland’s political forces saw themselves after Brexit.
Northern Ireland’s leading unionist party, the Democratic Unionists, quit government in 2022 in the wake of Britain’s exit from the European Union, which had set up a trade border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Wanting to secure ties with Britain, the DUP feared the sea border was the first step in breaking them up.
The assembly boycott ended last week after the British government agreed to reduce customs controls, strengthen Northern Ireland’s position in the UK and hand over 3.3 billion pounds, about $4 billion, in financial sweeteners.
Because it had the most union seats in the 2022 election, the DUP was entitled to nominate a deputy first minister on Saturday — Emma Little-Pengelly, who will work alongside Ms O’Neill.
“The past with all its horrors can never be forgotten,” Ms Little-Pengelly said as she described being a child during the Troubles and witnessing the devastation of an IRA bomb outside her home when she was 11. But he added: “While we are shaped by the past, we are not defined by it.”
The roles of the first and deputy first ministers are formally equal, with neither able to act alone to prevent either community from dominating the other. “People like to say here, you can’t order paper clips without someone else’s approval,” Ms Hayward said. But the titles, and the fact that the role of first minister reflects the largest number of seats, creates a ‘first among equals’ concept.
And Ms O’Neill’s appointment inevitably brought to the fore discussions about the prospect of Northern Ireland one day reuniting with the Republic of Ireland.
Experts said that while a rising Sinn Féin could give the cause further impetus, the party’s rise was more a reflection of the rifts that have emerged between union parties since Britain left the European Union than a widespread increase in Irish nationalism. Current polling shows that the majority of the population across the island do not support unification.
“They made the prospect seem realistic, and Brexit has helped, because support has increased somewhat,” said Jonathan Tong, a professor of politics at the University of Liverpool who specializes in Northern Ireland and has extensively analyzed opinion polls on the issue.
“He’s still got some distance to run,” he said, adding that with elections coming up in the Republic of Ireland in 2025 and the potential for a Sinn Féin government there, “it’s huge in those terms.”
He noted that a quarter of a century ago, few would have envisioned a Sinn Féin First Minister.
Part of that success is down to Ms O’Neill and Ms McDonald, who have helped change the perception of the party.
“These two women don’t have the baggage of membership or close association with the IRA,” said Robert Savage, a Boston College professor who specializes in Irish history. “They are younger, articulate, popular and astute in addressing the concerns, especially of younger people.”
Mrs O’Neill, 47, was born in Cork, a county on Ireland’s south coast, into a prominent Northern Irish republican family. Her father, who served a prison sentence for being a member of the IRA, later became a Sinn Fein politician. But she has already made an effort to define herself as the first minister for all. He attended both the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the coronation of King Charles III last year.
Many unionists link Sinn Féin to the history of the IRA, as do some nationalists and those who do not identify with either group. But increasingly, particularly among a younger group, the party is proving attractive.
In the Republic of Ireland, the party won the popular vote in 2020, in part by focusing attention on social issues such as housing and positioning itself as an alternative to the status quo. But his popularity did not extend to older voters who remember the violence of the Troubles.
In some ways, the growth of nationalist political representation is not surprising. The demographics have changed significantly in Northern Ireland, with the slow erosion of the Protestant majority there attributed first to the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control and then to economic factors such as the decline of industrial jobs, which were mainly held by Protestants.
Catholics will outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time in 2022, according to census figures. And Northern Ireland is not the binary society it once was. Decades of peace have attracted newcomers, and like much of the world, the island is becoming increasingly secular. The labels of Catholic and Protestant have remained as a clumsy shorthand for the cultural and political divide.
After Brexit, there was a fall in support for Northern Ireland remaining in the UK and an increase in support for Irish unification. Many voters saw the break from Europe as economically damaging and threatening cross-border relations, as the island had enjoyed decades where EU membership helped support peace.
For now, the restored government in Belfast has more pressing issues to deal with. Last month, tens of thousands of public sector workers walked out in protest over pay, in Northern Ireland’s biggest strike in recent memory. The healthcare sector is in crisis and the rising cost of living has been felt there more acutely than anywhere else in the UK.
“Look what happened when people got around a table and worked to create peace here, and the Good Friday Agreement came from that,” said Paul Doherty, a councilor representing West Belfast, one of the most deprived communities. of Northern Ireland. “I think we need to rekindle that spirit that we had in the ’90s.”
