The victory of the nationalist party, favorable to the reunification of Ireland, constitutes a historic shift.
Northern Ireland is at a historic turning point. For the first time in the history of this nation of the United Kingdom, dominated since its creation in 1921 by Protestants (mostly Unionists, faithful to the link with London), a nationalist party favorable to the reunification of Ireland and mainly Catholic, Sinn Fein, won the the parliamentary elections on May 5.
Northern Ireland is at a historic turning point. For the first time in the history of this nation of the United Kingdom, dominated since its creation in 1921 by Protestants (mostly Unionists, faithful to the link with London), a nationalist party favorable to the reunification of Ireland and mainly Catholic, Sinn Fein, won the the parliamentary elections on May 5.
Saturday, May 7, almost forty-eight hours after the start of a long and complex count, Sinn Fein (present on the whole island, in the Republic of Ireland as in Northern Ireland), counted 27 candidates elected, against 24 for the unionist party DUP, until then the main political force of the nation. In all, 90 deputies were to be appointed to sit in the Assembly of Stormont, the Northern Irish Parliament, endowed with substantial powers (health, justice, education), even if the sovereign subjects remain the domain of Westminster.
” We are entering a new era,” welcomed Mary-Lou McDonald, the movement’s president, on Saturday. Twenty-four years after the end of the Troubles, this civil war which, until the 1998 peace agreement, pitted nationalist Catholics against unionist Protestants for thirty years, this political and societal shift risks provoking a political crisis and will revive the debate, which is very sensitive in Dublin as in London, on the end of the partition of Ireland.
“I am ready to be a prime minister for everyone,” said her colleague Michelle O’Neill, vice-president of the nationalist movement, a former supporter of the paramilitaries of the Irish Republican Army, who should return to the post of head of the nation’s executive. Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the DUP, should be content with the post of deputy prime minister, under a system of power-sharing inherited from the Good Friday peace treaty obliging unionists and nationalists to govern together.
The two positions enjoy almost identical prerogatives, but, symbolically, they do not have the same scope. And symbols and identities still matter a lot in Northern Ireland. Humiliated, and criticized for its support for Brexit and the government of Boris Johnson, the DUP threatens not to participate in the Northern Irish executive. No question, according to him, of “returning to Stormont” as long as the Northern Irish protocol remains in place. This crucial part of the Brexit treaty, negotiated by London and Brussels, has since 2021 established a customs border in the Irish Sea, between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, which unionists consider an affront to their identity. British.
