To list the negative consequences would take the whole of this newspaper, and this week the civil servants left in charge are taking the opportunity to spell out the scale of damage now facing public services as a result of the current draft budget. Since Sinn Féin first collapsed the institutions in 2017, the only sustained period of devolved government was during the Covid pandemic. For four of the past six years, there has been none in the North. By definition, unionism requires functioning government in Northern Ireland more than any other political grouping.īut we all require government of some kind. Immoral and infuriating as the DUP’s behaviour has been, the outcome of this council election will not alter those calculations, whatever signal the non-unionist electorate is encouraged to send.
It is after all in their overwhelming strategic interest to re-enter Stormont. Indeed the first election pledge in its literature is actually to re-establish the Assembly and Executive – once it secures usefully unspecific guarantees on Northern Ireland’s place in the union.
It appears likely that, at some point in the weeks or months after the elections, the DUP will re-enter Stormont. There always is in the North, for good or ill. Headline polling struggles to capture these nuances, but there is also a wider political and, indeed, constitutional context. There are diverse local issues and a diversity of established local champions running for all parties, including my own, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and a significant number of Independents with large personal followings in specific places. These council elections are about everyday but important matters of local government. Our politics has felt frozen in carbonite, like Han Solo at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, waiting for the DUP to make peace with reality while our public services are pushed to the limit and beyond. An election to the Assembly happened last year, but its results have so far been left unimplemented. The Democratic Unionist Party’s nihilistic boycott of devolved institutions continues, even after practical concerns over our post-Brexit arrangements have been addressed by the UK and European Union, and even as public services here face grim cuts at the hands of a UK secretary of state who seems relaxed about punishing the vulnerable for DUP intransigence. Even for Northern politics, the past year has felt like a stuck record.
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