In a historic result in Northern Ireland’s assembly elections held this month, the Irish republican Sinn Fein — once the political wing of the Irish Republican Army — emerged as the single largest party with 29% of the first preference votes. The final seat tally was still being calculated in the election as this article went to print. The election in Northern Ireland is run on the single transferable vote model for 18 constituencies with multiple representatives. Despite the lack of a final result as yet, it is quite clear that Sinn Fein will emerge as the single largest party in seat terms too in the 90-member assembly.
The party is expected to nominate its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, as the ‘First Minister’ (the head of government) in the Northern Ireland executive. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended decades of sectarian violence between those favouring the British Union and those seeking an unification with the Republic of Ireland, the executive is a “duumvirate”. It is co-ruled by two executives, the First Minister and Deputy First Minister with equal legal powers but the nomenclature of the former has been a matter of prestige in Northern Ireland politics.
This is a big blow to the unionists who won every election to the assembly in the last 101 years and for the Democratic Union Party (the largest unionist party) in particular that had triumphed in the last 19 years.
Does this mean that the Irish nationalist and democratic socialist Sinn Fein has won a mandate for a rethink on the Irish question? While the DUP had the highest net drop in vote share (-6.7%) since 2017, Sinn Fein gained only a 1.1% increase with the surprise package being the centrist and liberal Alliance party which has taken a neutral position. Sinn Fein itself gained its advantage by focusing on issues related to health care and the costs of living in the province.
The losses for the DUP had also got to do with its rigid conservatism as more traditionally unionist voters preferred to support liberal and centrist forces such as the Alliance even as Sinn Fein won adherents with its economic emphasis over keeping nationalism as its core electoral plank.
Border poll
But that said, this historic mandate for Sinn Fein will allow the party to push the envelope on the need for another “border poll” — a vote on whether Northern Ireland would consider itself part of the U.K. or the Republic of Ireland — in the medium term, as a spokesperson for it acknowledged in remarks after the results were being announced.
The Sinn Fein of today was reconstituted in 1970 after a split from the original organisation that participated in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War in the early 20th century and which had considerably weakened after the establishment of the Republic of Ireland. During the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland — the period of ethno-nationalist conflict between unionists and the Irish Nationalists — the party got associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and was seen as the political wing of the militant outfit. Following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the creation of the Northern Ireland Assembly (also referred to as Stormont), the party has steadily received a sizeable vote share in elections but never finished higher than second place. The 2022 poll results mark a clear first for the party in Northern Ireland.
In the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein is a major force already in the opposition, having won in 2020, 37 of the 160 seats in the Dail Eireann (the lower house of Parliament), just one short of the ruling Fianna Fail, despite emerging as the single largest party in vote terms. Clearly, the party’s progressive agenda is allowing it to gain support in both the Republic and in Northern Ireland, despite its chequered past and an identification with ethno-nationalism.
Meanwhile, it is unclear if the DUP will, as per the Good Friday Agreement, participate in the joint government with Sinn Fein in what will be seen politically as second fiddle following these election results. In any case, the Irish question has already been complicated by the “Northern Ireland Protocol” that was signed into the Brexit withdrawal agreement between the U.K. and the EU. The protocol tackled the knotty question of Northern Ireland being part of the EU’s single market (and therefore to follow the EU’s product standards) by allowing for inspections and checks for products from the rest of the U.K. to be done at Northern Ireland ports instead of the border between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland.
The Northern Ireland Protocol has been anathema for the unionists with the DUP’s First Minister resigning earlier this year. The party has demanded a revocation of the protocol and could use this as a ploy to decide on the question of the formation of the new government. The DUP’s stance would result in a governance void in the province affecting the people in the province.
It is clear that the Brexit issue has complicated the political equations in Northern Ireland as much as it has in Great Britain with newer contradictions emerging to challenge traditional politics in the country.
