BELFAST — The great and the good came from London, Dublin and Brussels. From Washington and Florida, New York and Maine too. If their mission was to convince the Democratic Unionist Party to go back into regional government in Northern Ireland, they failed — for now.
The official reason for this week’s star-studded political gathering in Belfast — concluding Wednesday with appearances from an ex-U.S. president, multiple past and present British prime ministers, plus EU royalty in the form of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — is to reflect on the Good Friday Agreement peace deal a quarter-century ago.
But today’s realpolitik means finding a way to restore the 1998 peace pact’s core aim — stable government in Northern Ireland, uniting the region’s British unionists and Irish nationalists — following years of feuding and failure.
The power of veto is currently wielded by the Democratic Unionists, the party that long opposed the 1998 deal and keeps finding new post-Brexit reasons to avoid resuming their awkward coalition with the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin.
Those few DUP politicians braving this week’s Good Friday Agreement love-fest cut lonely figures among the Queen’s University Belfast crowds.
Most onlookers instead craned for photos with the political leaders who helped make 1998 a success: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and, perhaps most of all, George Mitchell, the former U.S. Senate majority leader now afforded Belfast sainthood for his patient stewardship of the Good Friday talks.
Each in turn used their platform to take veiled shots at the DUP, while treating it — for diplomatic reasons — as The Party That Must Not Be Named.
Making his first public speech in three years, the 89-year-old Mitchell opened the Queen’s conference Monday with a humble but eloquent 45-minute speech that underlined all that went right in 1998 — but could yet go wrong again.
Without naming the DUP, Mitchell warned against the “100 percenters” in all parties who “want everything their way, all the time. To them, any compromise is weakness. But I say to you that reasoned, principled compromise is essential, especially in divided societies.”
The U.K.’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, and Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin doubled down on that message when they appeared together on stage.
“Real leaders know when to say yes,” said Heaton-Harris, who called the DUP’s obstruction of power-sharing at Stormont “the single biggest threat to Northern Ireland’s place in the union.”
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson swiftly shot back on social media, accusing Heaton-Harris of sounding like “a clueless Irish-American politician” and vowing he would “not be browbeaten into submission.”
But the messages came thick and fast. Blair demanded a solution “that allows the government here to get functioning again.” Hillary Clinton said restoring power to Stormont must be “the first order of business.”
And the pressure on the DUP will continue Wednesday when U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, von der Leyen and other star guests fly in to close the event. Sunak warned in remarks released overnight that all sides “have work to do” to deliver the “integrated society” promised by the Good Friday Agreement. Sunak will host his own celebratory bash at Hillsborough Castle that evening, alongside several of his predecessors including Blair, Boris Johnson and Theresa May.
Eyes on the future
Over coffee and biscuits at tables dotted around the Queen’s campus, politicians and backroom operators from other major Northern Ireland parties speculated on the future of local politics if the DUP keeps saying no to power-sharing.
“We can’t let the Good Friday Agreement wither on the vine. It will be death by a thousand cuts,” said Naomi Long, whose cross-community Alliance Party came a strong third in last year’s Northern Ireland Assembly vote.
She noted that in the national referendum that followed the 1998 peace agreement, the DUP and nearly 29 percent of Northern Irish voters rejected the hard-fought deal.
“There has never been total consensus, not for the Good Friday Agreement and not for any agreement since. You should just need sufficient consensus,” she told POLITICO, arguing that the current rules giving both Sinn Féin and DUP vetoes over government formation should be dumped.
Sinn Féin and its moderate rival for Irish nationalist votes, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, say they’re open to Alliance’s reform calls — but only after the DUP ends its current boycott of Stormont.
“We can’t give up on the DUP,” said Gerry Adams, who led Sinn Féin from 1983 to 2018 and still casts a long shadow over party thinking. “In fairness to them, the real problem lies in London. This Tory government have no real investment in this process or the Good Friday Agreement. The first step here is to get the institutions back in place.”
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who went off campus to meet Donaldson and his closest party lieutenants — Emma Little-Pengelly, Gordon Lyons and Gavin Robinson — said afterward he was more optimistic that the DUP would end its blockade on power-sharing relatively soon.
“I expect that, in the not-too-distant future, the barriers to bringing up the government again will be removed,” said Clinton, who then traveled to Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, Londonderry (also known as Derry), to speak in the same city hall where he delivered the most rapturously received speech of his 1995 visit — the first by any sitting U.S. president to Northern Ireland.
Election fever
But the current stasis has already lasted a year and shows no signs of an immediate end, with election posters now going up all over Belfast for May 18 council elections in which the DUP sees its hardline stance as essential to securing its core vote.
The DUP’s Little-Pengelly was a lone refusenik in a panel discussion among the leaders of Northern Ireland’s five largest political parties. The rest want a government formed immediately based on the outcome of the May 2022 assembly election.
In that vote, Sinn Féin overtook the DUP for the first time, giving the Irish republicans the right to the top post of first minister. Even moderate unionists say it is now their right to lead a new government.
“Sinn Féin became the largest party. If they are not allowed to take their place and if we’re not allowed to get a government up and running now, then we really are trampling all over democracy here in Northern Ireland,” Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie said to thunderous applause from the overwhelmingly pro-agreement crowd.
Little-Pengelly stood her ground, insisting her party wants lasting peace and power-sharing too — but not at the price of post-Brexit rules that make it easier for Northern Ireland to trade with the rest of Ireland than with neighboring Britain.
Her party has yet to accept the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework deal that will reduce, but not eliminate, EU checks on British goods arriving at Northern Irish ports — and is unlikely to do so at least until the May local elections are out of the way.
“The reality is, sometimes, as hard as it may be, it is the right thing to say ‘no,’” said Little-Pengelly — to total silence from the hall.
A party long famed for its stubbornness is not ready to cede ground just yet.