In a desperate political position, there are not many triumphs that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can celebrate. One of them - although probably of little electoral return - is the resumption of the Northern Irish autonomous institutions after a period of two years, this time with the Republican Michelle O'Neill at the head of the Executive.
That is why Sunak traveled to Belfast this Monday to meet with the province's new chief minister, leaders of all parties and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who traveled from Dublin for the occasion. His message was that the new Government and the new Assembly must dedicate all their energies to everyday problems - the economy, deterioration of public services, lack of housing - and not to the question of the reunification of the island and the existence or not of a border. “What matters to people now,” he said, “is not the constitutional change but the day to day.”
Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, all British governments - Labor and Conservative - have accepted that the position of chief minister of Ulster be held by either a Protestant or a Catholic, depending on the outcome of the election. This despite the fact that the province was conceived in 1921 as a stronghold for the unionists of Ireland, who already before the civil war constituted an important community with its own national identity (different from the English, Scottish or Welsh), and a loyal more directed at the British Empire than at Great Britain.
That the nationalists could take over the main position in the Executive is something that the conservatives accepted in the agreements of a quarter of a century ago, despite the terrorism of the IRA, which in 1984 planted a bomb in the hotel where Margaret Thatcher was staying in Brighton, of the murder of Lord Mountbatten (godfather of King Charles III) and that his campaign of violence was aimed at separating Ulster from the Crown. And of course Sinn Féin, Michelle O'Neill's party, was the political arm of the gang.
Another concession from London, in exchange for the republican paramilitaries' farewell to arms and their participation in the police, was a kind of co-government with Dublin and the promise of a reunification referendum "when it appears that the majority of Northern Irish want it." , a circumstance that at the moment, according to surveys, has not yet occurred, despite the fact that demographic changes favor Catholics. Youth, however, are becoming less politicized and are less interested in religion and more interested in prosperity.
All the Northern Irish parties took the opportunity to ask Sunak for more money, but the tensions did not occur between the British Prime Minister and Sinn Féin, but between him and his Irish counterpart Leo Varadkar (there was no joint press conference, something unusual). Dublin has sued the United Kingdom before the European Court of Human Rights over the amnesty law for British soldiers accused of crimes during the Troubles, and views Brexit resentfully as a threat to the island's stability.
