Keir Starmer, Hilary Benn and Edwin Poots, speaker of the Northern Ireland assembly, at Stormont in 2024. Photograph: Liam McBurney/ReutersView image in fullscreenKeir Starmer, Hilary Benn and Edwin Poots, speaker of the Northern Ireland assembly, at Stormont in 2024. Photograph: Liam McBurney/ReutersAnalysis‘Nobody’s in charge’: is power sharing still working in Northern Ireland?Rory Carroll Ireland correspondentFeuding parties and crumbling public services damaging public’s faith in Stormont, 28 years on from Good Friday agreement
The Good Friday agreement appeared over Northern Ireland like a sunburst – a miracle of political leadership that consigned the Troubles to history.
Signed on 10 April 1998, it ushered in an era of peace that endures and is held up as a model for resolving conflicts around the world. Yet Northern Ireland will mark the agreement’s 28th anniversary on Friday with gloom.
There is gratitude that the shootings and bombings are no more – but also disenchantment – verging on despair – with politics. The Stormont estate outside Belfast that hosts the region’s executive and assembly has become synonymous with dysfunction.
The power-sharing coalition’s principal parties, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist party (DUP), are locked in chronic feuding that has severely hindered legislation and governance, creating a perception of drift and neglect. An opinion poll in January found that only one in four people believed the devolved government had improved their lives.
“There is nobody really in charge. There is no strategy. Nobody’s taking even a medium-term sense of control or direction,” said Claire Hanna, an MP and leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP), which is in opposition.
The health service is in crisis, with emergency services severely overstretched and patients enduring some of the UK’s longest waiting times. Roads are crumbling and water infrastructure is nearing collapse, which impedes housing construction. Meanwhile, pollution has turned Lough Neagh, which supplies 40% of drinking water, into a fetid lake plagued by antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
Andrew Muir, the environment minister, said the Good Friday agreement had been a historic achievement, but almost three decades later, Stormont was struggling to deliver practical benefits. “The challenges that I have faced as minister perhaps demonstrate very clearly the need for reform of those institutions,” he said.
Muir, of the centrist Alliance party, said power-sharing framework enabled parties to block previously agreed policies, such as the establishment of an independent Environmental Protection Agency. “Far too often the institutions as they’re designed incentivise and enable crisis and collapse and deadlock and delay rather than collaboration and consensus,” he said,
Two years ago, Stormont enjoyed a brief glow of goodwill. After repeated collapses – during which the DUP and Sinn Féin took turns boycotting power-sharing, leaving Stormont in mothballs – devolved government was reinstated in February 2024.
View image in fullscreenFrom left: Michelle O’Neill, Keir Starmer, Emma Little-Pengelly and the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, in Belfast last month. Photograph: Mark Marlow/PAThe elevation of Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill as the first nationalist first minister imbued the occasion with a sense of history. She hailed a new dawn. “The public rightly demands that we cooperate, deliver and work together.”
Emma Little-Pengelly, the DUP’s deputy first minister – a post with equal power but less prestige – struck the same conciliatory note. “There can be no dominating from one to the other, but a new approach of recognising the concerns of each other and finding solutions together.”
But relations between the two big parties – which govern in coalition with Alliance and the Ulster Unionist party (UUP) – soured. Ministers have feuded over job titles, the Irish language, commemorations and street signs, while assembly members have grandstanded over trivia while passing just 12 bills, most of which were housekeeping.
The assembly speaker, Edwin Poots, lamented that members were delivering pre-scripted remarks to use as social media clips. He drew criticism for taking an all-expenses paid trip to Barbados while the assembly was in session.
Read moreAssembly members drew further scorn by approving a pay rise that, from this month, will increase their annual salaries from £53,000 to £67,200. “We have a talking shop that fails at basic governance,” wrote Suzanne Breen, a Belfast Telegraph columnist. “Political failure is being rewarded, and it’s a kick in the teeth to voters of all hues.”
Malachi O’Doherty, the author of How to Fix Northern Ireland, said the core problem was that about 80% of voters voted along tribal lines. “What we’ve got is a political system which is constructed around basically a sectarian contest. No political party gets penalised for poor performance.”
O’Doherty said the 2006 St Andrews agreement, which tweaked Stormont’s rules, had compounded the problem by sharpening competition between Sinn Féin and the DUP and squeezing more moderate nationalist and unionist alternatives. He predicted that the next assembly election in 2027 would again be dominated by the Sinn Féin-DUP battle for first minister. “It’s all identity politics, everything else is peripheral.”
Analysts say the DUP has picked fights with Sinn Féin to rally its base and counter challenges from rival unionists. Such friction can also benefit Sinn Féin, by rallying nationalist voters. Neither party responded to a request for comment.
O’Doherty said there was no longer a need to force the two parties into a loveless marriage, and that a majority system would allow them to alternate in power with the support of centrist parties that would have a moderating influence.
Muir, the environment minister, said power-sharing was still needed but must be reformed so that no single party could block proposals or collapse institutions – especially those that disputed science. “There should be no place for people to use vetoes around measures that are designed to protect our environment.”
The SDLP has proposed three changes: remove the symbolic hierarchy of the first and deputy first minister titles by terming them joint first ministers; tweak voting rules for the assembly speaker; drop the single party veto on executive formation. “Power-sharing can work,” said Hanna. “It’s how parties are choosing to operate it.”
Some think the gloom is overdone. Paul Bew, a historian and cross-party peer who played an advisory role in the Good Friday agreement, said Stormont ought to be doing “a bit better” but what mattered was the enduring framework for historic compromise.
“The real point is peace, and community psychotherapy. Psychotherapy in Northern Ireland doesn’t mean that you look at your own faults, it means being rude to the other tradition. I never thought that – given the nature of the people, the divisions – it could be any better.”
For all its faults, Stormont was no failure, Bew said. “It’s working, because the peace has held.”
