'New era' starts in Northern Ireland with Sinn Fein victory

By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal

LONDON (AA) - A "new era" has started in Northern Ireland with a historic election victory of Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party once referred to as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

In last Thursday’s election, Sinn Fein won most of the seats in the 90-seat local parliament, otherwise known as the Assembly or Stormont, for the first time since the foundation of Northern Ireland as a state in 1921.

The nationalist party won 27 of the 90 seats and the DUP won 24 according to results as of Saturday evening, with the results of two more seats pending.

The party’s victory means the end of the rule of the Royalist Protestants who forever want to be part of the UK, unlike Sinn Fein, the representatives of Irish Catholics who would like to see their country unified with the Republic of Ireland.

“This has been an historic election,” Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Fein’s vice president, said in her victory speech on Saturday.

Hailing “an election of real change,” she signaled a change for the country, which may now fast head to unification with the Republic of Ireland.

On Twitter, O’Neill wrote that “a new era begins” in response to a congratulatory message from Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has had ideas of her own of separating her country from the UK after Brexit and came out victorious, too, in the recent elections.

However, unlike the Scottish bid for a second independence referendum, which requires approval from Westminster, a public vote in Northern Ireland on merging the two Irelands is guaranteed by the internationally-signed Belfast Agreement.

- New Executive

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who saw his Conservative Party vote share drop sharply across England, Scotland, and Wales, congratulated all the winners in Northern Ireland and urged them to work together to form a new devolved government.

“Over the coming days I will be meeting with all the party leaders and will urge them to restore the Stormont institutions at the earliest possible moment, starting with the nomination of an Assembly Speaker within 8 days,” he said in a statement.

"A new power-sharing Executive is vital for progress and prosperity for all in Northern Ireland," said Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin, also urging Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to work together to form a new government.

Both premiers underlined their commitments to the 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement as co-guarantors of the deal, which ended the Troubles, the decades-long era of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

However, the DUP has yet to announce that they will nominate a deputy first minister who would work alongside O’Neill.

According to a unique arrangement based on the Good Friday Agreement, the first minister and deputy first minister must be nominated and work together with equal powers. But if the DUP does not nominate a deputy, Sinn Fein will not be able to form a new Executive.

- What lies ahead?

When and if the new Executive is formed without any delays, the first bump on the road will be the Northern Ireland Protocol, a deal signed between the UK and EU as an addendum to the EU Withdrawal Agreement.

The DUP and the central UK government argue that the protocol creates a customs border for British goods and separates Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK and so have demanded that the EU renegotiate the terms.

The British government has threatened EU officials with scrapping the protocol in the absence of real change. The DUP has said until the election that they would not take part in an Executive without a change in the protocol.

Whether Sinn Fein will concede to discuss the protocol with the DUP to form an Executive or the DUP will kick the ball in the long grass, for now, remains to be seen in the coming days and weeks.

A second thorny issue will definitely be the Irish unity. That would mean the unification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, a prospect the protestant unionist would firmly reject.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald recently said the prep work for referenda on both sides of the border should start and such votes can be held by the end of the decade.

However, despite a guarantee in the Good Friday agreement and the nationalists now becoming the biggest party in Northern Ireland, this issue will probably be left alone for the time being.

The new Executive will probably start by dealing with the country’s most pressing problems, including the cost of living crisis, which is becoming a big problem across the UK.