31
votes
Northern Ireland elects Irish nationalist First Minister Michelle O'Neill
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- Title
- Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill elected first ever nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland
- Published
- Feb 4 2024
- Word count
- 5356 words
Behold, the reason why the DUP kept up their tantrum for so long and basically ensured would happen by doing so. For US readers, imagine if a state party threatened to shut down the government, actually did so, and kept it up for so long the only new laws for over half a decade were Federal ones. Imagine what would happen to that party, once the Fed forced them back to work.
This was so easy to imagine I had to check if it had actually happened in the US. Anyway, do you think this signals a broader shift in the electorate towards supporting Irish nationalism (is this functionally the same as supporting reunification?), or is this more a backlash against DUP? That is, do you think among the average voter support has grown for reunification? In case it wasn't clear I am pretty ignorant of Northern Irish politics.
Yes, yes, and yes. There has been a steady swing towards unification with the ROI (Republic of Ireland, the other half of the island), and the Tories in the UK in supporting Brexit wrote off NI.
Supporting both required simultaneously having a land border with the EU (meaning customs checks to prevent products that aren't up to snuff from getting into the EU, or evading taxes), and also not having any kind of border with Northern Ireland, (because the right to travel freely between them was a huge part of the peace deal that, essentially, treats everyone in NI as both UK and Irish citizens at the same time). Violating that deal would absolutely mean a return to terrorism, and the first target is going to be that border. Caught between the popular vote of the day and lasting peace in Northern Ireland, the Tories made the obvious choice and sacrificed ties to NI, suggesting it could be an EU zone inside the UK for trading purposes and putting the customs border in the sea between Britain and the island of Ireland instead. This completely contradicted their promise that Northern Ireland was 100% part the UK, especially as the DUP also supported Brexit and wanted to leave too.
When this became clear to the DUP, who to be clear are a bunch of evangelical Protestants (see their stances on LGBT rights (see "Save Ulster from Sodomy" campaign), abortion, Creationism in schools, all things the ROI has gotten rid of), they took the only action available to them to avoid losing more power, namely stopping government from working entirely until circumstances were more favourable.
As you can see, it didn't work at all.
Could you elaborate on why NI needs so much financial support? Police/defense funding I can understand, but I get the feeling that’s not the entire issue.