Although Sinn Féin has suffered setbacks in the powersharing project, it knows it's in politics for the long haul, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR.
COMING UP, an election. The Stormont conjured up by a peace process produces old-fashioned slugging matches on television. But a lot of the old bitterness has been replaced by, whisper it, something akin to boredom – as in normal societies. The DUP and Sinn Féin loom over their respective electorates: neither gets what it wants. They arm-wrestle issue after issue and nobody wins, leaving access to secondary education in a spin and a decent sports stadium beyond reach.
Will an election this summer put either or both in a lasting good mood? For the moment at any rate, a Westminster election is not in sight. The next council elections have been postponed until 2011, probably until the day that voters decide who should troop into Stormont again. But this June the electorate may choose three Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Will they turn out with any enthusiasm? Euro elections may not set anywhere else alight. In the North, like every other voting exercise, they have always had built-in magic. Northern Ireland used to love an election. A gauge of who stands where in the ancient quarrel, who’s up, how far the other is down, the vote has always been parsed and weighed by pundits across bar counters and in living-rooms with scholarship and angry passion.
The most fascinating contests have always been internal needle matches, struggles for the separate souls of unionism and nationalism.
Now that neither is what it was, the struggle is less intriguing. Neither the SDLP nor Ulster Unionists will be back in contention any time soon, or so it seems.
Yet the kingpins look rattled. The DUP behave as if the isolated figure of Jim Allister, elected MEP on the party ticket but now their enemy, is about to develop a mass following. Sinn Féin’s wide triumphalist streak is invisible. What their followers see and hear is the limits of powersharing, dominant unionists who have no concept of a need for civility, much less conciliation. This week DUP Minister Gregory Campbell said No and the mirage evaporated of a shared sports stadium on the site of the Maze prison, leaving the merest wisp of the idea of an H Blocks museum. Last week it was goodbye to radical replacement of the 11-plus exam, Sinn Féin Minister Caitríona Ruane blocked and tackled into ill-temper and ineffectualness.
These past months a DUP chorus of “nya nya” has welled up again, very much as in the period when a diminished Ian Paisley snr left the stage and his successor either failed to stop, perhaps even encouraged, an outbreak of provocation.
The message then was that devolution of control over policing and justice could wait until the DUP were good and ready, which might be never. That produced the Sinn Féin tactic of blocking all Executive decisions, hardly the reassurance to their own electorate that they might have liked.
Then to break the logjam there came an agreement, of sorts, a “route map” towards devolving police and justice. But not, apparently, any kind of agreement on the Maze, or the 11-plus. Never mind the question of how to provide houses for the Catholics who make up the bulk of north Belfast’s waiting list. Unionists oppose house-building on the most promising stretch of land on the grounds that it would then be seen as Catholic. But few if any Protestants want to live there, so it looks as if there may be no houses. What does that do to the hearts and minds of Sinn Féin voters in overcrowded New Lodge and the Bone?
No surprise that according to records the DUP are by far the most assiduous attenders at Stormont committees. A sign of the times that Sinn Féin attendance is not good, nor that of the SDLP? How long ago it seems that Sinn Féin plunged into politics with the zeal of converts, young and not so young election workers trekking around doorsteps with their clipboards for hours at a stretch, with the fervour that bomb-makers and snipers showed for the organisation’s earlier priorities. As the June election draws closer, will the political machine regain its power? The 32 county “project” is more off the rails than stalled – is this as good as it gets? Ears ringing with DUP jeers, many might be disposed to see horrible similarity to the situation painted by dissident republican taunts that Sinn Féin’s fate is to be junior partner in the daily administration of a British Northern Ireland.
And yet this is pre-election mode. DUP triumphalism is geared to drown out Jim Allister’s accusations that they are soft on republican terror, in cahoots with Martin McGuinness. A party afraid of Allister, the man whose bandwagon never arrived, surely cannot intimidate people who marched away from guns and bombs. Sinn Féiners enjoyed the applause, but politics is a switchback. Time now for the long haul.