OPINION:Northern Ireland will have a justice minister next month – but with the PSNI chief constable retaining operational independence, writes GERRY MORIARTY
FINALLY, FINALLY . . . The vote took place. The deal was done. Another milestone was passed.
Northern Ireland will have a Department of Justice and a Justice Minister on April 12th – that is, taking it as a given (which can be dangerous, but still . . . ) that Northern politicians do not somehow manage to conjure defeat from victory between now and then. Or barring unpredictable events that it’s best not to even contemplate.
Hillary Clinton and George W Bush and Shaun Woodward and Brian Cowen and Gordon Brown can rest easier in their beds.
There is a temptation to be dismissive about how difficult it was to get to this point over the past couple of weeks because of the DUP-UUP brinkmanship clash, but yesterday was important. A huge political hurdle has been surmounted. There will be many more obstacles ahead but they should not be as forbidding. There was first powersharing, then decommissioning, then policing and now – the last of the big ones – policing and justice.
The Ulster Unionists tried to wreck the policing and justice agreement by unnerving the Democratic Unionists but, in the end, DUP leader and First Minister Peter Robinson was able to lead his troops through the Yes lobby shortly before 5pm yesterday. The only DUP MLA absent was hardliner the Rev William McCrea. He was excused because he was at a funeral. How Irish, although Willie wouldn’t like that description. His son Ian voted Yes.
Robinson, in managing to keep his party so united, appears to be regaining some political sure-footedness. Just over a week ago his deputy, Nigel Dodds, warned that without the UUP the DUP could not support the transfer of powers. But since then contact with the unionist base allied to a poll by Robinson and Martin McGuinness convinced the First Minister he – and not the Ulster Unionists – had read the unionist public correctly.
Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey used a Belfastism yesterday when referring to all the political scuffling, manoeuvring and posturing leading up to yesterday’s Assembly vote. He asked if the UUP Ministers, its leader Sir Reg Empey and Michael McGimpsey, saw themselves as “two tubes” within the Northern Executive.
For “tubes” read incompetents. The Ulster Unionists were claiming that justice should not be devolved because the Executive was too “dysfunctional” to run a justice department. But turning the argument back against them, Maskey wondered why weren’t the two UUP Ministers making a better fist of creating a fit-for-purpose Executive.
There is no doubt that the Executive has been ineffectual in many ways, and Maskey’s party in the Executive and the DUP and the SDLP must also accept their share of the blame for that ineptitude.
But at least in virtually completing devolution yesterday, the Assembly and the Executive are now in a position to look forward and move forward.
This issue could have wrecked the powersharing Executive. Sinn Féin was prepared to walk away from Stormont and leave it to London and Dublin to pick up the pieces with a greener form of direct rule if there were no transfer of justice powers.
And again, while we have to be careful about taking anything up here as a given, the other outstanding issues such as the rows over education, the Irish language and North-South co-operation surely should not be sufficient to derail the Stormont institutions.
The political and sectarian divisions and enmities within the Executive and Assembly will not disappear but the problems that remain should at least be manageable.
Alliance Party leader David Ford, when appointed Minister of Justice (another “given”) on April 12th, will be in charge of administering policing and justice, but with the important caveat that the PSNI chief constable will have operational independence and, as the Hillsborough Castle Agreement dictates, judicial functions will remain “independent of government and immune from any partisan or political interest”.
Achieving this devolution was crucial to Sinn Féin: it allows Gerry Adams, McGuinness, et al to tell republicans and nationalists, including any who might be minded to switch allegiance to the dissidents, that more power has been ceded from Westminster. But not all power. A number of matters will be reserved for Westminster such as the operations of MI5 and the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency.
The UUP’s McGimpsey tried to stir it yesterday by querying what Sinn Féin would do if the chief constable felt the need to bring in the British army to deal with some major dissident action, disturbance or other threat. Again, as Robinson and several others responded, calling in the British army would be an operational matter for the chief constable.
Several reasons are touted as to why the UUP voted against the transfer of policing and justice powers. The major one is that it was a question of getting revenge for all the grief that Ian Paisley and Robinson subjected them to when David Trimble was first minister and the Ulster Unionists were the lead unionist party.
Empey justified his opposition to devolving policing and justice “at this stage”, but one wondered if he was totally committed to the strategy or if some of his colleagues with this visceral antipathy to the DUP had forced him to take that line.
It is all at odds with his Tory partners in the UCUNF (Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force) who support this devolution. It will be a difficult position to argue on the doorsteps come the British general election expected in May.
There was a certain cack-handed nature to the attempts to persuade Empey and the Ulster Unionists back aboard the political process ship. Overtures from Clinton and Bush, as well as a rather loaded Northern Ireland Office survey, were counter-productive.
But while all of this unionist infighting might have failed to register with people in the South, the UUP rebellion certainly gained them headlines and airtime up here. Perhaps the Ulster Unionists will feel they are now more relevant and that this will give them a lift in the Westminster election.
The danger, however, as Alliance’s Naomi Long pointed out in the Assembly chamber, is that, in differentiating themselves from the DUP, the Ulster Unionists could be equating themselves with Jim Allister’s anti-agreement, anti-powersharing Traditional Unionist Voice party.
Gerry Moriarty is Northern Editor