Alliance goes for 'short-term fix' as scorn heaped on redesignation Lasting damage, possibly irreversible, could be done to a central tenet of the Belfast Agreement
Irish Times - 5th November 2001
Frank Millar, London Editor
It was not by accident that the Belfast Agreement was rooted in the principle of dual consent by the unionist and nationalist communities in Northern Ireland, or provided that that rule should apply above all to the election of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in the new Stormont.It was by all accounts the SDLP's Mark Durkan and Seamus Mallon who insisted upon it in the Strand One negotiations, only finally concluded in the early hours of that historic morning in April 1998. Some of those involved recall Mr Mallon's determination that this basic principle - that the First and Deputy First Ministers should command a majority of both sides - was the one the people would most easily and readily understand.
In simple terms, it gave the SDLP the assurance (at least at that point) that there would be no outcome of which it did not approve. It also seemed to offer unionists a guarantee that they would never have to revisit their 1974 nightmare, in which a minority of unionists might seek to sustain an Executive against the wishes of a majority of the pro-Union population.
Elsewhere, the agreement would provide for alternative forms of voting, allowing decision-making by simple majority or, in respect of certain key matters, by way of a weighted 60 per cent majority comprising at least 40 per cent of unionists and nationalists.
These variations might be reasoned now to be anomalous. Indeed, British sources have argued precisely that in the last 24 hours, depicting the conclusion of the 1998 negotiation in this regard as almost accidental, a detail which might really have been finessed in a number of different ways. It is true that much in the final stages was completed in something of a fuss and a panic.
However, this was not an accident. On the most fundamental issue of all - the leadership of the power-sharing government - the SDLP prevailed, and the dual consent principle was entrenched in British law.
Last Friday at Stormont, the consent of the unionist community, reflected by the votes of its elected representatives, was formally withdrawn, yet this unwelcome and unhelpful new fact of political life is to be simply disregarded.
No matter that the majority unionist No to Mr Trimble's restoration as First Minister makes real the long-threatened crisis of democracy at the heart of the agreement. Courtesy of a deal with the Alliance Party, the power-sharing administration is set to continue with Mr Trimble's unionists as minority shareholders.
Determinedly non-sectarian and non-tribal, Alliance members are to redesignate themselves as unionists for the purpose of reversing Friday's result. The distaste many unionists will feel at this spectacle is matched only by the rising revulsion inside the Alliance Party itself. Its leader, Mr David Ford, was quoted yesterday as saying: "I think many of us would find it difficult to stomach being either a unionist or a nationalist for more than 24 hours."
It was also Mr Ford who volunteered the essential context.
What he was talking about, he told BBC Radio 4, was "a short-term fix". Heaping scorn on Alliance, one nationalist sympathiser privately described the manoeuvre as "anti-democratic" and "a fundamental breach of the agreement". Plainly, however, what works is what matters.
Pragmatism rules, and probably a good thing, too, in the minds of the majority throughout these islands who want the agreement to work and cannot for the life of them comprehend how two Ulster Unionist "mavericks" could threaten its very survival.
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