Oct. 28 (UPI) — Northern Ireland appears headed for a snap election as soon as mid-December after the Northern Ireland Assembly failed to elect a new speaker on Friday.
Failure to elect a new speaker by the end of Thursday, means the assembly, commonly referred to as the Stormont, will now be mothballed, leaving Northern Ireland without a devolved government.
Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party refused Thursday to appoint a neutral speaker, the fourth straight time it has done so. That ended a 24-week period to form a new unity government.
That news meant all 10 remaining caretaker ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive lost their jobs at midnight. Several issued last-minute decrees before their time in office abruptly ended.
Without an executive, day-to-day governance falls to the senior civil servants in the various ministries and departments.
Britain’s new Northern Ireland secretary Chris Heaton-Harris has said publicly that he would call a snap Stormont election if the DUP continued its stalling tactics. Heaton-Harris is expected to call that election Dec. 15. That would come only seven months after the previous election and pundits have speculated there is little public appetite for it.
“I am extremely disappointed that the Executive has not reformed. The people of Northern Ireland deserve a fully-functioning devolved government,” Heaton-Harris wrote on Twitter in the early hours of Friday morning.
“Today Stormont could be taking decisions to ease the challenges people face. Instead, the legal duty to act falls to me as Secretary of State. I will be providing an update on this.”
The DUP — considered right-wing and linked with Protestant and English identity, was founded in 1971, a year after the left-wing nationalist Sinn Féin — which was originally founded in 1905 — was resurrected.
Northern Ireland’s Stormont reopened in 2020, more than three years after the assembly previously collapsed.
Friday’s news received condemnation from several politicians.
“Sinn Féin stands ready to form a government in the north and to make politics work for everyone, irrespective of their political view,” the party’s president, Mary Lou McDonald said on Thursday.
“This is his mess, and a failure of leadership by him and his party,” said Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s vice president, putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson.
Donaldson said Friday that his party’s mandate was to block the appointment of an assembly speaker and that it did “not believe that sufficient progress has been made.”
The pro-Brexit party wants to overturn rules in place at the Irish Sea Border that puts checks on goods entering the region from Great Britain. It sees failure to overhaul the rules as a non-starter when it comes to resuming a devolved government at the Stormont.
