The “Shared Island” section in the new programme for government is not quite the cut-and-paste from 2020 that some critics have alleged.
It has an odd set of differences from the previous programme in 2020. That document contained a list of initiatives to improve British-Irish relations, beginning with a promise to “enhance the role of the British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference”.
These are the east-west institutions of the Belfast Agreement, with the conference being its primary body, through which London and Dublin are meant to oversee all three strands of the agreement – east-west, north-south and internal to Northern Ireland.
Listed beneath this in 2020 were other pledges to “develop structures”, “deepen relationships” and “prioritise bilateral engagements” between British and Irish heads of government, ministers and officials, covering “all sectors” and including the devolved administrations of Scotland and Wales.
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This looked like reinventing the wheel, or padding out the programme with repetitive waffle. The conference and council are the structures for most of the engagement listed. You cannot enhance their role while duplicating them.
Remarkably, the new programme resolves this by dropping mention of the Belfast Agreement institutions while keeping everything else.
There is a fresh pledge to “establish new arrangements ... encouraging co-operation across all aspects of our partnership”.
There will be “annual summits between the two Heads of Government, providing a platform to review joint efforts and deepen co-operation”.
The east-west strand is dead. Long live the east-west strand.
It is a similar story with the North-South Ministerial Council, the Belfast Agreement’s only All-Ireland institution. The 2020 programme mentioned the council prominently and promised it would resume with a full high-level meeting – it had collapsed along with Stormont for the preceding three years.The new programme omits the council from its long list of cross-Border initiatives – a striking exclusion from a document on a shared island.
In fact, the only reference to any of the agreement’s east-west and north-south institutions is a paragraph in the Tánaiste’s job description, copied from 2020, noting he may attend in lieu of the Taoiseach.
The strangest change in the new programme is a promise to “advocate for the re-establishment and full operation of a Northern Ireland Civic Forum as envisaged in the Good Friday [Belfast] Agreement”. There was no mention of this in 2020, nor is it an issue in Northern Ireland.
The forum was a 60-member sectoral talking shop that Sinn Féin and the DUP decided not to resurrect when they restored devolution under the 2006 St Andrews Agreement. They replaced it with a six-person panel, launched under the 2015 Fresh Start Agreement and reaffirmed in 2020’s New Decade, New Approach. The Irish government was a participant in both deals.
Although the panel has never got off the ground, that is where advocacy should be focused. Some group presumably lobbied for the forum’s return and the government has casually obliged. What all this means is that the Belfast Agreement’s architecture is dying of disinterest. Its elaborate balance of three sets of relationships is too contrived to be necessary under most normal circumstances, and normality is winning out.
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Within each strand, institutions have withered through apathy or been surpassed by events. British-Irish relations are wider than the remit of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, while Brexit has broadened the scope of Northern Ireland issues. The conference did not meet for over a decade after St Andrews and repeated attempts to revive it since 2018 have lost momentum. Now it has a rival in the British-Irish annual summits launched last year and mentioned in the new programme for government.
The North-South Ministerial Council was nationalism’s hope for expanding All-Ireland co-operation. It was designed to gain functions, yet it has not grown in a quarter of a century. No unionist obstruction was required; lack of drive from others proved impediment enough. The shared island initiative now has the appearance of bypassing it.
For most people, Stormont is the agreement’s defining institution. Nationalists were initially concerned about this dominance of the internal Northern Ireland strand, while unionists were concerned Dublin would interfere with it. Everyone is evidently less concerned today. Otherwise, there would have been more complaints about Dublin’s strange mention of the civic forum and fiddling with North-South arrangements.
If this all seems fantastically arcane, that is the point. There was a time when many people would have been exercised by it and governments in Dublin would have weighed up every word.
There are worse fates for the agreement than fading into irrelevance, but it would be dangerous not to acknowledge this is happening. Both governments are meant to hold occasional major reviews of the entire system. They have never done so; all such effort has been devoted to resolving crises at Stormont. A more measured look over everything is long overdue.
