Those who vote for dinosaurs are doomed to live in the past

MICHAEL WOLSEY

INSANITY has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

The people of Northern Ireland have been behaving in this mad way for the past 25 years.

They elect politicians who have no interest in sharing power and are surprised when they fail to form a powersharing executive.

They elect politicians because of their stance on flags, parades and peace walls, then complain that they don’t concentrate on bread and butter issues.

They elect Sinn Féiners who say their first aim is to secure a referendum on Irish unity and are baffled by the DUP’s reluctance to join them at the Cabinet table.

They elect the white, misogynistic evangelists who run the DUP and are puzzled when these men oppose moves to liberalise abortion laws or extend LGBT rights.

Sow the wind and you’ll reap the whirlwind. Although whirlwind is hardly an appropriate term for the plodding politics of Northern Ireland.

Elect dinosaurs and you’ll live in the past, would be a better metaphor. The northern parties that get the most votes are the two least likely to work together and those who vote for them cannot honestly say they favour power-sharing. Pointscoring and triumphalism are their first priorities, not good government. No other democracy indulges the whims of its electorate in this way. Parties that prioritise ideology above practicality rarely make it to the Cabinet room in Dublin or any other European capital. Britain’s Conservative Party tried it when they picked Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to run the country. Their free-market theories sent the Pound into freefall and hiked the cost of government borrowing.

Tory members liked the noises this pair made but the financial world didn’t and British voters soon got the message.

They made it clear that they would not support an ideology that endangered their pension funds and pushed up the price of their mortgages.

Voters in Northern Ireland don’t have to make that sort of calculation.

The politicians they elect have squandered the potential of the Good Friday Agreement.

They get away with it because someone (usually the British taxpayer) always picks up the tab.

The lack of a government at Stormont has caused difficulty for many services that find themselves under-funded and under-staffed but, ultimately, the Westminster government will not let the place go down the tubes and everybody knows it.

Per head, Northern Ireland is being subsidised more heavily than any region of Britain.

#But it hasn’t many heads and the cost is only a tiny fraction of total UK spending.

So unless the peace process itself is endangered – and so far, thankfully, there has been no serious threat of that – northern voters and the people they elect can continue to play games and Britain will continue to foot the bill. It shouldn’t be like that and it needn’t be like that. There are many good politicians in the North who are willing to shoulder their responsibilities and make Stormont power-sharing work but it won’t happen so long as other politicians can ignore their responsibilities and suffer no consequences.

The British government needs to abandon the d’Hondt system which forces Stormont parties to declare themselves nationalist or unionist and allocates ministries on that basis.

It should let the parties and politicians who are willing to form a government do so on no other basis than that they can get legislation through the house.

Let those who don’t like it go into opposition or stay growling on the sidelines.

Our own Government should back Westminster in this move.

D’Hondt was deemed necessary 25 years ago to prevent unionist (or nationalist) parties ganging up and excluding the other side. There is little danger of that now and it is a risk worth taking.

The failure of d’Hondt-style power-sharing is forcing the British government to once again consider direct rule from London, but this time with a high input from Dublin.

Irish governments will be wary of this controversial strategy which requires an open-ended commitment.

But they cannot continue to support the insanity of endlessly repeating the same actions and expecting a different result.