Soapbox: Why Northern Ireland’s leaders should take the unrest rocking the Middle East as a warning

Dan Haverty is a Washington-based journalist. He holds an MA in International Relations from University College Cork, where he spent two years conducting research on the peace process in Northern Ireland and has bylines in History Ireland (upcoming) and the Irish Echo.

It’s been a turbulent few weeks. Anti-government protests erupted across Latin America, forcing the resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales, and pushing Chilean President Sebastián Piñera to implement widespread reform. In the Middle East, protests against fuel hikes are shaking Iran to its core, anti-government demonstrations in Lebanon brought down the administration of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and in Iraq, Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi’s rule looks increasingly precarious.

It is these last two cases that are of particular importance to Northern Ireland because of the striking similarities between the fundamental structures of their societies, and between the grievances, protesters are pushing forward.

In Lebanon, protesters are demonstrating against a rigidly sectarian governing system that was instituted in the aftermath of the civil war, rewarding Christian, Shiite, and Sunni elites but leaving little space for nonsectarian interests. Similarly in Iraq, protesters are demanding change to a government that is constrained by competing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish factions, where those seeking a politics that transcends those divides are largely left out.

These types of systems can function when there is minimal external pressure, but in an era of extreme economic uncertainty and protracted regional conflict, the public demanded responsive, efficient governance. Instead, they got inadequate social services, bloated bureaucracies, and leaders who focus more on their narrow sectarian rivalries than the immediate needs of the people they serve. This will sound depressingly familiar to the people of Northern Ireland

One should be cautious about essentializing issues (and especially responses to those issues) in one place and using them to gauge attitudes in another. Outbreaks of public unrest are always multifactorial and much of a single population’s behaviour can be discerned by its unique historical and cultural experience. And, of course, the conditions that breed unrest in one place do not necessarily make unrest inevitable elsewhere.

Still, it is clear that the events unfolding in the Middle East are part of a global trend, and national actors are very often influenced and inspired by world events. Such a tradition has existed in Ireland since at least the late 18th century. For that reason, Northern Ireland’s political leaders should take the unrest rocking the Middle East as a warning, because the fundamental issues over which protesters are taking to the streets in Iraq and Lebanon are the same ones fuelling an underlying sense of discontent in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland has been without its devolved government for more than 1,000 days. The Executive collapsed in January 2017 after Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigned over a botched heating initiative. Gaps between the positions of Sinn Féin and the DUP proved unbridgeable, preventing its restoration after the Assembly elections in March of that year.

Negotiations trudged along through the months that followed. At times it seemed like there was simply no path to an agreement, while at others it looked like a deal was imminent. A major breakthrough did seem close in March 2018 before the DUP pulled out at the eleventh hour. Then Brexit heated up and consumed the nation’s attention, putting Stormont negotiations on the backburner.

Westminster was reluctant to impose direct rule, partly because of the inevitable controversy it would create but also because no one in the British government had the appetite to stomach Northern Ireland with Brexit on their plate. Northern Ireland was thus left in political purgatory—none of its parties have made a major decision for the country in almost three years, and London is doing little more than writing its checks. Professional civil servants are the ones holding things together, but with no civil or budgetary oversight, social services are beginning to crumble.

In June, a Chartered Accountants Survey showed that 94 percent of the public felt that the lack of a functioning executive has had a negative effect on the provision of public services. This was followed-up in early November, when Westminster’s Northern Ireland Affairs Committee produced a report concluding that in lieu of a long-term funding strategy, the country’s health services risked “deteriorating to the point of collapse.”

Nurses have waited long enough. Members of the Northern Ireland branch of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which has over 435,000 members across the whole of the United Kingdom, voted overwhelmingly to go on strike to advocate against low pay and understaffing. The strike will last a single day on December 3, but the RCN said further strikes are planned into the new year if their demands are not met. With little hope of Stormont being functional again in the near future, more industrial action appears likely.

A healthy, prosperous, and stable population might be able to withstand even a few years without proper services, but the social situation in Northern Ireland has significantly worsened in recent years. Suicide rates continue to rise—especially among young people—and a drugs epidemic has left hundreds dead and thousands more in need of serious medical attention. This is occurring against the backdrop of the growing threat paramilitaries pose to public safety and immense economic uncertainty due to Brexit.

Much of this could be mitigated by effective governance from Stormont, but the rigidly sectarian power-sharing structure has only entrenched disagreement and prevented any movement on these issues. Critics have always pointed out that the Good Friday Agreement’s glaring flaw was that it institutionalized sectarianism by allowing only parties that self-identified as ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ to sit on the Executive, encouraging voters to choose those parties and effectively locking the doors of power to unaligned parties like Alliance. This guaranteed that all political life would continue to flow through a sectarian lens, and those parties that espoused the most sectarian politics would be rewarded.

That’s precisely how Sinn Féin and the DUP monopolized power in the early 2000s, but recent evidence suggests that voters are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with this sectarian system of government.

Alliance had an historic showing at the local elections in May, extending its seat total from 32 to 53, while the nonsectarian Greens and People Before Profit also saw modest gains. None of the main nationalist or unionist parties gained any seats, and, conversely, most of them saw losses. A recent opinion poll by LucidTalk indicates that those results will be replicated in the Westminster elections next month. Support for both Sinn Féin and the DUP has dropped significantly since 2017, and Alliance looks poised to have its best electoral performance ever.

But election data is only a measure of those members of the public that still have faith in the system. Though turnout shot upwards at the 2017 Assembly election, there had been a downward trend at every prior election since 1998, and it notched just over 50 percent in 2016. The latest Northern Ireland Life and Times survey now suggests that a full 24 percent of people don’t support any party—sectarian or not—and that feeling is felt across confessional lines. Voter participation is often used to gauge the confidence a population has in its democracy, and a low turnout tends to bely dissatisfaction with the entire system.

The combination of these factors paints a grim picture that eerily resembles that which existed in Lebanon and Iraq on the eve of their protests. The social situation is rapidly deteriorating and deep-rooted sectarianism has paralyzed the government, gutting the only effective means by which the country can avoid a freefall. This state of affairs has turned the public away from the old sectarian way of doing politics, and voters are looking across traditional religious divides to seek allies in new places. Then there’s the substantial minority that’s totally disenchanted, rejecting the system in its entirety.

Nonsectarianism and anti-government sentiment are the hallmarks of the Iraqi and Lebanese protests, and those attitudes are growing at an unmanageable rate in Northern Ireland. The country’s leaders should take seriously a global trend that is placing their like on the side of Saad Hariri, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, and other elites, and work to institute deep and far-reaching institutional change, lest they suffer the same fate as their Middle Eastern counterparts.

“SYRIA-CRISIS/GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS” by a.anis is licensed under CC BY-ND