Start with the positives, for they are hard to dispute. The new Northern Ireland plan unpicks some of the economic and political damage inflicted by Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal. It makes the return of devolved power-sharing government possible. It ends the DUP’s two-year democracy boycott. It compels the rival parties to work together again, in line with the 1998 Belfast Good Friday agreement. It also releases a £3.3bn sweetener from the UK Treasury that Northern Ireland’s battered public realm badly needs.
All of that is long overdue. But is it really a new dawn in the north? Some have been seduced into describing this week’s deal in these terms. Maybe they will be proved right. Let us hope so. But the evidence is still only thin, and there is a long way to go before the “up and running” cliche is truly accurate.
In reality, Northern Ireland politics remains, as so often and for so long, a zero-sum game. Durable unionist support for the deal that was finally unveiled today by the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, is fragile. Though power-sharing is now being restarted, this will be at least the fourth major reboot since 1998, and the second in the past seven years.
The fundamental question this week is whether this deal will give unionists the confidence to make power-sharing work better than last time. There is no quick or simple answer to that, and a rush of activity at Westminster and Stormont in the last few days does not supply one. A question of that kind touches deep commercial, cultural and political anxieties. Right now, unionists are the focus of attention. Never forget, though, that the nationalist response will eventually matter just as powerfully.
The DUP leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, has this week been in the vanguard of a highly coordinated piece of political choreography to make the deal happen. He is working on terms agreed with Heaton-Harris. Presumably, the EU, the Irish Republic and the White House have signalled their backing too. It would be a surprise if Keir Starmer has not privately signed off on it as well.
So far, so good. But there is no guarantee that the choreography will succeed. The plain fact is that the deal is not what Donaldson said he wanted when he collapsed the power-sharing institutions two years ago. Back then, he put seven DUP demands on the table. The key ones called for no restrictions on trade between Britain and Northern Ireland across the Irish Sea, and an end to any suggestion that post-Brexit Northern Ireland was not a full part of the UK.
This week’s deal does not appear to do either of these things as explicitly as the propaganda suggests. Trade between Britain and Northern Ireland will still be subject to post-Brexit rules agreed with the EU, though they will apparently be enforced differently and less obtrusively. And Northern Ireland will still have to have a special intermediate status, involving overlapping forms of governance, as the Good Friday and the Brexit deals require. That has not changed either.
That does not mean the deal is a worthless exercise. But it is inescapably a compromise. It was always obvious that Donaldson would not get everything he wanted. It was equally clear that the DUP would only get back into government by accepting conditions many supporters would dislike. Donaldson is thus stuck with selling the package as a more profound concession than it really is.
This is a mighty dangerous political game. Precisely how dangerous has been underscored by events at the start of the week. In order, presumably, to ensure the deal did not explode on the launchpad, Donaldson got DUP backing by giving the party a version of its contents, supposedly in secret. Whether that backing, said by Donaldson to have been “decisive”, will hold up now the details have been published in the UK command paper is a key question.
It is not a good sign for Donaldson that the whole supposedly secret DUP meeting was leaked in real time to the loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson, an implacable foe. Bryson live-tweeted the entire thing in what was surely not just the journalistic scoop of the season, but also a clear indicator of deep and organised opposition to the deal. According to some reports, the party officers also divided only by 7-5 in Donaldson’s favour. The deal, therefore, remains vulnerable to a unionist backlash.
Underlying all this is the continuing weakening of the DUP as the voice of unionism. It may have won some concessions. But its long-term credibility is still in the balance. Much of that is its own fault. The DUP misread Brexit and Johnson catastrophically. It compounded this by internal arguments and bringing down the institutions. It is possible Donaldson may emerge strengthened by the return to government. But if doubters decide they are being bounced into something they don’t really want, the whole exercise would risk being portrayed as a lame-duck deal by a lame-duck party and a lame-duck UK government.
Even optimists recognise that the old political battles are about to resume on a reshaped field. Northern Ireland is about to have a nationalist first minister for the first time in its 103-year history. For both sides, this will take some getting used to. But since the entire raison d’etre of Northern Ireland is not to be part of a nationalist Ireland, this is not just a moment of history. It is just as obviously a moment of hazard as well.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
