A former Northern Ireland secretary has warned that the rules around power sharing in Northern Ireland need to change if the devolution settlement is to survive. Lord Hain, who helped negotiate the arrangement in 2007, suggested that sanctions should be imposed on any political party that refuses to power share and therefore collapses the Northern Irish government.
His comments came as the DUP’s refusal to form an executive, due to the Northern Ireland Protocol, has stretched on for more than a year. Lord Hain suggested, in an amendment to the Northern Ireland Budget Bill, new rules around executive formation in Northern Ireland, which would mean any party eligible to form a power sharing executive and which refuses to do so should have their funding withheld.
This would include its Assembly party funding, the salaries of the Members of the Legislative Assembly, the salaries of the members’ staff and its office and travel expenses. He told peers he wanted to highlight a “deeply troubling gridlock in Northern Ireland’s self-governance, which is relentlessly ravaging the very foundations of the Good Friday Agreement”.
