The chamber’s ornate ceiling remained blue, red and gold, and Portland stone still held up the Stormont edifice, but the beaming Sinn Féin faces declared this was a historic moment for Irish nationalism.
Michelle O’Neill became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister in a day of symbolism and pomp that restored devolved government and etched an epitaph on the tomb of what was once a unionist state.
The union endured – Northern Ireland remains part of the UK and a referendum on Irish unity is not on the horizon – but when the assembly nominated O’Neill at 2.33pm yesterday for republicans the countdown to potential unification ticked louder.
O’Neill avoided triumphalism and made no explicit mention of constitutional change in an inaugural address that focused on reconciliation and bread-and-butter issues.
“I will serve everyone equally and be a first minister for all,” she said. “Wherever we come from, whatever our aspirations, we can and must build our future together. We must make power-sharing work because collectively, we are charged with leading and delivering for all our people, for every community.”
The appointment of a republican first minister represented “a new dawn” unimaginable to past generations of Catholics who experienced discrimination, said O’Neill, 47. “That state is now gone.”
For all the conciliatory words, the County Tyrone republican comes from an IRA family, defends the legitimacy of IRA violence and honours IRA members. She tacitly disputes Northern Ireland’s legitimacy by referring to it as the “north of Ireland”.
Stormont’s architects represented the six counties by building six floors and erecting six pillars, all mounted on a granite base, but Sinn Féin, ascendant north and south of the border, has its eyes on all 32 counties.
O’Neill will lead the executive with Emma Little-Pengelly, a Democratic Unionist (DUP) who was nominated deputy first minister, a post with equal power but less prestige.
Little-Pengelly, 44, recalled witnessing the aftermath of an IRA bomb as a girl but vowed to work with O’Neill to improve public services. “Michelle is an Irish republican, and I am a very proud unionist. We will never agree on those issues, but what we can agree on is that cancer doesn’t discriminate and our hospitals need to be fixed. Let us be a source of hope to those young people watching today, not one of despair.”
Several unionist assembly members congratulated O’Neill but others wore funereal expressions that betrayed the psychological blow – a state designed in 1921 to enshrine a permanent unionist majority, with a Protestant assembly for a Protestant people, was no more.
Demographic and political changes eroded that hegemony, and at the 2022 assembly election Sinn Féin overtook the DUP as the biggest party. A DUP boycott in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements mothballed Stormont until this past week when the UK government tweaked the Windsor framework and smoothed the so-called Irish Sea border.
The secretary of state, Chris Heaton-Harris, called it a great day for Northern Ireland and expressed optimism Stormont will break a stop-start cycle that has plagued it since the 1998 Good Friday agreement ushered in mandatory power-sharing.
During the second world war Stormont was daubed with cow manure to camouflage it from German bombers. Jim Allister of the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice suggested the place still stank. “We have a Sinn Féin first minister, but not in my name, nor in the name of thousands of unionists who will never bow the knee to IRA-Sinn Féin,” he said.
Allister accused the DUP of selling out and said Northern Ireland remained under EU customs rules, weakening its position in the UK.
Rumoured loyalist protests at Stormont, an estate outside Belfast, failed to materialise. Instead health and transport workers brought banners to denounce crumbling public services and delayed pay rises.
The assembly’s revival will unlock a £3.3bn financial package from London that should be enough to avert planned strikes but not solve a fiscal crisis worsened by two years of stalemate.
Sinn Féin, the DUP, Alliance and the Ulster Unionist party (UUP) shared ministerial positions using the D’Hondt mechanism based on party strengths, except for justice, which Alliance leader Naomi Long filled on a cross-community vote.
Sinn Fein nominated Conor Murphy as economy minister, John O’Dowd as infrastructure minister and Caoimhe Archibald as finance minister. The DUP nominated Paul Givan to education and Gordon Lyons to communities. Robin Swann of the UUP regained the health portfolio and Alliance’s Andrew Muir took agriculture, the environment and rural affairs.
Edwin Poots, a former DUP leader, became assembly speaker.
Matthew O’Toole leads the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP), which failed to qualify for the executive, as the opposition. His first act was to ask the DUP and Sinn Féin to commit to not walking out. “If we are to achieve anything we cannot continue with the threat of collapse looming over Stormont,” he said.
