MLK & DUP & SF

MLK day not really a thing here. Instead we had the spectacle of the Northern Ireland government collapsing. I wrote earlier about the Renewable Heating Initiative, in which businesses and homeowners received 1.60 pounds for every pound they spent on wood pellets if they converted to a pellet-burning boiler. For 20 years. What a deal! A similar program in England had these things called caps and limits, but we don’t believe in that here in Ulster. The architects of the brilliant scheme thought that UK taxpayers covered the cost--so, other people’s money! Yay. That says a lot about N.I. politics right there. Turns out, N.I. taxpayers wer supposed to pay for what became a 2 billion pound pile of ash (it’s being called cash for ash--the more you burn, the more you earn). N.I. doesn’t have that kind of money, so it’s paying only half the cost, of which half again was budgeted. The outrage is over 500 million pounds when it should be over 2 billion. Whatever.

The government isn’t releasing the list of RHI recipients, just as it doesn’t release the names of party donors, or of anyone else the public may be interested in.

Our executive is led by the heads of the two largest parties in the last election--that would be the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein. One supports eternal union with Great Britain (unionists) and one supports the reunion of north and south in a single government (Sinn Fein means “ourselves alone”). What could possibly go wrong?

The head of the DUP was once head of the department where RHI was conceived in 2012 (no extra points for guessing in whose district the wood pellet manufacturer is based). She has been in no end of trouble since the media broke the story. After a few weeks of public outrage, her co-executive minister from Sinn Fein stepped down, forcing elections.

Greed and corruption aside, the government structure doesn’t work. You can’t have two parties fundamentally at odds running the country. And yet. Look at the U.S. How is it different? Thanks to years of gerrymandering, electoral districts are solidly Dem or solidly Republican, just as districts here tend to be unionist or nationalist. The GOP plays the long game and, as a result, controls most state legislatures and both houses of Congress. With protected districts, you get candidates who have neither the incentive to reach out to constituents on the other side nor the character for the difficult work of reaching compromise with colleagues. So after 225 years of evolution, the U.S. is in the same boat as Northern Ireland, with antagonistic factions pitted against each other and democracy--the will of the people--be damned.

We have a spark of hope the US lacks. Other parties. DUP and Sinn Fein aren’t the largest by much. The electorate needs to show up for the next election (half don’t), and it needs to vote for the parties that are not based on identity politics (Greens, Alliance), or at least the more moderate parties from unionist/nationalist camps (UUP/SDLP). And yet. The politicians in the US and here know their craft and they know how to whip up the demons of those who let identity politics subvert their interests.
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