So this happened

I have written in the past about the "ash for cash" scandal--where farmers and businesses could get 1.60 pounds for every pound they spent on biomass burners. The program, unsurprisingly, created a billion-pound overspend, half of which the UK swallowed and half of which comes out of the NI budget.

The upshot was that Sinn Fein, the minority partner in the executive that runs N.I., withdrew from government, forcing an election that was held March 3. The head of the majority party, Arlene Foster of the Democratic Unionist Party, has been unrepentant about how the program was rolled out and how it was (mis)managed. Unsurprisingly, a lot of big DUP donors were enthusiastic users of the program. I’ve heard the DUP got kickbacks from some participants--like large evangelical churches, which are at the core of DUP politics.

So. The election. The DUP had their heads handed to them, but still remained the largest party in the province. Prior to March 3, the DUP had 38 seats to Sinn Fein’s 28. Now the DUP has 28 seats to Sinn Fein’s 27. Confusing matters, there are 18 districts in NI, which each had six seats since the founding of the NI Assembly. With this election, the number of seats per district dropped to five, so an assembly of 90 instead of 108. DUP took the biggest hit in the downsizing.

The headline story is that pro-unionist parties like the DUP (which want to remain part of the UK), saw their share of the assembly drop from 55 to 40 while the nationalist parties (want to unite with the Republic) saw their share of the assembly drop from 40 to 39. That is a shock to the system in NI, where unionists are now confronting the possibility of no longer being in control. The share of the assembly held by nonsectarian parties (Alliance, Greens, Labour), fell from 13 to 11.

In the weeks since the election, the DUP and Sinn Fein have failed to reach an agreement that would allow them to resume (heavy sigh) the shared executive. Sinn Fein doesn’t want Arlene to lead the party and they want an Irish Language Act and they want legacy crimes investigated. The DUP (kind of like the Tea Party but with a nastier personality) won’t give an inch.

I agree with Sinn Fein on giving Arlene no quarter. I don’t fully support the language act. Do taxpayers need to spend 11 million pounds over five years so that assembly business can be translated into Gaelic? I don’t think so. No one in the assembly speaks Gaelic as a first language. The investigation of Troubles era atrocities is tricky in that the British army used a lot of informants. So, if I was in the IRA and I ratted out my comrades to the British Army, and then I turned around and killed other IRA members, my secrets stay secret. Ditto for Protestant paramilitaries. I don’t really have the answer. The British government could be hiding behind the “we must protect informants” argument to protect rogue elements of the British army or the Protestant paramilitaries with whom the British army colluded. It is amazing how many murders and bombings--on both sides--were never solved, leaving behind a lot of angry families.
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