
Last week, SDLP Leader Mark Durkan gave a keynote speech to the British Irish Association’s Annual Conference. It has received a lot of media coverage, including good pieces by The Guardian and North by Northwest.
However, Durkan was mis-quoted by the Irish News who printed the headline Power-sharing should end soon says Durkan. I wrote a blog piece about it at the time, which I’ve now removed it as it repeated some erroneous quotes! I thought that I’d write another blog piece instead for clarity.
Durkan’s speech is available in full here. The speech is also being discussed on the SDLP Members Forum.
What Durkan Did Not Say:
Durkan definitely didn’t suggest any system resembling simple majority voting (50%+1). This wouldn’t work in N Ireland. Secondly, he did not suggest changing the D’Hondt mechanism – this would remain the same – whereby each parties entitlement to Ministries is on the basis of their electoral mandate.
And lastly (do I even need to point this out!), it’s quite clear from the speech that Durkan was not promoting an end to power sharing. That has been a principle of the SDLP since it was established and it remains so!
What Durkan Did Say:
He did say that in the future society should aim to dissolve the current system of designation used by the Assembly. This is not really a surprise. The SDLP has always said that the system of designation was only a temporary step. In the absence of a strong Bill of Rights that would include protection for community identities, the SDLP insisted on the system of designation 10 years ago as it was required to protect the nationalist minority after so many years of Unionist majority rule in the old days of Stormont. Designation provided important re-assurance that the Assembly would be better.
The cross-community decision-making apparatus was important to secure overwhelming nationalist support for the Agreement in the 1998 referendum in the absence of a stronger means of guarding minority rights, such as a Bill of Rights.
So why review the system of designation?
The Agreement was specifically designed to be reviewed after several years of successful government. It’s worth noting that there was a review of designation in January 2002, which recognised that designation was still necessary but should be continually reviewed. All the parties involved agreed to review it again in the full Strand One Review, but this wasn’t possible because the Assembly kept getting suspended!
However, 10 years have now passed and a lot has changed. Politicians in N Ireland have grown up a little, so the cross-community protections put into the Assembly through the system of designation could in future be replaced by a strong Bill of Rights and a Protected Majority Voting System.
A Protected Majority Voting System would need to be carefully examined by all the parties (and this is not SDLP policy, it’s just an example!) but in my opinion it could include elements of the Qualified Majority Voting used the EU Council, where 65% of the vote must be achieved for legislation to pass.
The EU-style system is different from a simple majority voting system used in Dáil Éireann or the UK Parliament because it would require 65% vote to pass any legislation, therefore making it impossible for any legislation to pass without the support from both communities. It would allow us to leave behind the unionist vs. nationalist system we currently use.
The SDLP always wanted a better system of designation at the Assembly, but recognised that a typical left-right political spectrum instead of a nationalist vs. unionist arrangement might not be possible at first. The unionist vs. nationalist agreement was also required to ensure cross-community consensus on legislation, but not everyone fits into a nationalist or unionist category, and at some point in the future, when we’re ready, NI will leave behind this system that divides our communities.
Mark Durkan said: “At the time, the system of designation was necessary because of what we were coming from but should not be necessary where we were going. Such measures with their arguably sectarian or sectional undertones should be bio-degradable, dissolving in the future as the environment changed. Most, if not all of us, had such future adjustments in mind when we wrote the review mechanisms into the Agreement. As we move towards a fully sealed and settled process we should be preparing to think about how and when to remove some of the ugly scaffolding needed during the construction of the new edifice.”
We are building towards a New Ireland. The SDLP is exploring the opportunities of political re-alignment and are in discussions with southern parties, Unionists and interested parties. Meanwhile, the UUP are exploring relationships with the Conservatives. These should not be prevented by our current system of designation.
On political re-alignment, Mark Durkan said:
“The possibilities for political realignment with new or changing party offerings in the future could be stunted by permanent reliance to the present degree on designation. If we are serious about a truly shared future then we have to allow for truly shared politics where parties can – and have to – appeal across the traditional divides. The fault-line in our society will still be there but it should not determine the party political cleavage for future generations.”