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History will be made on Saturday in Northern Ireland when a republican from a party devoted to Irish reunification takes the top job for the first time in a region that was created as a bastion of British unionism.
First minister-designate Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin will be sworn in when the 90-member Stormont Assembly is recalled at 1pm, two years to the day after the Democratic Unionist Party triggered its collapse in a row over Brexit.
On Friday she met other parties and the civil servants who have been running the region for much of the past two years during the boycott by the DUP, the region’s largest pro-UK party, to discuss the assembly’s priorities.
O’Neill, 47, won plaudits when she greeted King Charles III warmly after the death of Queen Elizabeth and attended his coronation “to show respect”.
Emma Little-Pengelly, a 44-year-old barrister, former Stormont legislator and former MP, is expected to be the DUP’s pick for deputy first minister.
The posts have equal legal status — and neither can function without the other — but the symbolism is inescapable. Some unionists bristle at the thought of the once-dominant DUP playing second-fiddle to Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, which was created by the partition of the island in 1921
Sinn Féin beat the DUP in the last regional elections in May 2022, relegating the long dominant party to second place.
Both women have family links to Northern Ireland’s troubled past.
O’Neill’s father was an Irish Republican Army prisoner during the region’s three decades-long conflict involving republican paramilitaries fighting to reunite Ireland, loyalist paramilitaries battling to remain in the UK, and British security forces.
Sinn Féin was long considered the IRA’s mouthpiece. O’Neill, who comes from a working-class background and became a mother at 16, rose through party ranks after entering politics two decades ago.
Little-Pengelly’s father was convicted in Paris in 1991 for his role in a loyalist gun-running plot, but has denied having been an arms-buyer.
If confirmed in the role, she may face criticism for being unelected: she was drafted into DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s seat while he remained an MP at Westminster.
The new leadership team will face huge challenges. While Stormont was on ice, Northern Ireland’s public finances plunged into the red, driving public services into crisis and sparking a wave of strikes that are still continuing.
The DUP’s Brexit trade dispute was finally settled this week when MPs passed legislation to enact a deal that Donaldson hammered out in months of bilateral talks with Rishi Sunak’s government.
Most checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain and staying in the region will now be removed, a key DUP demand. The party argued Sunak’s 2023 Windsor framework deal on post-Brexit trading rules did not go far enough.
Donaldson said that Northern Ireland’s place within the UK was being undermined and its ability to do business with Britain, its largest trade partner, was also being harmed.
The deal was spelt out in a document entitled “Safeguarding the Union”, the cover of which cover was in the UK’s patriotic red, white and blue. It contained what experts said were some concrete changes to simplify trading rules, but little meaningful change in terms of Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.
Some senior members of the DUP and hardline unionists outside the party remained vehemently opposed to the deal.
But one of the most powerful voices in unionism gave the thumbs-up: Rev Mervyn Gibson, grand secretary of the Orange Order, told the Belfast Telegraph the deal was “a win for unionist determination and unity”.
He said it would knock the prospect of Irish unity “out of sight”. Sinn Féin, however, insisted that Stormont’s return showed a “new Ireland” was nearing.
O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s vice-president, said people had been “failed by partition”. Party leader Mary Lou McDonald, who hopes to become Ireland’s Taoiseach in elections in the south due by March 2025, said reunification was coming within “touching distance”.
Nevertheless, O’Neill has vowed to be a “first minister for all”.
Unionists will be watching to see how often she utters the words “Northern Ireland”. Sinn Féin prefers to call the region “the North of Ireland”.
