Another huge spanner has been dropped in Stormont’s works by the Republic’s abortion referendum.
What had been landmark point of cross-party agreement has suddenly become a unionist versus nationalist issue of the most intractable kind.
For all the passions raised by an Irish language act, it is not a question of profound religious conviction or viewed by anyone as a matter of life and death.
Serious responses to the referendum result, including from UK cabinet ministers, appear to have abandoned devolution either as a way to address abortion in particular or to include it in resolving the Stormont deadlock in general.
Proposals have instead focused on imposing and legitimising Westminster legislation, with ideas ranging from holding a referendum in Northern Ireland to bypassing devolution on the grounds of abortion being a human rights matter.
In all this desperate improvisation, the Good Friday Agreement is receding in the rear view mirror. It has taken Jeremy Corbyn, of all people, to refocus it.
Last week, on his first visit to Northern Ireland as Labour leader, Corbyn proposed convening the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference to break the Stormont deadlock.
If he had not gone into more detail this might have seemed unsurprising - Sinn Féin has been making the same demand for months.
However, Corbyn repeatedly debunked republican claims the conference can make devolved decisions, let alone function as a form of joint authority.
That would be in breach of the Good Friday Agreement and “constitutionally impossible,” the Labour leader pointed out.
Because the DUP is averse to any meeting of the conference, Corbyn disappointed everyone, which may explain why his comments attracted less attention than they deserved. Remarkably, he is the only political leader in London, Dublin or Belfast to have expressed a firm and clear understanding of the conference’s remit since convening it became a subject of debate last November.
Corbyn may have felt a need to stick meticulously to the agreement after a statement from his team ahead of his visit that sounded ambivalent about the consent principle.
If so, he showed the value of returning to the Good Friday text. Citing it cleared up the consent row immediately, just as it resolves any argument over the Intergovernmental Conference.
The agreement makes clear the conference’s role is “contributing as appropriate to any review of the overall political agreement” - where ‘appropriate’ refers to Dublin having no direct say over Stormont.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is among those to recently suggest the conference’s function can be performed by any British-Irish meeting, so what those meetings are called “is not the most important thing.”
In fact, it is crucially important. We have an agreed top-level mechanism for dealing with a political crisis. Pandering to one side or the other by pretending we are not using it would be a ludicrously cavalier approach to its operation.
Contrary to popular belief the agreement is not a work of ‘constructive ambiguity’ - that cliché was only coined to disguise a breach on decommissioning. The agreement is a precisely worded law and treaty, straying from which just piles confusion upon calamity.
When devolution last collapsed between 2002 and 2007, the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference was the vehicle used to deliver the St Andrews agreement. London and Dublin addressed non-devolved issues while reviewing the all-party talks convened to restore Stormont.
Prime ministers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern met and reported progress via conference summits.
The main sticking point was recognition of policing and justice - a deeply contentious question that in the end would take a further three years to resolve.
Yet enough was agreed to get a transitional assembly up and running to demonstrate how the deal would work, then hold an election that was in effect a St Andrews referendum.
Whatever problems later emerged from that agreement - the rule changes on appointing a first minister have arguably led to Stormont’s current predicament - St Andrews was reached through careful observance of what had been agreed before.
The same approach to a new agreement must be the model today. London and Dublin should help the Stormont parties negotiate a St Andrews II, then we should vote on it.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the Republic’s referendum, it is the democratic value of people knowing exactly what they are voting for. The Irish government published its draft abortion legislation in February.
A Stormont equivalent would be a draft Irish language bill - and for abortion, perhaps, a statutory code of conduct on petitions of concern.
newton@irishnews.com
