Sinn Féin’s explanation for moving Conor Murphy does not add up.
Stormont’s economy minister is one of the party’s six nominees for the Seanad. His election is effectively guaranteed.
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According to party president Mary Lou McDonald, Murphy will use his new position to advance “the Irish unity debate in the Oireachtas”.
She added that his candidacy “underscores Sinn Féin’s commitment to representing the entire island of Ireland”.
These claims would be credible were Murphy planning to remain a Stormont minister, a form of double-jobbing allowed by law.
The unionist equivalent would be sitting in the executive and the House of Lords, for which there is a precedent: the DUP’s Lord Morrow was communities minister in 2016.
The remit of the Department for the Economy covers Invest NI, universities and the labour market. Murphy has cross-border policies for all three and would have intriguing options to promote them as a minister and senator.
However, Murphy says he sees the Seanad as a full-time role and will be resigning as both a minister and an MLA if elected.
The only advantage this gives him is the ability to be chair or deputy chair of a Seanad or Oireachtas committee – Stormont ministers may not hold those positions.
The Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement has become an occasional forum for discussing a united Ireland.
Murphy says he wants to use his time in the Seanad to hold Dáil parties to account on their manifesto pledges related to Irish unity.
The committee would be a good place to do so, especially if Sinn Féin hopes to chair it. Oireachtas chairs are allocated by party size.
But this is all fantastically arcane to the typical voter. Murphy could make far more of an impact, with the public and fellow politicians, by simply attending the committee as Stormont’s economy minister.
Every MLA can attend Oireachtas committees. They can also appear as a witness when invited by committee members.
If Sinn Féin believed this had any potential to advance its constitutional goals, its entire Stormont team would be travelling to Dublin on a regular basis. Instead, the party has made no use of the facility beyond a few token photo opportunities.
So Murphy’s move appears to be a House of Lords-type step towards retirement, certainly from a northern perspective, while some in the south feel a northerner is being sent down to keep on eye on them. Neither look is advantageous for Sinn Féin.
The party may have an interesting replacement lined up as economy minister, helping to keep itself and its agenda in the headlines. Any of its underemployed MPs could be co-opted into the assembly and then into the executive, for example.
While Murphy has put his imprint on economic policy, the party owns the policies and a new minister can pick up where he left off.
But this just adds to the mystery of why Murphy is bothering to leave. He says his health has recovered after a scare late last year.
Sinn Féin’s setback in November’s Irish general election will have changed the party’s calculations – it had hoped to control equivalent departments, north and south, enabling all-Ireland alignment.
But again, disappointment on that score is no reason to move a northern minister to the Seanad.
Some people suspect Sinn Féin displays occasional contempt for Stormont to reassure the republican base. To the extent this has ever been true, it has never been less true than now, when it holds the office of first minister and wants to prove its fitness for power in the Republic.
If the party is feeling a little unsettled in the executive, one factor may be the strange incident last February when devolution was restored.
The DUP had been expected to take the Department of Finance under the back-room deal that usually proceeds running the d’Hondt process. At the final moment it picked education, bouncing a clearly surprised Sinn Féin into taking finance.
The republican party has thus ended up with two economic policy departments, disrupted plans and no doubt renewed wariness about the DUP.
So a lesson to take from Murphy’s departure is that Stormont reform should pay some attention to the appointment of ministers.
In most coalition systems, the programme for government and the choice of departments are decided together.
That might be a bit ambitious for Stormont. But if its back-room deal was a more open negotiation, at least we might have a better idea of who was coming and going.