Why is Michelle O'Neill playing an unprecedented role in Northern Ireland?

After seven years of leading her nationalist party, at 47, Michelle O'Neill is the first politician who is not in favor of Northern Ireland becoming part of the United Kingdom to lead the devolved Stormont Government (Parliament of Ireland). North), since the separation of Ireland more than a century ago.

This fact above all has a symbolic value. O'Neill, who represents democratic socialism, succeeds 11 unionist leaders seven years after taking the reins of the party. This follows the roadmap designed by his predecessors, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, long before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the bloody conflict in Northern Ireland.

The economy, the engine of change?

When Sinn Féin won the May 2022 Assembly elections, with 30% of the vote, Irish people began to talk about the 'telluric political movement' that was occurring. What in the past was the political arm of the terrorist group Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the most voted party in Northern Ireland, at a time when Brexit began to threaten the coexistence of the parties. The result was then repeated in the 2023 Council elections.

The current situation in Northern Ireland, after the Good Friday peace treaty, signed in 1998, which put an end to the conflict between unionists and the IRA, has the fragility of all treaties in which the parties must contribute for generations to the healthy coexistence.

It is especially evident in Belfast. With the Irish Republican Army (IRA) practically inactive – but still very present in the collective imagination, especially for causing thousands of deaths in almost three decades – almost 100 walls in its capital speak of peace, but are also reminders of the divisions that Catholics continue to have with Protestants.

“They continue to exist because we simply don't trust each other,” explains one of the taxi drivers with identification to move in Protestant neighborhoods, although not in Catholic ones, who prefers not to give his name publicly.

That is the core of another separation, which has nothing to do with religion, although it is historically connected with it; It is more of a political position between the pro-British (Protestants) and the nationalists (Catholics).

In practice, the country has been governed by London since peace was signed in the Good Friday Agreement. These parties had to share power, as agreed in that document; However, the British Government has suspended its autonomy on at least four occasions and for long periods, since the political forces failed to reach an agreement internally or scandals arose.

In 2020, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) collapsed the institutions using as a pretext the impact on the population due to the post-Brexit trade agreements, but deep down there was a cataclysm within the party that could not resist the idea of ​​​​allowing the Sinn Féin will enter the Executive as the main party.

In any case, the economy is the weak point that this new conversation generates, with the difference that now the votes have supported Sinn Féin, which ensures a different position of power and the real prospect of it also achieving that status in the South.

This is why the DUP, the largest unionist party in the region, has now agreed to restore the Government by signing a post-Brexit trade agreement with the United Kingdom, which contemplates the Northern Ireland Protocol, which guarantees the absence of borders. with the Republic of Ireland, a member of the European Union.

According to the party's leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, the pact has also effectively eliminated the so-called Irish Sea Trade Border for goods destined for the North from the United Kingdom.

And the reactivation of the Northern Irish institutions is supposed to allow London to release an endowment of 3.3 billion pounds sterling (about 3.9 billion euros) to support public services, which have recently been affected by a major strike.

However, Donaldson faces opposition within his party. It emerged in the local media that a group of unionists, including Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister and loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson, published a legal opinion by the former Attorney General of Northern Ireland, John Larkin KC, concluding that the agreement does not remove the Irish Sea border.

On the other hand, nationalists see Brexit – rejected by the majority of the Northern Irish electorate in the 2016 referendum – as the opportunity to promote their historic objective of reunifying the island of Ireland now through democratic means.

The President of the Republic of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, has welcomed the re-establishment of power-sharing institutions, saying: “Today's revival of the Northern Ireland Assembly will be welcomed by all those who wish to see a system effective power-sharing… I wish the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and their Ministers the best in their new roles in the work ahead as we look towards the full restoration of all the institutions of the devolved Government.”

Who is Michelle O'Neill?

“It is an honor to take over as Prime Minister. My commitment is to represent our entire population and communities,” Michelle O'Neill posted on her X account.

O'Neill, single mother at 16 years old, Described by those close to her as tenacious and pragmatic, she was linked to the peace process from the age of 21 when she abandoned her studies as an accounting technician to join the party. That was in 1998.

In his speech he took into account the cost of living, without forgetting important issues for the Catholic nationalist community such as the defense of the Gaelic language and other signs of Irish identity.

In the past he has faced criticism for his attendance at events commemorating members of the IRA, but now he has in his hands the opportunity to attract the vote of Northern Irish people, who still suspect a paramilitary past, as the former president of Sinn Féin says , Gerry Adams, who assures that O'Neill belongs to the new generation not linked to violence. His father, Brendan Doris, was a political prisoner for belonging to the IRA and his uncle, Paul Doris, chaired an organization that raised funds for the cause.

Born in Clonoe, in the border county of Tyrone, from 2005 until 2011 she held the seat vacated by her father on Dungannon and South Tyrone County Council. In 2010 she became the first woman to head that local government body, and by then, she had already won a seat in the autonomous Assembly in the 2007 regional elections.

In 2011 he took up the Agriculture and Rural Development portfolio in the Belfast Government. Then, after the 2016 regional elections, he controlled the Ministry of Health for a year. There he tried to promote an ambitious modernization plan, which did not agree with the neoliberal thesis of the DUP.

In 2018 she became vice president of Sinn Féin, as “number two” to its president, Mary Lou McDonald, based in the Republic of Ireland. Finally, between 2020 and 2022 she was the Northern Irish Deputy Chief Minister with the same intermittencies that the power-sharing Government has suffered.

With local media, AFP and EFE