Power sharing and devolution in Northern Ireland is edging closer to collapse as the main unionist party prepare to pull its ministers out of the regional government.
A committee of the Stormont assembly will debate a motion from the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) on Thursday that calls for the parliament to be adjourned.
In a crisis centred on claims that the Provisional IRA (PIRA) continues to exist and kill people on Belfast’s streets, the DUP refuses to do “business as usual” until emergency talks chaired by the British and Irish governments resolve the question of ongoing paramilitary activities such as the murder of former IRA gunman Kevin McGuigan last month.
Under Stormont’s rules, major motions in the parliament have to command cross-community support. As the nationalist SDLP is unlikely to back an adjournment or suspension, which Sinn Féin already opposes, the proposal will fail and the DUP’s ministers will walk out of the administration.
SDLP leaders were holding crisis talks in Dublin with the Irish premier, Enda Kenny, on Thursday morning before returning to Belfast for the adjournment vote later in the day.
The leader of the Ulster Unionist party, Mike Nesbitt said he wwould only back an adjournment if “Gerry Adams injects some honesty and reality into the debate the status of the IRA in 2015”. He said he saw not point in the UUP even taking part in an adjournment debate unless Sinn Féin leaders accepted what everyone else from the chief constable to the two governments were saying - that PIRA members killed Kevin McGuigan.
The UUP withdrew its sole minister from the power-sharing coalition last week following the assessment of the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s that individual PIRA members were responsible for killing McGuigan and that the organisation still exists in some form.
Sinn Féin’s president, Gerry Adams, has said unionist moves to suspend the institutions were a mistake. “There is only one republican organisation. That is Sinn Féin. There is only one leadership - ard chomhairle [the party executive]. The IRA has gone.”
The arrest of three leading Belfast republican figures including Sinn Féin’s northern chairman, Bobby Storey, in connection with the McGuigan murder accelerated the crisis on Wednesday. Storey was named in parliament 10 years ago as the IRA’s intelligence director.
The DUP believes Storey’s connection to the Sinn Féin leadership links the McGuigan killing to mainstream republicanism, a charge pro-peace process republicans deny. Despite 16 arrests so far over the murder, no one has yet been charged.
Nigel Dodds, the DUP MP and party leader at Westminster, said Storey’s arrest along with Brian Gillen and Eddie Copeland had pushed devolution “beyond the tipping point”.
If, as seems likely, devolution and power-sharing government is suspended as a result of a full unionist walkout, then London could take back all the powers currently in the hands of local ministers.
Northern Ireland’s first minister, Peter Robinson, has said that if the devolved institutions do collapse it could be up to a decade before they could be pieced together again.
