Photograph: Stephen Barnes/Demotix/Corbis
The Ulster Unionist party’s (UUP) ruling executive has voted to leave Northern Ireland’s regional government, in a move that will put pressure on other unionists to follow suit and threatens the future of the power-sharing agreement. This follows the murder of an ex-IRA assassin by some of his former comrades earlier this month, which has created potentially the greatest crisis for the five-party coalition at Stormont in almost a decade.
On Saturday night the UUP backed their leader, Mike Nesbitt’s recommendation earlier this week that the party resign from the Northern Ireland executive and go into opposition in the Stormont assembly. Up to 90 members of the UUP executive voted in favour of the exit strategy at a hotel in east Belfast.
While the rival and much larger Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has said that Sinn Féin should be excluded from the government over the resumption of IRA activity, including the murder of a former republican prisoner, Kevin McGuigan, it is unlikely the DUP will get support from nationalists for such a move. Failure to expel Sinn Féin from the coalition will result in demands from the DUP’s grassroots to walk out of the administration, thus triggering its collapse.
Sinn Féin has accused the UUP of manufacturing the latest crisis to outflank the DUP ahead of looming assembly elections in 2016. But unionists insist the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) assessment that individual Provisional IRA (PIRA) members were behind the McGuigan murder is a breach of an agreement back in 2005, when the PIRA was meant to have disbanded as a paramilitary force and had its arsenal decommissioned.
Chief Constable George Hamilton of the PSNI stressed last weekend that the PIRA’s leadership did not sanction the killing of Kevin McGuigan, who was murdered in retaliation for the murder of former Belfast IRA commander Gerard “Jock” Davison in May.
The vote to exit the power-sharing coalition won unanimous support. After the meeting, Nesbitt said: “The Ulster Unionist party will be leaving the Northern Ireland executive next week.” He added that Danny Kennedy, the UUP’s one minister in a five-party administration comprising 13 ministers and two junior ministers, will formally resign next week.
