Michelle O’Neill: ‘What I won’t allow is the unravelling of the Good Friday Agreement’

Michelle O’Neill is trying to lead an administrative region that she does not want to exist, and whose official name she rarely uses. It’s not easy. It’s not enough that her party, Sinn Féin, won the most votes in Northern Ireland’s elections in May, a historic result for nationalists. “The North, designed with an inbuilt political unionist majority — that’s gone,” as she puts it. By law O’Neill still needs the largest unionist party, the Democratic Unionists, to agree to form an executive. The DUP, however, is boycotting in protest at the custom checks imposed by the Brexit protocol.

So having promised to be a “first minister for all”, O’Neill is not first minister at all. Her first 100 days since electoral triumph have been a non-event. Sitting in the Stormont assembly building, whose grandeur belies its underuse, she says matter-of-factly: “In many ways it’s frustrating.” And it could soon be much more frustrating: both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are committed, if they become UK prime minister, to tearing up the protocol, which gives Northern Ireland privileged access to both the British and EU markets. The region, which has been growing faster than anywhere else in the UK except London, would suffer the brunt of any trade war. We could “end up out of the single market”, complains O’Neill. “We’re suspended in a state of uncertainty.”

Yet she sees one large consolation: that her goal of Irish reunification is becoming more likely. “Brexit has been a catalyst for constitutional change, because of the actions of this Tory government . . . There’s a conversation afoot that hasn’t been witnessed before.” A majority of Northern Irish voters opposed Brexit in 2016. A majority now supports the protocol. Their views have been overridden.

O’Neill promises a referendum on Irish unity by 2032: “We definitely think we’ll be having this vote in the next 10 years.” She also insists Sinn Féin is less focused on a date than in planning for what a unified Ireland would look like. The future of Northern Ireland, an afterthought for the Leave campaign, could yet be one of Brexit’s biggest legacies.

O’Neill is the personable — critics would say sanitised — face of Sinn Féin. She is not former leader Gerry Adams or her political mentor, the late Martin McGuinness (ex-deputy first minister and Irish Republican Army commander). Although her father and uncle joined the IRA, she was too young to consider armed struggle. Her back-story inspires sympathy: she became pregnant as a teenager and endured teachers’ disdain; she gave birth, went into intensive care with pre-eclampsia and sat a GCSE exam a week later. She was 21 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed; now 45 and living near Coalisland in Mid Ulster, with two grown-up children and herself not a regular mass-goer, she is a bridge from the cohort of armed struggle to today’s socially liberal consensus.

In person, she strikes a neat balance between being ideological and inoffensive. The only time her demeanour slips is when I ask about her attendance at the funeral of former IRA leader Bobby Storey in mid-2020. She has apologised for any harm caused but not for going per se. Would she go to another IRA funeral? She grimaces. “I think that’s a bit of a — you know, it’s two years past. We were coming out of very difficult times and I hope that we’re never in that kind of scenario again.” So she wouldn’t rule out going to another IRA funeral? “Ah, seriously, I think that’s a bit off,” she cuts in, visibly irritated.

Her irritation reflects her challenge. To make reunification a reality, O’Neill must win over those from a unionist background, or at least assuage them that she is no threat. Instead this month she outraged many by saying that there was once “no alternative” to IRA violence. “I have to find ways in which to ensure that those of a British identity feel protected. Is it going to be smooth? No, of course not.”

For many in Westminster, ripping up the Northern Ireland protocol would be a shocking break with the UK’s history of respecting the law. For O’Neill, the British government has never been trustworthy. She cites a proposed amnesty over crimes committed during the Troubles, “to cover up the fact that they killed our citizens . . . These people have form.”

She is happy for wrinkles in the protocol to be “ironed out”. “The EU have said they’ll reduce checks and paperwork by 80 per cent. We should just take that with both arms.” But unionist demands that the protocol must have their “consent” are spurious, she says. “The rest of us objected to Brexit, but it’s still been foisted upon us. The principle of consent is about constitutional change only, it’s not about Brexit.”

O’Neill’s fortune as a politician has been to coincide with flux. Northern Ireland was created to have a Protestant majority, but in 2017 unionists lost their majority in the Assembly for the first time. Later this year, census results are expected to show that Catholics outnumber Protestants. “The DUP is hiding behind the protocol [not to enter government] . . . The balance of power has shifted here. The DUP are using the protocol as a proxy because of all those other, bigger political shifts,” says O’Neill. (Her elevation to first minister would be largely symbolic, having the same powers as her previous role as deputy first minister.)

If no government is formed by mid-October, there should by law be another election by mid-January. “Do I have any confidence that the secretary of state [for Northern Ireland], whoever that may be, will call an election? No, I don’t, because these are people who continually find ways to go around the law.”

This is not Stormont’s first stalemate; the last one was precipitated by Sinn Féin. Does the Good Friday Agreement itself need reform, so that the executive can function even when one major party boycotts? O’Neill pushes back. “You have to realise where we’ve come from . . . the nature of this place, the fact that it discriminated against people from the nationalist background. All those checks and balances are necessary.

“The Tory government are attacking the Good Friday Agreement at every turn. Whenever your agreement is under attack, you have to be very, very mindful of opening up the door to changes that could help it unravel. When you pull a thread, sometimes you can unravel the whole thing. What I won’t allow is the unravelling of the Good Friday Agreement.”

After all, it’s the Good Friday Agreement that provides for a poll on reunification, when the British government judges that a majority would vote in favour. O’Neill insists the ground needs to be laid first: “Brexit’s a good case in point as to how not to do a referendum. What does the health service look like, what does education look like, in an all-Ireland context? Our focus is on the Irish government and the fact that they need to plan for constitutional change.”

The other dynamic in Northern Irish politics is the rise of the Alliance party, which has no fixed position on Irish reunification. That bloc, made up largely of voters from a unionist background, is key to O’Neill’s ambitions. “Those are people who have said they are open to being convinced.”

Yet if most unionists cannot accept the protocol, it’s hard to see that they could reconcile themselves to Irish reunification. O’Neill insists that constitutional change would not challenge people’s identity, or their equality under the law. “I, as a nationalist, as a republican, would never want to repeat what was done to the community that I come from.”

What concretely could she offer? Could a reunited Ireland, for example, have a new flag that recognises British identity? “My perspective is that the [Ireland] flag is fine as it is: it represents both traditions. Let’s have that conversation.” Could it be a member of the Commonwealth? “Again, everyone comes with their own perspective . . . I think you can convince people of something better by your every word, by your deeds, by how you govern.”

Sinn Féin has governed, together with the DUP, in fits and starts since 2007, including during the renewable heating initiative, a farcically designed subsidy scheme. Does O’Neill take any blame for the scheme? She does not. “The DUP brought it about, they designed it.” But Sinn Féin lobbied for a delay in the closure of the scheme once flaws were found. O’Neill disagrees.

Does she support UK policy on Ukraine? “Of course.” So does she support increasing military spending to pay for it? “We encourage dialogue in all these things. We take a very different approach obviously in terms of being militarily neutral, but not politically neutral. We support refugees here, thankfully.” Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy would not be enthused.

Only one-third of Northern Ireland adults say they would vote for a united Ireland tomorrow. Many citizens of the Republic of Ireland have their doubts. A Labour government in Westminster, which treats the nationalist community like less of an afterthought, could change the dynamic too. The example of Scotland is that you can come to the brink of constitutional revolution, without quite being able to cross it.

I ask O’Neill if she is ready for reunification to take 30 or 40 years — beyond her own political career? She is once again both undramatic and determined. “It will take as long as it takes. I’m a committed Irish republican. I’m not going to give up.”

Letter in response to this article:

Don’t forget Ireland has a say in reunification too / From Tom O’Sullivan, Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland, New York, NY, US