Northern Ireland’s main pro-UK party the DUP said Tuesday that it endorses a deal with the UK government allowing it
to end a long-running boycott of the province’s devolved government.
An internal party vote to back the deal at a closed-door meeting in Lisburn, near Belfast, forms a basis to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly after nearly two years, said Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Jeffrey Donaldson.
“The result was clear, the DUP has been decisive, I have been mandated to move forward,” Donaldson told reporters around 1:00 am (GMT) following a marathon five-hour meeting and vote.
But ending the DUP’s veto on restoring the power-sharing executive at Stormont is conditional on legislation being passed by the UK government and a final agreement on a timetable, he said.
The details of the deal will be published soon, Donaldson said without giving further information.
“I believe that the proposals will bring forward measures that are good for Northern Ireland, and that will restore our place in the United Kingdom and its internal market,” he said.
UK Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said he was “pleased” that the DUP had accepted that deal, and that London “will stick” to its terms.
“I now believe that all the conditions are in place for the Assembly to return,… and I hope to be able to finalise this deal with the political parties as soon as possible,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
– ‘Optimistic’ –
If approved, the deal would allow the DUP and the nationalist pro-Irish Sinn Fein to elect a speaker for the Assembly as early as next week.
Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill is expected to become first minister, the first time a republican has held the post after her party overtook the DUP in the last Assembly election in May 2022.
Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein, said in a statement she was “optimistic… that we will see the northern institutions back up and running before the February 8 deadline” set by London.
The DUP walked out of the executive in February 2022 in protest against post- Brexit trade arrangements for the province called the “Windsor Framework”.
That deal was brokered between the United Kingdom and the European Union to address issues with a previous agreement, the Northern Ireland Protocol.
According to hardline unionists, the amended Windsor Framework rules don’t go far enough to protect Northern Ireland’s status within the United Kingdom, and keep the region partly under EU law and on a path toward Irish unity.
During protracted talks with London, the DUP sought to overhaul the rules, including lessening the amount of checks on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
The Assembly’s mothballing paralysed Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions and fuelled political uncertainty and industrial unrest in the region, with public service provision crumbling as budgets were put in cold storage.
Earlier this month, 16 public service worker unions coordinated a mass strike over pay, the biggest industrial action seen in the British region for decades.
London has offered the region a o3.3 billion ($4.2 billion) financial package to solve public service pay disputes on condition that Stormont returns.
