At the entrance to the austere parliament buildings on the Stormont Estate, the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly in the hills above Belfast, security guards greeted visitors with a smile. The hall buzzed with activity: Journalists awaited the end of debates in the House of Commons, government advisers hurried past with files under their arms, schoolchildren waited beneath portraits of the one-time unionist (pro-British) leader Ian Paisley and the nationalist (pro-reunification) Martin McGuinness, two former giants of local politics. The atmosphere was optimistic at the beginning of March, when the Northern Ireland Assembly finally resumed work after two years of paralysis due to a boycott by the unionists, unhappy that Brexit had weakened ties with London by introducing a customs border in the Irish Sea.
On January 30, Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), agreed to return to Stormont in exchange for a £3.3 billion (approx. €3.87 billion) cheque from the UK government for Northern Ireland and assurances that the Windsor Framework, the agreement between Brussels and London on the province's post-Brexit status, will limit customs controls with the rest of the UK.
But the return to political normalcy is not quite as it seems. For the first time in the history of this nation of the United Kingdom, born of the partition of Ireland in 1921 and conceived as a Protestant sanctuary, the leadership of the executive has fallen to Sinn Féin, Ireland's main pro-reunification party. The former political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) came out on top in the Northern Ireland regional elections of May 2022.
Michelle O'Neill, vice president of the party, which works across both the north and south of the island, can finally exercise her responsibilities as first minister. The 47-year-old experienced politician's room for maneuver is certainly limited: She can't make any decisions without her deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, a 44-year-old DUP lawyer and former adviser to Ian Paisley – unionist and nationalist MPs are also expected to co-legislate in the Assembly. But symbols are important in this part of the UK still marked by community rivalries, 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement put an end to decades of conflict between Protestants (unionists) and Catholics (nationalists).
Sinn Féin's strong position at Stormont is all the more important given that in the Republic of Ireland, despite a recent setback, the party remains ahead in the polls, just a few months ahead of the general election due to be held no later than February 2025. Its president, 54-year-old Mary Lou McDonald, has a good chance of becoming taoiseach ("prime minister"). This charismatic politician, from a middle-class background with no links to the armed struggle, has focused her discourse on the housing crisis, the main concern of the Irish people. In a republic governed for almost a century by two center-right parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, young voters are voting for Sinn Féin without worrying too much about its historical links with the IRA, still considered toxic by their parents.
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