In Northern Ireland, ‘a Protestant state’ finally has a Catholic leader

Sinn Féin, as it neared overtaking the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), triggered a three-year collapse in 2017. Soon it became the unionists’ turn to sabotage Stormont, when the launch of new post-Brexit trade rules made it easier to trade with Ireland, an EU member, than with the rest of the U.K. — a shock to unionists who had backed Brexit on the risky assumption it would make that land border with the south more real again.

The DUP withdrew its first minister exactly two years ago Saturday, a step that left the rest of the executive limping along until its legally required collapse eight months later. The DUP ensured it couldn’t be saved because, after Sinn Féin achieved its breakthrough victory in the assembly election of May 2022, the DUP used its position as the largest unionist party to stop the new assembly from functioning at all.

That DUP blockade finally was lifted Saturday on the back of two painstakingly negotiated deals: the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework agreement that eliminated many, but not all, of the checks and restrictions on British goods arriving at Northern Ireland ports; and this week’s DUP-U.K. Safeguarding the Union agreement that aims to strengthen Northern Ireland’s economic place in the U.K. and cut Windsor-level checks at Northern Irish ports more quickly. Perhaps critically, unionists at Stormont will gain a new ability to delay or limit, if not prevent, the local rollout of new EU goods laws.

U.S. President Joe Biden, who as a senator helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement, praised the end of the two-year standoff in Belfast. “I welcome and strongly support the restoration of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly at Stormont, and I commend the political leaders of Northern Ireland for taking the necessary steps to restore these core institutions,” Biden said in a statement.

On Saturday, when the Northern Ireland Assembly jointly elected O’Neill as first minister and the Democratic Unionists’ Emma Little-Pengelly as deputy first minister, the shared sense of relief could be felt in every quarter of the house — except from Jim Allister, the lone unionist die-hard in the 90-member chamber opposed to working with Sinn Féin in any circumstances.

“Smashing Sinn Féin” was the DUP’s policy until 2007, too. But Little-Pengelly stressed her willingness to work with O’Neill now that the DUP — or at least a majority of its members — had accepted the revised Brexit trade deal on offer.