Deadlocked Northern Ireland set for snap elections

VOTERS in Northern Ireland will go to the polls on March 2 in a snap election that was forced by the main Catholic party, Sinn Fein, after the collapse of a regional government in which Catholics and Protestants shared power.

The election will be held in the shadow of uncertainty over Britain’s planned withdrawal from the European Union, a move that is broadly unpopular in Northern Ireland. Though a majority of Britons voted in a June referendum for the Brexit, as the withdrawal is known, the vote in Northern Ireland was 56 per- cent to 44 percent against. Many in the region fear that security and customs checks will be reimposed along the border with Ireland, harming the economy, escalating tensions and threatening a return to sectarian conflict.

Sinn Fein hopes to use the snap election to gain clout and weaken its unionist opponents, especially the Democratic Unionist Party, which holds the most seats in the regional Assembly, with Sinn Fein in second place. The unionists are allied in London with the Conservative Party, which is pursuing Brexit, while Sinn Fein wants Northern Ireland to stay in the EU and eventually reunite with Ireland.

The political crisis in the North was precipitated last week when Sinn Fein’s leader, Martin McGuinness, resigned as deputy first minister. Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended decades of sectarian conflict in the region, if Sinn Fein did not nominate a replacement for McGuinness within seven days, a new election would have to be called. The party let that deadline pass on Monday.

The stated reason for his resignation was to protest what he called the mishandling of a regional renewable energy program. The program had been set up by the first minister, Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionists, and ran hundreds of millions of pounds over budget.

Critics have accused Foster and her team of corruption and mismanagement of the energy program, and Sinn Fein has demanded that she step aside while the program is investigated; she has refused.