Belfast’s city council has shown what can be achieved if tribal differences put aside
AFTER last month’s collapse of the Stormont talks, this is the right time to tell a rare political good news story from the North: how Belfast City Council has learned to run its affairs through the kind of relatively harmonious inter-party relationships that appear to be almost completely absent from the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly’s mistrust-fuelled proceedings.
In the 1980s, when I was a reporter in Belfast, the council’s meetings were notorious for sectarian squabbling and hatemongering – endless DUP calls to ban Sinn Féin; Sinn Féin descriptions of the Union flag as the ‘butcher’s apron’; proceedings sometimes having to be suspended for fear of physical violence; and even one DUP councillor, George Seawright (afterwards expelled from the party and later killed by a fringe republican group), calling for the “incineration” of Catholics who objected to the British national anthem.
At one meeting in 1985, I listened to that arch-Brexiteer and climate change denier Sammy Wilson, soon to become the DUP’s first lord mayor, condemning the council’s project to build a concert hall (which turned out to be its most inspired public investment of the past 30 years) as “a fraud, a white elephant, with no prospect of enriching this city”.
Fast forward to Belfast City Council today. What a transformation!
No single party – or, more important, coalition of unionist or nationalist parties – has a majority. Sinn Féin holds 19 of the 60 seats, the DUP 13 and Alliance eight.
Smaller numbers are held by the Ulster Unionists, SDLP, left-ofcentre Progressive Unionist Party, Greens and People Before Profit.
This multiplicity has put deal-making at the heart of the council’s business, a process which as often as not involves the more centrist parties, and is reflected in the compromise decisions which are the stuff of the city’s politics.
At its two most powerful committees – the Strategic Policy and Resources Committee and the City Growth and Regeneration Committee – officials work hard to persuade the councillors to reach agreement by consensus.
Eighty per cent of the time they succeed and decisions do not have to go to a vote of the full council.
One senior official says that some time in the past 15 to 20 years most councillors, including from the DUP and Sinn Féin, realised the best way to provide efficient public services was by agreement.
They use a party leaders forum and other informal working groups, where the politicians and city officials have preliminary discussions and try to iron out any difficult issues.
“They realise they will get nothing done if they vote on purely tribal lines,” says this man. He says Belfast has been blessed with effective chief executives over the past two decades, notably Peter McNaney and the current incumbent Suzanne Wylie, backed up by excellent staff.
He pays tribute to the councillors, most of whom live in the communities they represent, for a common “willingness to compromise to get things done”.
Unlike in the past, committee memberships, committee chairs and other post-of-responsibility and council appointments to outside public bodies are decided by extremely complex and ultra-fair European voting systems like D’Hondt and Sainte-Lague.
The days of the Ulster Unionist monolith automatically handing out jobs to their cronies are a distant memory. Unlike in the assembly, no councillor is required to define herself or himself in sectarian terms as “unionist”, “nationalist” or “other”.
There are no petitions of concern to stymie decision-making. For most of the time, councillors’ minds are focused on practical services to their constituents, rather than divisive national or tribal issues like flags and language and legacies of the past.
Loyalist violence following the council’s 2012 decision to fly the Union flag on only 17 days a year – in line with elsewhere in the UK – gave the council an entirely unfair image of continued deep division over such issues.
What seems to have happened is the overall politics have become more progressive and less conservative in the past decade.
There is a greater degree of agreement – sometimes in united opposition to the DUP – among the majority, whether they’re
republican or social democratic or progressive (eg. Alliance and the small Progressive Unionist Party). For example, in 2015 the council voted in support of marriage equality.
Another crucial change is the council now has more women (more than a third, compared to under 10pc 20 years ago) and more younger members.
The council has set up the Shared City Partnership to involve business, trade union, church, voluntary sector, social care and housing groups in advising it on taking forward its Good Relations (ie, relations between Protestant, Catholic and other communities) policies for Belfast. It has worked hard – if not always successfully – to keep the problem of July 11 bonfires in loyalist areas under control. It has persuaded loyalist groups, in particular, to replace intimidating paramilitary murals with more muted representations of culture and community.
In all this, the Alliance Party, as the third largest (with eight out of 60 seats, compared with eight out of 90 in the Northern Ireland Assembly) has played a key role.
One of its younger councillors, Emmet McDonough-Brown, puts it like this: “The broader the consensus between the parties, and the wider the civic conversation among the people of Belfast, the more stable any agreement, and the more effective and long-lasting any outcome, will be.
“No party has overall control of the council so Sinn Féin and the DUP can achieve nothing on their own: they have to engage with the other parties. Alliance often finds it is holding the balance of power: a strong and privileged position. We will work with both the DUP and Sinn Féin depending on the issue. That gives us a chance to advance our core aim: to build a shared and reconciled city.
“Sinn Féin and the DUP are still the largest parties, but there are lots of people in the city – young people, women, minority ethnic groups in particular – who fall outside that duopoly.
“We are committed to giving those people a voice. Anybody who chooses to make Belfast their home is an equal citizen.
“It’s a good position to be in – that there are people coming in from outside who want to make Belfast their home. It’s not so long ago that large numbers of people just wanted to get out of it.”
There is a lesson here for the British and Irish governments.
Instead of relying on the two old enemies – the DUP and Sinn Féin – to settle their probably irreconcilable differences, they should learn from Belfast’s experience and more fully include the Ulster Unionists, the SDLP and Alliance – maybe even the Greens and People Before Profit – in future Stormont talks.