Northern Ireland’s first minister, the Democratic Unionist party’s Paul Givan, has resigned. What does it mean and will Stormont collapse? What has happened? Givan, who was only appointed first minister eight months ago, announced his departure on Thursday citing the threat the continued Brexit arrangements posed to Northern Ireland institutions that depend on consent between nationalist and unionist communities. DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson says he hopes the action may provide the leverage that the UK needs to break the impasse in ongoing negotiations between the UK and the EU. But why now? The DUP has been threatening to quit Stormont since 9 September last year but at each self-imposed deadline has stepped back from the brink. These repeated warnings, without subsequent action, had led some critics to portray Donaldson as the boy who cried wolf.
Givan’s resignation is being seen as part of a two-step move to finally deliver on the threat. On Wednesday night, the DUP agriculture minister, Edwin Poots, made the first move, ordering a halt from midnight to post-Brexit checks on food and farm products that were brought as part of the Northern Ireland protocol between the UK and EU. It emerged early on Thursday that the checks were continuing. Poots claimed they would be gone in a few days once the senior civil servant in charge had cleared up some unidentified financial issues. What about the Northern Ireland protocol? Checks on food and farm products as well as customs paperwork are mandated by the Northern Ireland protocol, a subsection of the wider Brexit withdrawal agreement brokered personally by Boris Johnson to get the Brexit deal over the line in January 2020. The DUP campaigned for Brexit in the 2016 referendum but has objected from the outset to the arrangements made in the protocol designed to avoid a border on the island of Ireland. The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, who has taken over Brexit negotiations in Brussels from Lord Frost, is in the middle of negotiations with Brussels, with both sides declaring they want a deal before March. The UK is pursuing an interim deal with an elimination of most of the checks on food and farm products followed by a wider solution on government after the May elections. Can the DUP take the law into its own hands? The Irish European commissioner, Mairead McGuinness, has said Poots’s order is a breach of international law. And it seems that the legal risk was also an issue for Donaldson. Only last week the DUP gave Brussels and London until 21 February to come up with a new deal eliminating the checks on goods crossing the Irish sea. What has changed? The DUP is under mounting political pressure at home. Polls show it will lose its position to Sinn Féin as Northern Ireland’s largest party in the May elections with a rival, the Ulster Unionist party, snapping at its heels. Its electoral gamble is that walking out of Stormont will pay off at the polls. Will this trigger a snap Stormont election? If first and deputy first ministers are not renominated within a week, the UK government assumes a legal responsibility to call an assembly election within a “reasonable” timeframe. Legislation that has almost completed its passage through Westminster would significantly extend this “cooling off” period to up to nine months. Most of this is largely academic in the current situation, as Northern Ireland already has a scheduled assembly election in May. At most, Givan’s resignation could see the date for that poll brought forward by several weeks. Does this mean Stormont would collapse? No, but it means its decision-making powers would be severely weakened. The executive or cabinet could not officially meet as its chair and deputy chair would be absent. The most significant item of unfinished business for the current executive is the draft three-year budget. Sinn Féin finance minister Conor Murphy’s spending plan envisages a significant reconfiguration of executive spending priorities to boost investment in the region’s under-pressure health service. A failure to agree a final executive budget would derail those plans to prioritise health spending.