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Her name is Michelle O’Neill, she’s 47 years old, and on Saturday she made history by becoming head of government in the British province of Northern Ireland. It’s historic because Michelle O’Neill belongs to the Sinn Fein party, a republican party with Catholic roots, which has long been considered the political wing of the IRA, the Irish Republican Army.
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So, while the world is being torn apart by territorial, identity and religious wars, Northern Ireland has steadily overcome one obstacle after another since the Good Friday Peace Agreement 25 years ago. This agreement put an end to decades of civil war between Catholic republicans and Protestant unionists.
Michelle O’Neill’s history
Michelle O’Neill’s own father was imprisoned for his IRA membership, and one of her cousins was killed by the British army. In her inaugural speech, she stressed that her parents’ and grandparents’ generations would never have believed this day possible.
The divisions have not disappeared, but they are being managed politically; according to the power-sharing formula worked out in the Good Friday Accords, negotiated under the aegis of an American mediator, former Democratic Senator George Mitchell.
Alongside O’Neill, Emma Little-Pengely was sworn in as deputy head of the Unionist government. While O’Neill’s father was in prison for the IRA, Emma Little-Pengely’s father had been arrested in Paris for attempting to procure arms for the Protestant paramilitaries. Today, the two women share power without abandoning their convictions.
O’Neill had originally been due to take office in 2022, following the election victory of Sinn Fein, which came out on top for the first time. But the DUP unionist party had boycotted the institutions in protest of London’s post-Brexit arrangements. A vote in the British Parliament last week ended the boycott.
Middle East analogies
The question of Ireland’s unity will not go away. The new head of government has made it clear that she must first deal with economic and everyday issues. She repeats it in every speech, in every interview: this is the key to the survival of the current balance.
It’s not enough to win a referendum
But when the British government declared this weekend that the question of Irish reunification would not arise for “decades,” O’Neill politely pushed back. In a television interview, she said that Ireland had entered “a decisive decade.” In fact, she prefers to speak of “the north of Ireland,” rather than “Northern Ireland.”
Polls show 40% of voters in favor of union with the South, 40% against, and 20% undecided. Not necessarily enough to win a referendum. But for the time being, the peace agreements are back on track, and the story continues.
After Ireland, George Mitchell, the American envoy, was appointed by Barack Obama to try again, this time in the Middle East — that didn’t work, but the Irish example shows that hope must never vanish.
