Sinn Féin has officially joined the ranks of the political elite panicking over the structural fragility of the Northern Ireland Assembly. With the release of their "Building Better Politics" document, First Minister Michelle O’Neill wants us to believe that the key to a stable Northern Ireland is stripping political parties of their power to walk away from the table.
They call it stabilizing the institutions. They call it removing the ever-present threat of collapse.
It is actually an act of political self-preservation disguised as progressive governance.
The conventional wisdom in Belfast and London is that when Stormont collapses, democracy fails. The lazy consensus among political commentators is that the institutional vetoes built into the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement are bugs that need to be patched. If we can just pass the baton to another party when the largest nationalist or unionist faction refuses to nominate a First or Deputy First Minister, everything will run like clockwork. If we just stop a single party from blocking the election of a Stormont Speaker, the wheels of government will spin uninterrupted.
This view is fundamentally flawed. It misdiagnoses the entire mechanics of power-sharing.
The threat of collapse is not a design flaw in the Northern Ireland Assembly. It is the only real lever of accountability that exists in a mandatory, forced coalition. Remove the right to walk out, and you do not create a functioning government. You create a permanent, unaccountable oligarchy where bad governance is insulated from consequences.
The Mirage of the Forced Coalition
I have watched political administrations across Europe blow millions trying to engineer stability through bureaucratic handcuffs. It never works. When you remove the escape hatch from a forced coalition, you do not force the occupants to cooperate; you simply ensure they fight endlessly inside a locked room while the house burns down around them.
Look at the mechanics of what Sinn Féin is actually proposing. Under the current rules, the Northern Ireland Executive relies on a delicate, agonizing balance of cross-community consent. If the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) or Sinn Féin walks out—as both have done, resulting in shutdowns from 2017 to 2020 and 2022 to 2024—the government grinds to a halt.
Sinn Féin's new master plan suggests that if one party refuses to play, the opportunity to nominate passes down the line. It sounds reasonable on paper. In practice, it completely dismantles the core premise of the peace process: that governance requires the active consent of the chosen representatives of both major traditions.
Imagine a scenario where the largest unionist party walks away due to a fundamental constitutional dispute, and the system simply bypasses them to install a smaller party to fill the seat. You have not saved the government. You have created an administration that lacks democratic legitimacy in the eyes of half the population. That is a recipe for civil unrest, not stability.
Efficiency is the Wrong Metric for Northern Ireland
The standard argument for these reforms focuses heavily on institutional delivery. Organizations like the Constitution Unit have pointed out that Northern Ireland faces deep economic and social crises. The health service is underperforming compared to the rest of the UK, infrastructure gaps are halting housebuilding, and productivity is lagging. The blame is laid squarely on the fact that devolved government was absent for five of the last nine years.
The premise here is wrong. The assumption is that if Stormont stays open, public services get better.
The data tells a completely different story. Even when Stormont is up and running, its record on public policy delivery is abysmal. Mandatory power-sharing creates an environment of perpetual gridlock. Because ministers from opposing parties cannot be fired by a single Prime Minister or Premier, the Executive operates as a series of independent fiefdoms. Decisions are made by horse-trading and lowest-common-denominator compromise, not by strategic vision.
When you remove the threat of collapse, you remove the only incentive these independent fiefdoms have to ever reach a compromise. If a minister knows their party cannot be kicked out of government and the institutions cannot fall, they have zero incentive to bend on controversial policy issues. Gridlock becomes permanent, but it is masked by the illusion of an open building.
The Hidden Risk of Normalizing Stormont
Sinn Féin also wants to "normalize" the appointment of the justice minister and grant equal status to MLAs who designate as "Other" rather than Unionist or Nationalist. While this appeals to the growing middle-ground electorate represented by the Alliance Party, it ignores the structural reality of why these protections exist.
The system was designed to be friction-heavy. It was intentionally built to make unilateral action impossible. By attempting to streamline the process, Sinn Féin is trying to turn a peace-management mechanism into a standard western democracy. But Northern Ireland is not a standard western democracy. It remains a deeply divided society where political designation reflects existential constitutional positions.
If you dilute the power of designation and bypass the major blocks, you undermine the very trust that allows the assembly to sit in the first place. The downside of my contrarian view is obvious: it means accepting that Northern Ireland will occasionally have no government at all. It means accepting periods of direct rule from London or prolonged political stagnation.
But that instability is honest. It reflects the real, unresolved divisions of the country. A collapsed Stormont is a glaring, public admission that the political parties have failed to find common ground. It forces the British and Irish governments to intervene, and it forces the electorate to confront the reality of who they are voting for.
A permanently open, un-collapsable Stormont that delivers nothing but bureaucratic stagnation is far more dangerous. It breeds cynicism. It teaches the public that whether they vote or not, the same parties will sit in the same offices, collecting the same salaries, while public services rot.
The Real Question We Should Be Asking
Instead of asking "How do we stop Stormont from collapsing?" the media and the political establishment should be asking: "Why are we so terrified of a political system reflecting its actual environment?"
The obsession with structural reform is a distraction from the real issue: a total lack of political will to govern effectively. No amount of rulebook tinkering, transparency protocols for the Speaker, or devolution of fiscal powers will fix a government where the participants fundamentally distrust each other's long-term objectives.
Sinn Féin’s proposals are not about building better politics. They are about locking in their current position as the largest party and ensuring that no unionist walkout can ever strip them of the First Minister's office again. It is a tactical play wrapped in the language of civic duty.
Stop trying to fix the structural plumbing of Stormont. The leak isn't in the pipes; it's in the water.
