 Hello and welcome to today's IIA webinar. My name is Dr. Barry Kulfer, the Director of Research at the IIA, and we're delighted to be joined today by Sam McBride, Northern Ireland Editor at the Belfast Telegraph, who's been generous enough to take time out of his no doubt hectic schedule to speak to us. Sam McBride is the Northern Ireland Editor at the Belfast Telegraph and is only independent. He also writes about Northern Ireland for the Economist and was previously political editor of the Belfast newsletter. His excellent 2009 book burned the inside story of the cash for ash scandal and Northern Ireland's secret of new elite became a Sunday Times Best Editor and was nominated for the Christopher Eward Biggs Memorial Prize. He has a regular presence on radio and television, giving analysis of events which impact on Northern Irish politics. Today, Sam will speak to us for about 20 minutes or so about the outcomes and implications of the Northern Ireland Assembly elections and the implications of which seem to change by the hour. Attendees will also have the opportunity to put their own questions to Sam before we wrap up at around 2 PM. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. Please do feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them or as many of them as we can once Sam has finished his presentation. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. Please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IEEA. Without further ado, many thanks again for being with us, Sam, and I hand you the floor. Thanks very much, Barry, and good afternoon, everyone from Belfast. I'm going to try to answer five of my own questions here at the start and you will then be able to ask me proper questions to which I do not have the answers at this point. The storm of the election, which we've just had, has made headlines around the world. We've had the world's media in Belfast both before and after. It's had all sorts of dramatic, very dramatic and seismic outcomes we are told by some of those paper headlines. But is this election really as historic as has been made out or is it actually exaggerated? I think that what this election has done is clarify that Northern Ireland is now a land of three tribes rather than two. That is something which has been really getting clearer over recent years. It has been the clear trend since about 2007 when Martin McGinnis and Ian Paisley went into power sharing together. At that point, we also started to see when we look back now at the graph of how unionism and nationalism and those who are not defined by either of those two labels have performed. That is the point at which they start to move upwards gradually, incrementally, but really clearly. And when you plot it out over a long period of time, it is very stark. So in this election, it's not that that is a dramatically new event, but the fact that the others in the center ground of Northern Ireland politics are continuing to get bigger, they are continuing to put on more seats, particularly the MI Alliance Party, which is now really the dominant force in the center ground, which has not just eaten into unionism and nationalism, but has also eaten into other parties in its territory, into the Green Party in particular, taking both of its seats. That is a really significant moment, because these are the people who ultimately will decide Northern Ireland's future. There are three minorities now. There is unionism on roughly about 40% of the vote. There's nationalism on roughly about 40% of the vote. And then you've got these others in the middle with something like 20%. And it will not be those parties which will decide the outcome of a future border poll, but it will be their voters. So it's not about their voters being told by those parties how to vote. It may well be that in that instance, they will not say anything at all and they will sit on the fence. But those people are the people who, smart unionists and smart nationalists are trying to court and are trying to work out how can they strategize not to maybe get them into their camp in a storming election where they vote for Sinn Féin or the DUP or whatever it might be, but how do they appeal to them at some future point in a border poll? That's the big strategic prize now for politics in Northern Ireland. This has also been an election which has symbolically humbled unionism. Unionism lost its storming majority in 2017. That was the snap election after the cash for ash scandal. It was at the point where we now know Martin McGinnis was dying, where there was a change in the Sinn Féin leadership and in its strategy and its long-term approach to storming, which until that point had been really treating it as something that was sacrosanct and suddenly it said, actually, storming disney on the table as a negotiating tactic and it's something which we're prepared to haggle over. That was very popular within their electorate. There was a lot of distaste at Arling Foster, a lot of distaste at the RHI scandal, lots of unease within nationalism at Brexit, which had happened the year before, the vote for Brexit had happened the year before and that loss of storming's majority was a really significant, a really dramatic moment. And yet at that point, as somebody who reported that and who grasped the significance of it, even I didn't think that it was the point at which unionism's majority was probably never coming back. Unionism had gone from a position where it had 49% of the vote in 2016. Just before Brexit, there was an assembly election and things had never looked more secure for the union, arguably in the history of Northern Ireland at that point. And in the 2017 election, just a year later, less than a year later, the unionist vote went from 49% to 46%, but in terms of seats that had a much more dramatic impact. And when we look at things now, 46% actually looks like a very healthy percentage for unionism. Unionism is now down around 42%. It has not only lost its storming majority as a designation, it has lost the post of First Minister, it is no longer one of its main party, the ADUK is no longer the biggest party in storming. And so there is a continued weakening of the unionist position there. This election has also put pressure on the Good Friday Agreement structures, which have been creaking for a very long time. And I think that the growth of the others in the center ground is something which is really going to push reform there. It may not happen now, but I think that it is something which is now completely inevitable. It's just a question of does it happen now or does it happen perhaps when storming falls apart the next time? And the final significant element of this election are the geopolitical implications of this, both for the UK's relationship with the European Union and for what that means for wider politics across Europe. There is a clear hardening of unionism's position in this election. Unionism is both shrinking, as I've said, but it's also hardening. And that complicates things in relation to the Northern Ireland protocol. And we've seen that yesterday and we'll be seeing that over coming weeks and over the next year or so. But it's also important to say that while all of that is true and all of that is significant, the issue which has most dominated the headlines, the ascent of Sinn Féin to the top of storming is a wholly symbolic thing. It doesn't give Sinn Féin any extra power. It means that Michelle O'Neill can rub out the deputy in front of her title. She can say she's the first minister and despite lots of speculation, which was fueled very unwisely from the DUP's perspective by their refusal to say that they would go into government with Sinn Féin on that issue. I think it's very clear that the DUP will go in on that basis because they have nowhere else to go once the protocol is removed as an issue, if indeed that can be sorted. But once that happens, yes, it's a very symbolic moment, but it doesn't actually do anything to resolve either the problems with storming as a system of government or from Sinn Féin's perspective, it doesn't do anything to advance the cause of Irish unity. It does not in any way persuade people who are the bloc in Irish unity, people in Northern Ireland who up to now have not supported that, it doesn't do anything to persuade those people. The second question I want to answer is what does the protocol mean for Northern Ireland at this point and where is it likely to be going? And I think that there are really two aspects to this. There are the economic aspects and there are the political aspects. In economic terms, there are people who are doing very well out of the protocol. There are companies that are making lots of money. Some of that is quite crude in some ways. It's quite simplistic. It's as straightforward as Sainsbury supermarket is no longer able to bring certain products across the Irish sea border from Great Britain. And so therefore they have to turn to a local supplier for those. So that's good for that local supplier. But it is something which is not necessarily making a really dramatic impact on the Northern Ireland economy. There are more sophisticated and more significant economic aspects to this, benefits to this for companies such as companies in the pharma manufacturing sector, some of the advanced manufacturing companies in Northern Ireland, where having a food in both the single market for the European Union and the UK market is going to be a significant advantage. And we've seen some significant and some big investment by some of those pharma companies in particular. But the big question, which is curtailing some of that, I think at this point is the uncertainty as to whether what currently exists in the protocol is actually going to be the long-term position here. But that benefit to Northern Ireland economically is counterbalanced by the really breathtaking scale of a lot of the paperwork which now faces companies who are importing products from Great Britain into Northern Ireland. There are rules here, which would normally apply to a container ship or a container coming from China or India or Brazil or wherever it might be, which are now applying to single items or single pallets coming from Great Britain into Northern Ireland. And when you talk to companies, I think there is a gulf here between how small companies are finding that and how big companies are finding that. If you're a supermarket or a big company in that sort of area, you're able to take the hit to a certain extent, particularly if Northern Ireland is quite a small part of your wider UK or wider continental market, you're able to hire the best lawyers to understand how this operates for you, how you can take advantage of the rules. You're able to hire the best lobbyists to try to get around some of these rules. And we've seen the UK supermarkets in particular benefit from that with lots of these grace periods where they've basically exempted themselves from lots of the pain that would hit them most squarely. If you're a small shop or you're a small retailer, you don't have that. And I think there is going to be this growing problem here that there is a disproportionate impact on the small person. That's going to have implications for competition in Northern Ireland. And it's also going to have very significant implications for consumer choice in Northern Ireland if the current situation persists for the long haul here. And I think that the most significant aspect of the talk about the protocol is that as it sits at the moment, huge chunks of it have not been implemented. I think that talking to both the EU and the British government and to business, the likelihood is that lots of what hasn't been implemented will never be implemented. There is actually growing political support for that from parties which are on paper supporting the protocol. They actually don't want lots of it to be implemented because now that people realise how particularly complex that would be, there is a realisation that actually some of it is just unimplementable. It could not be done. And so there is now an argument, I think, not so much about whether the protocol as it exists on paper and in law is going to be implemented. But how much of it should be kept and how that process should be overseen? Should it be done unilaterally by the British government? There is clear consensus from the parties who support the protocol in Northern Ireland that should not be the case, that that's dangerous, that that undermines the rule of law, et cetera. But I think that there is much more consensus here actually on the final outcome than might be apparent from some of the rhetoric here. But the second aspect of this is more complicated. This was never simply about filthy looker. It was never simply about economics, about trade rules for a lot of people. This was a fundamentally constitutional question. It was about where the border went. That cut both ways. It was very significant to nationalists if that was going to go at the land border. It was equally significant to unionists if it was going to go in the Irish Sea. I think that has been very poorly understood by the Irish government or if it has been understood, they have misrepresented that quite significantly. And there has been this sense that the only way to protect the Good Friday Agreement is to effectively adopt what is the nationalist interpretation of where the border can go. It can't go at the land border, but it can go at the sea border. I think the difficulty now is that the British government is moving in what Liz Truss said yesterday to accept the unionist interpretation of that and say, well, actually, there is this significant constitutional problem now. It's not just about us dealing with the practical difficulties, but that cuts both ways because that then means that if the British government is saying, as she said in the House of Commons yesterday, that there must be unionist consent as a minority for what comes out of this process, it means that there has to be nationalist consent for what comes out of this as well. And so this is a very messy and far from straightforward situation whichever way this is decided. And I think that there has been a profound destabilization, obviously, of Northern Ireland politics. It is far more rancorous than it was before Brexit. It is far more uncertain. There is far more of a sense from both unionism and nationalism that there is a lot to play for here, that they can make significant gains and they can also lose significant things if they get this wrong. And so that really has put things on edge in a way that was not the case prior to the vote in 2016. The third question is around whether the DUP can compromise on this protocol issue and get back into the executive. And the short answer to that I think is absolutely yes, definitively yes, they can compromise. I think if you look at their documentation around this, it is basically written to allow for compromise, but that doesn't mean it can come away with a fig leaf on this. It doesn't mean that their concerns are either not genuine or that even if they're not genuine, that they can spin something which is not serious as being very fundamental and representing real change. What we have seen in this election is hugely significant. We have had the most hard line stance by a unionist party in decades going into an election. They have gone into this election asking for an explicit mandate not to go into government unless they get what they want on the protocol. And what they want on the protocol is not some like touch changes. It's about, it is in their terms getting rid of the RAC border in its entirety. Yes, there is an argument around whether that involves the entire protocol going or whether it involves changing the protocol. I think that's quite a semantic argument which really doesn't matter. What they have said in simple terms which the person in the street will understand and which their voters will understand in these terms is that the RAC border, as it is understood, as it makes a significant barrier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, must go. And that's a very high barrier for them to clear, a very high hurdle for them to clear now. And even having gone into this with such a tough message, if you like, such a recalcitrant message, they have seen huge leaching of their vote to an even more hard line party, the traditional unionist voice of Jim Allister. He took 66,000 votes in this election. That's a really extraordinary hole for somebody who in himself is very capable and is very widely respected on the right of unionism. But even there, there was not any great enthusiasm for lots of his candidates. They were quite low profile. There were not big figures in many cases and they got really significant votes, really surprising votes in areas where they had no hope of getting seats. So what we have seen here and what the DUP has listened to in this election is a message that basically says, unionist voters who are leaving it are going to a more hard line alternative. And the Austrian unionist party, which, while it opposes the protocol, is more pragmatic on this and certainly is not saying that they would pull down Stormwind over this. They would go back in tomorrow, regardless of what happens with the protocol. They're the party that is losing support. The DUP is not losing its vote to there. It's losing it to the right. And so if it does not get significant gains on this, I think it's in really perilous territory. The next question is, what happens if the British government actually does ditch the protocol and whether that's in all but name or whether it is literally getting rid of the protocol, I don't think really matters. The first thing there, I think, is that Sinn Féin have been remarkably coy as to what they would do in those circumstances. I was at the Sinn Féin manifesto launch about three or four weeks ago during the campaign and Mary Lou McDonald was asked this question, would you then boycott Stormwind? Would you then say, we're not going into the executive? And she didn't answer the question. And I think that was quite telling. I don't think that necessarily means that Sinn Féin knows how it would respond to that, but they're certainly not ruling that out. It would be quite difficult for Sinn Féin to do that because they have been really forthright in their very clear denunciation of the DUP for not going into government over this issue, saying that it's nowhere near as important as the DUP is making out and actually health and education and all of those things, such as the cost of living crisis are more important. But I think the reality is that both sides here care about this a great deal. It was easier, I suppose, for Sinn Féin to say that when they thought that they had won this argument to a certain extent that the protocol was going to stay. If it's actually going to go, I think that's much harder. And I think that the alternative here where the British government actually goes back on its word where it again, basically betrays unionism and having said very tough things in the House of Commons yesterday, it actually doesn't do very much or certainly doesn't do what it said it would do. I think it's going to be very dangerous on the other side. We're likely to see things move onto the streets. We're likely to see protests. We're likely to see lawless paramilitaries get more involved in this. And I think that there is a very long history of militancy within both unionism and nationalism at various points, but particularly within unionism over recent decades, there has been often an incoherent militancy, even at points where it's not logically in their interests, where it's not going to change things, where it may actually drive people away from unionism. We have seen in things like the flag protests and even what happened last year in parts of Northern Ireland where there was quite serious rioting and loyalist areas, that it really doesn't necessarily stop that happening. There is a sort of in really on clear and incoherent lashing out, which I think is likely to be a pretty visceral reaction to this if there is another betrayal by the British government. But I think that in terms of the DUP, if they do go back into government and if they are betrayed by Boris Johnson, I think that is potentially the sort of thing that is the end of the DUP as a serious political force. They were warned during the Brexit process not to trust Boris Johnson. They disregarded those warnings. They put him into par in Downing Street. They brought him to their party conference. They lauded him, they listened to him. And throughout this process, they were really clearly saying to people, you don't know what you're talking about. We know what we're talking about. And there was sort of arrogant swagger, which clearly was wrong in hindsight and in many ways was wrong in foresight as well. And I think that if they do that again, having been betrayed on multiple occasions, that is something which potentially for a party which is so wounded, which is so driven by internal contradictions and so lacking in ideological coherency is the sort of thing that potentially is just the end of the party as a serious political force in Northern Ireland. The final question I want to address is, is Northern Ireland doomed? Is it the end for Northern Ireland? Is Irish unity inevitable? And I think the answer to that as far as I'm concerned is not in the slightest. I think the surge here in this election was for a party in the centre ground, the Alliance Party, which was explicitly saying, let's basically park talk of a border pole. Let's not say we're never going to talk about it. Let's not say that we'll never have a border pole, but it's not on their radar as an immediate concern. And even for Sinn Féin, which saw its vote go up slightly and to incredible levels. I mean, when you look at the Sinn Féin vote of 250,000 people, it's an extraordinary vote. It's really a dramatic shoe of their electoral might in Northern Ireland. But it was in response to a campaign from Sinn Féin that was far more about things like inflation than it was about Irish unity. And some of that was tactical by Sinn Féin. They were not wanting to energize unionism. They were not wanting to wind up unionism at a point where they knew that they were ahead in the polls. They just needed to play things safe. But I think it was about more than that. I think it was about a realisation that even within Sinn Féin's voter base, there are people there who, yes, are very enthusiastic about having a border pole tomorrow or next week, but there are others who are much more cautious. They want to plan for it. They want to think about it carefully. They want to be clear about what sort of New Ireland they actually want because they're not quite clear right now. And I think that if there had been a campaign from Sinn Féin here, which had put Irish unity as a much more urgent and pressing matter, I think their vote would not have been 250,000. I think that that was a recognition that there are other concerns that are driving people in the more immediate term. And I think that when I say that Irish unity is not inevitable and it's not on the current horizon, that is really contrary, I suppose, to the zeitgeist, which not just within nationalism, but even among lots of gloomy unionists and lots of unionists are fairly perpetually gloomy about their prospects, says that there are really grave concerns here for the future of Northern Ireland from a unionist perspective. And there are reasons for really significant hope from a nationalist perspective. In some ways, both of those things are true, but I think that they feel to take account of the longer game here, the bigger picture. If you go back to 2016, Northern Ireland had never been more secure within the union. We've seen in the space of a few years, and actually it was true within the space of a few months there, that one vote, one big decision turned that on its head, something which seemed completely clear and something which had led to nationalism losing support, which had led to Sinn Féin losing support, which had really got nationalists very worried in Northern Ireland about where they were going. They were, in some ways, worried that Sinn Féin had been outfoxed by the DUP, that they had got stuck inside a stormed system that wasn't working for them, and that they were trapped within a Northern Ireland system that, yes, was much fairer for nationalists. It was something that was far more tolerable than what had gone before in the 1950s or 60s, but that wasn't what they wanted. They wanted something that was much grander than that, a far more significant political goal. And actually, I think that lesson, to a certain extent, has been forgotten by both nationalists and unionists. They look at the current situation and they think that that will persist forever. And actually there is every possibility that something is fine that is a compromise in the protocol, that things do settle down, that if the protocol actually does become in some way the best of both worlds in a genuine sense where a lot of the red tape has got rid of between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but there is a food in both camps for Northern Ireland companies, that that brings economic benefits, that it brings economic stability, that that brings political stability, and that as one nationalist businessman said to me last year, why would anybody in those circumstances, if it works, want to stop it? If we had a United Ireland in those circumstances, we would lose these unique circumstances. It would no longer be unique. We would suddenly just be as the rest of the Ireland. And so therefore I think there is sometimes quite short-term thinking here. And if you go back to the longest running survey of attitudes on Irish unity, which is the Northern Ireland Life and Time Survey, it's overseen by Northern Ireland's two universities, Queens University Belfast and the Ulster University. It has been going on since the 1990s. And if you look at the figure, when people are asked if they would support Irish unity, if it was voted on tomorrow, in 2002, that survey found that 27% said yes, they would vote for unity tomorrow. In 2020, after two decades, and after Brexit and after everything that has happened, that had gone up to 30%. So it had risen by 3 percentage points. Now, I happen to think that the survey now, that for various reasons, it underestimates support for unity. I think that there are reasons why sometimes people in a face-to-face survey like that are sometimes shy about saying that they support Irish unity. So I'm not saying that is the true figure for the level of support for Irish unity. I think it's higher than that. But I do think that over a 20-year period where with the same methodology, you're asking this question, the same question, and you're getting those results, there is a significance in being able to track the shift in the public mood. And to move 3 percentage points in that period, given the really calamitous fallout from Brexit, given the failure of storming, given that that in many ways gives support to the old Republican idea that really Northern Ireland is a field state, that it can't work, that it won't work, that we've tried everything in terms of forms of governance and none of them are any good. And given the really shambolic leadership of unionism and a very unpopular British Prime Minister and Boris Johnson, I think that some Republicans ought to be looking at that and not believing their own propaganda, but actually thinking, hang on a minute, why have we only marginally shifted the dial on Irish unity? It is true that Sinn Féin have been brilliant at winning elections, but it's also true that they've been awful at persuading people of coming on board with the idea of Irish unity. That is the only way that they say they now accept we will get Irish unity. There is no other way. And yet they're not persuading people. Sometimes when that is said to them, as I wrote last weekend in the Sunday Independent, we get an answer from Republicans, which says yes, but that feels to account for the fact that unity will come about through other people being better persuaders than us. And to a certain extent that is of course true, there are more persuasive voices for unity than Sinn Féin. But I think that also is quite an easy answer for Sinn Féin, which feels to account for the fact that not only are they not persuading people, in many ways they are one of the greatest things which unionists in Northern Ireland say is an impediment to Irish unity. A question in a border poll for Irish unity without Sinn Féin in the picture would be much less problematic for some softer unionists, but particularly for those people in the center ground who are not unionists, who are not nationalist than the current situation. And just, just finally, I think that if we go back 100 years and look at what has happened, it's a good lesson in being cautious about anybody who says that anything beyond the next five or six years is in any way inevitable. Nothing in life beyond death and taxes is inevitable. There is nothing in today's Ireland north or south which would really have made much sense, I think, to Michael Collins or Edward Carson or Eamon de Valera or James Craig. They would have found it hard to comprehend a lot of what we take for granted. And so therefore I think people who say now that one thing or the other, either union or unity is inevitable are really feeling to learn the lesson of history. Thanks very much.