This IS something NO ONE would think could ever happen back in the days of violence there….
Michelle O’Neill became Northern Ireland’s first nationalist first minister in a day of symbolism and pomp that restored devolved government and etched an epitaph on the tomb of what was once a unionist state.
The union endured – Northern Ireland remains part of the UK and a referendum on Irish unity is not on the horizon – but when the assembly nominated O’Neill at 2.33pm yesterday for republicans the countdown to potential unification ticked louder.
O’Neill avoided triumphalism and made no explicit mention of constitutional change in an inaugural address that focused on reconciliation and bread-and-butter issues….
…
O’Neill will lead the executive with Emma Little-Pengelly, a Democratic Unionist (DUP) who was nominated deputy first minister, a post with equal power but less prestige.
Little-Pengelly, 44, recalled witnessing the aftermath of an IRA bomb as a girl but vowed to work with O’Neill to improve public services. “Michelle is an Irish republican, and I am a very proud unionist. We will never agree on those issues, but what we can agree on is that cancer doesn’t discriminate and our hospitals need to be fixed. Let us be a source of hope to those young people watching today, not one of despair.”
Several unionist assembly members congratulated O’Neill but others wore funereal expressions that betrayed the psychological blow – a state designed in 1921 to enshrine a permanent unionist majority, with a Protestant assembly for a Protestant people, was no more.
Demographic and political changes eroded that hegemony, and at the 2022 assembly election Sinn Féin overtook the DUP as the biggest party. A DUPboycott in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements mothballed Stormont until this past week when the UK government tweaked the Windsor framework and smoothed the so-called Irish Sea border…