A week after the historic victory of Sinn Fein, which is campaigning for the reunification of Ireland, Northern Ireland is mired in political paralysis. Unionists, in favor of maintaining the province in the United Kingdom, blocked the functioning of the local Assembly to oppose certain post-Brexit provisions. Boris Johnson is expected on Monday to try to calm the situation, we learned on Friday May 13.
>> Northern Ireland: four questions on the historic victory of the nationalist party Sinn Fein in the parliamentary elections
The newly elected Assembly met on Friday for the first time since Sinn Fein, supporters of reunification with the Republic of Ireland, came out on top in local elections on May 5, the first in more than a hundred years of history of the province.
Sinn Fein accuses Unionists of taking ‘society hostage’
But the DUP (unionists), who came second, refuses to share power with Sinn Fein, as provided for in the peace agreement concluded in 1998, as long as post-Brexit customs controls provided for in the protocol negotiated by London remain in place. at the time of the divorce with the European Union. To show their determination, the elected representatives of this political party refused to appoint the president of the local Assembly.
“Disappointed” and “angry” for the public in the face of institutional deadlock, Michelle O’Neill, the vice-president of Sinn Fein slated to become the new head of government in Northern Ireland, accused the DUP of withholding “the company hostage for the hard Brexit they brought with their friends” of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.
The British Prime Minister is due to travel to Belfast on Monday, she added, lamenting that Northern Ireland is “a pawn in the middle of a battle between the British government and the European Union”.