The reset in British-Irish relations is in danger of over-writing the Belfast Agreement. Prime minister Keir Starmer visited Taoiseach Simon Harris at Farmleigh House in Dublin last Saturday. Afterwards, a joint statement announced annual UK-Ireland summits will be held every March from next year, focusing on four key areas of co-operation: security, climate, trade and culture. This duplicates the main east-west institution of the Belfast Agreement, the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC), which is meant to involve regular meetings of both governments, with summits of the Taoiseach and the prime minister “as required”.
The BIIGC was the primary forum for British-Irish engagement until the 2006 St Andrews Agreement. Then it fell into disuse for 12 years, amid a view that its work was done: security was a key part of its remit and Sinn Féin had finally agreed to the devolution of policing and justice. Both governments revived it after Brexit, but attention has been sporadic, largely due to Tory chaos. The new annual summits are a separate exercise.
The BIIGC is not tied to Northern Ireland issues: its remit covers “bilateral co-operation at all levels on all matters of mutual interest within the competence of both governments”. The new summits will not avoid Northern Ireland issues. The full remit of their four key areas is growth, trade and investment; climate, energy technology and innovation; security, justice and global issues; and culture, education and people-to-people connections. Saturday’s statement said trade and investment will be priorities. Apart from “global issues”, everything in this list could relate to Northern Ireland to some degree.
There was clearly no sense of delineation at Farmleigh. The joint statement revealed both premiers discussed recent race riots in Belfast and funding for the Casement Park stadium. Perhaps it would be absurd to conduct all British-Irish business through the BIIGC, and harmless to hold one-off summits on issues that touch on Northern Ireland. Making the new summits an annual, scheduled event is what really creates the impression of a parallel institution. The BIIGC cannot be supplemented, let alone replaced, by another intergovernmental forum, however tempting that might be given its moribund state.
It sits at the top of the Belfast Agreement’s three interlocking strands: east-west, north-south and Stormont; it is also the legal successor to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Decades of negotiation led up to its carefully balanced existence, all of which London and Dublin have forgotten in their headlong new embrace. When they next fall out, to which partnership arrangement will they turn?
Events are also bypassing the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC), the Belfast Agreement’s all-island forum. A quarter century of solid but little-noticed work via its six cross-Border bodies has been eclipsed by the Shared Island Initiative, with its headline-grabbing projects and €100 million-a-year budget. The Republic’s ballooning budget surplus has further transformed public perceptions of what cross-Border co-operation might become. Yet the Shared Island Initiative is a unilateral exercise by the Irish Government, or more precisely by a part of Fianna Fáil. It reaches out to Stormont and the UK Government on an ad hoc basis and has no structured engagement with the NSMC. Where shared island projects cross paths with the cross-Border bodies, it is essentially by coincidence. Worse still for the NSMC, almost nobody seems to care. Unionists and nationalists have grown to like the Shared Island Initiative, having overcome their various initial suspicions. It was effusively praised by Northern Secretary Hilary Benn at the annual British-Irish Association conference in Oxfordshire, also last Saturday, with Tánaiste Micheál Martin in attendance.
Concerns are being voiced in expert circles, however. A seminar was held in Belfast this Monday to mark the NSMC’s 25th anniversary. Dr Etain Tannam, associate professor at Trinity College Dublin, told the audience the north-south and east-west strands face being “hollowed out” by careless duplication. Both strands have tended to be seen as talking shops compared to Stormont, the focus of all politics within Northern Ireland. Their relevance inevitably fades without constant effort to maintain it.
It takes a collapse of Stormont to remind everyone of the Agreement’s interlocking nature. Without northern ministers, the NSMC collapses as well. Nationalists wanted the BIIGC to step in from 2017 because they hoped it could deliver a form of joint authority. Only then did most people notice it had not met since St Andrews. Recent collapses have fostered a consensus that Stormont requires reform.
Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was a keynote speaker at the Belfast seminar. He noted all the agreement’s institutions are overdue reform and major reviews are required by the agreement itself.
Those institutions struggled to survive Brexit tensions, but what really reveals time is passing them by is being sidelined by improving British-Irish relations. The BIIGC is responsible for launching reviews of the agreement. Both governments should discuss it there – and nowhere else.