A meeting of the influential Democratic Unionist Party executive will take place on Monday amid calls by Sinn Féin for the party to end its “will they, won’t they” return to Stormont.
In what is expected to be a critical week for Northern Ireland politics, the 130-strong executive members will gather at a secret location to discuss a potential deal with the UK government amid speculation the party is preparing to end its two-year boycott of the powersharing institutions.
The DUP executive is the party’s ultimate ruling body.
It is unclear if an executive vote on the deal and possible return to devolved government will take place on Monday night.
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In advance of the meeting, one insider told The Irish Times: “I do think the party is at the endgame of this; we’re at the point now of the party going back in within a short period of time or looking for a new leader.”
Details of the gathering were leaked on social media on Friday evening.
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Executive members received emails inviting them to a briefing at a “secure venue” where party leader Jeffrey Donaldson would provide a “detailed update on the current political situation”. Information about the location will be given to them on Monday.
A senior Sinn Féin TD said the time had come for the DUP to make a decision. “We’ve been here so many times, there’s been so many false dawns when it comes to the DUP, and the DUP really need to end this blockade of this Assembly and accept the fact that people in the Assembly election [in May 2022] voted for change and the dynamics are changing and have changed in the North,” Pearse Doherty told RTÉ on Sunday. “We have to get off this endless merry-go-round in relation to ‘will they, won’t they?’
“They should absolutely jump but the British government needs to stop facilitating them, they’ve told us that the negotiations are over. And they need to get back into the Assembly. There’s nothing more to talk about,” he said.
The development comes in advance of next weekend’s two-year anniversary of the DUP collapsing Stormont when the party’s former first minister, Paul Givan, quit the powersharing executive in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements.
It also takes place before further strike action by bus and train drivers this Thursday. The latest action by Translink workers comes after a mass walkout by public sector workers earlier this month in a dispute over pay.
Pre-Christmas talks aimed at restoring Stormont ended in failure after the DUP insisted that separate negotiations with the UK government on the Windsor Framework post-Brexit deal were ongoing despite northern secretary Chris Heaton-Harris saying they had “effectively concluded”.
A £3.3 billion (€3.9 billion) funding package by London – of which almost £600 million would resolve the public sector pay row – remains on offer but is dependent on the executive’s return.
Hardline unionist opposition to the DUP’s possible return to the Assembly chambers without the removal of the post-Brexit “Irish Sea border” ratcheted up over the weekend, with Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister urging those DUP members against the move to revolt against the party leadership.
A paper co-authored by Mr Allister, former UK Labour minister Kate Hoey, former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib and loyalist activist Jamie Bryson titled “No Deal is Better than a Bad Deal” will be published in advance of Monday’s crunch executive meeting.
“The perversion and constitutional obscenity of a partitioning border in the Irish Sea would be given permanency through its acceptance by the DUP, if they return to Stormont now,” the authors write. “We encourage unionism to stand firm and refuse to be either bought or bullied.”
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