London and Dublin have “paused” talks to restore Northern Ireland’s regional government, according to a senior Irish official, after the pro-British Democratic Unionists were blamed for blocking a pre-Christmas deal to end a three-year stand-off with the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party.
Efforts to revive the power-sharing executive will resume after next week’s holiday as Julian Smith, Northern Ireland minister in the UK government, threatens new regional elections if agreement is not reached by January 13, when laws allowing civil servants to run Northern Ireland expire.
A new election to the regional assembly at Stormont, outside Belfast, would be an unappealing prospect for both the DUP and Sinn Féin since each lost a share of the overall vote in the UK general election eight days ago. Voter antagonism was blamed, in part for their failure to restore institutions set up under the 1998 Good Friday peace pact.
“There won’t be an agreement this side of Christmas,” the Irish official said on Friday night after Simon Coveney, deputy Irish prime minister, spoke to Mr Smith.
Both the Irish and British governments believe a long-awaited deal is still in prospect to settle the row, the official added. They stand ready to table a joint paper to break the deadlock.
Mr Smith had earlier on Friday held talks in London with DUP representatives in another effort to break the stalemate. “I have had a positive meeting with members of [the DUP] this morning at Westminster. I am confident that we can move things forward,” Mr Smith said in a tweet.
The regional executive has not sat since a public-spending scandal over a botched green energy initiative toppled power-sharing in January 2017.
In talks that resumed last Monday the British and Irish governments have been trying to broker an agreement that would see three smaller parties — the cross-community Alliance, the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour party, and the Ulster Unionists — join the executive.
On Thursday Mr Smith and Mr Coveney said a deal could have been struck to restore the regional government and the assembly by Christmas were it not for the DUP’s stance. “I know that there are people in the DUP who wanted to move forward, and I would urge them to move forward so that we could get this done,” Mr Smith said.
But Sammy Wilson, a DUP MP, has insisted that the party would not sign up to a “quick fix” deal that could fall apart later. “We asked for the meeting with Julian Smith after his comments, his very unhelpful comments yesterday. And we made it quite clear that, of course, as a unionist party we wanted the stability of devolution in Northern Ireland — not, however, not an assembly at any cost,” he said on BBC Radio Ulster.
The parties have been trying to resolve three questions: Sinn Féin’s demand for statutory recognition of the Irish language in the UK region; measures to deal with the legacy of the sectarian conflict that largely ended with the 1998 deal; and Stormont procedures that any party can use to block legislation.
Leo Varadkar, the Irish premier, said Dublin and London were determined to resolve the matter. “As far as the governments are concerned, we’re really determined to do everything that we can to get the parties together and have an inclusive administration in Northern Ireland,” the Taoiseach said in Dublin.
“It has to involve the DUP and Sinn Féin, of course, as the biggest two parties,” he said. “But we want to have the other parties involved too — the SDLP, Alliance, which did very well in recent elections, and also the [Ulster Unionists] — so we’re going to work as hard as we can over the next couple of weeks to get that done.”
After the election the DUP was left with eight of the region’s 18 seats when it lost two in Belfast, but Sinn Féin secured seven, the same number as in the 2017 election, after losing one and winning another. Nationalist MPs overtook unionists in the House of Commons for the first time because the SDLP also won two seats. Alliance won one.
