Northern Irish Voters and the British–Irish Agreement: Foundations of a Stable Consociational Settlement?

Northern Irish politics is characterised by two distinct and polarised Nationalist and Unionist ethno-national blocs, and marked clearly by religious origin or aliation. There is also a third, signi®cantly smaller, `other' quasi-bloc, that is more heterogeneous in nature, and lacks the ethno-national solidity of the two primary blocs. As is well known, the two primary blocs, their political representatives, and those who term themselves their military or paramilitary representatives, have remained at war, or at least at loggerheads, for many years. The British±Irish (or Good Friday) Agreement of April 1998 has been widely, and correctly, hailed as a major political breakthrough with reasonable prospects of transcending previous failed attempts to resolve an apparently intractable constitutional, party political and military stalemate. The Assembly established by the Agreement is based upon a consociational model of political regulation. A central plank of consociation is the belief that a legitimate government and governability cannot be obtained in divided territories without the endorsement of (most of) each of the main communities within the relevant region. Simple overall majority support is not sucient for stable and legitimate government in such regions; indeed consociational arrangements, in principle, are designed to work against the logic of simple majoritarianism in the electorate, the legislature, the executive, the judiciary and the bureaucracy. Consociational institutions therefore need to adopt procedures that rely on, create and sometimes formalise cross-community consensus. In short, to be workable, consociational institutions appear to require concurrent majorities. The British±Irish (or Good Friday) Agreement was put to a referendum in both parts of Ireland. There were concurrent majorities across the two territories, with a 95 per cent endorsement in the Republic of Ireland, and a 71 per cent endorsement in Northern Ireland. But were there concurrent majorities within Northern Ireland? Most local voters, most parties, and a majority of Catholic and Protestants endorsed the Agreement, but a substantial number of Unionists rejected itÐa bare majority of Unionists if we exclude supporters of the Alliance Party from the Unionist bloc. This antiAgreement segment of the Unionist bloc presents a continued threat to the viability of the Assembly, and indeed to the overall Agreement: it can constantly challenge whether the Agreement, and its implementation, has the support of a majority of Unionists, as indicated most recently in the June 1999 European Parliamentary elections. The Agreement institutionalises two types of `key' decision-making within the new Assembly. One is an explicit operationalisation of the logic of concurrent majoritarianism. All Assembly members must register as Nationalist, Unionist or `other'. Under the `parallel consent' procedure a key decision must