Northern Ireland's main political parties on Saturday were facing a three-week deadline to mend fences after snap elections aimed at sorting out the bad blood between them left them deadlocked. If the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein, the Irish republican party, cannot agree to form a power-sharing executive - a cornerstone of peace in Northern Ireland - then governance of the British province could return to London.
Commentators said both sides had a long way to go in a short space of time to sort out their differences. In a historic shake-up, the elections saw the DUP lose its absolute majority for the first time, even though it narrowly scraped ahead of a resurgent Sinn Fein. Final results from the regional elections on Thursday showed that the DUP won 28 seats in Northern Ireland's semi-autonomous 90-seat assembly, while Sinn Fein garnered 27 seats. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), a nationalist party, won 12 seats; the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) won 10; the cross-community Alliance Party took eight; and other groupings won five.
The result means that unionist parties no longer command an absolute majority in Northern Ireland's legislature for the first time since the province's creation in 1921. The results also left the DUP two seats short of the 30-seat threshold required to deploy on its own a so-called petition of concern veto, something the party has used to block gay marriage. Tensions between the Catholic and socialist Sinn Fein and the Protestant and conservative DUP boiled over in January when Sinn Fein collapsed the government.
Sinn Fein refused to work with DUP leader Arlene Foster as Northern Ireland's first minister over a bungled green energy programme she had introduced when she was economy minister. The tensions were also exacerbated by Brexit, which the DUP backs but Sinn Fein opposes. If the stand-off cannot be resolved, then the assembly could be suspended and governance of the province would be transferred to London. "Let us move forward with hope," Foster said after the count. "Hope that the common good will be able to prevail; hope that civility can return to our politics; hope that a functioning assembly can be restored; and hope that a Northern Ireland with so many overlapping cultural identities can be home to all of us."
Michelle O'Neill, Sinn Fein's leader in Northern Ireland, said the election result was "amazing". "That's because people know that action needed to be taken," she said. "We now need to get down to the business of fixing what's wrong and delivering for all citizens." If Sinn Fein will not agree to work with the DUP before the three-week deadline expires, the Northern Ireland Assembly is likely to be suspended and its devolved powers returned to London - so-called direct rule.
Stephen Grimason, a former spokesman for the Northern Ireland executive, told the BBC: "There's been so much change that its difficult to see how you plot forward getting back into government. There would need to be quite a lot of negotiation. "Both the DUP and Sinn Fein have very difficult decisions to take about the red lines that they had before this all started."
The election energised voters, with turnout reaching 64.8 percent - the highest level since the first vote after Northern Ireland's 1998 peace deal which brought an end to the Troubles, the three decades of violence in which more than 3,500 people were killed. But the results prompted Mike Nesbitt, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, to quit, after his party failed to make inroads with a proposal to form an alternative executive with the SDLP.
"Some day Northern Ireland will vote as a normal democracy. We will vote in a post-sectarian election but it's now clear it will not happen during the duration of my political career," he said. The pro-unionist News Letter daily said the election "raises serious questions about the future of unionism and how unionists should move ahead". "Foster must not now rush into any arrangement to prop up devolution. Direct rule under this present UK government is far preferable to hasty concessions to Sinn Fein," the paper said.
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