Northern Ireland is about to vote for an assembly that might never meet

The recent 25th anniversary of New Labour’s election triumph served as a reminder that the Good Friday Agreement celebrates its own silver jubilee next year. Yet, because of Brexit and a variety of modern manifestations of the ancient “Irish question”, the future of the peace deal itself is in doubt.

As an intricate framework of mutually dependent cross-community structures, it was never designed to deal with the possibility that Ireland and the UK would find themselves in different economic zones, let alone the current scenario in which Northern Ireland finds itself in a place all of its own: the overlapping bit of a Venn diagram between the EU and the UK. The situation has given rise to irksome checks on trade, and is thus the biggest single issue for many voters in Northern Ireland and also the biggest danger to peace.

It now seems certain Thursday will yield a shock-but-no-surprise political moment when Sinn Fein “wins” the election as the largest single party in the Stormont assembly – albeit not with an overall majority and with unionists, taken together, outnumbering republicans.

It is important to remember that the position of first minister is more of a co-leadership role, as the deputy can also collapse the government. They attend all important summits together and are effectively a double act. Or not, at the moment, because Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s DUP is boycotting the executive, leaving the secretary of state Brandon Lewis to keep an eye on things while civil servants run the province. Aside from two long periods of abeyance (2002-07 and 2017-20) and other periodic interruptions, Northern Ireland hasn’t had a functioning government for almost half of the life of the Good Friday Agreement.

The stalemate looks set to continue. Even if Sir Jeffrey could swallow his pride and serve with Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill, the DUP has other objections. Rightly or wrongly, the DUP wants an end to the Northern Ireland protocol of the EU-UK withdrawal agreement, which kept the province in the single market for goods and has resulted in checks on shipments from Great Britain (the alternative being an unacceptable “hard border” between Ireland and Northern Ireland).

There isn’t much the Northern Ireland executive can do about the protocol, even if Sinn Fein and the nationalist SDLP wanted to scrap it, which they don’t. Nor can Westminster, realistically; previous attempts to override the withdrawal agreement have been squashed under pressure from Brussels.

Thus the DUP must hold the Northern Ireland executive to ransom until London, Dublin and Brussels can find a replacement to its taste. That such a replacement doesn’t exist means the Northern Ireland assembly and executive are unlikely to meet for a very long time. Into such a vacuum and sense of crisis will flow instability. Northern Ireland is about to vote for a phantom political body.