Change the rules to allow Northern Ireland to have the First Minister it wants

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Leading article: Change the rules to allow Northern Ireland to have the First Minister it wants

David Trimble was poised – so we all thought – to emerge once again as the hero of the Mission: Impossible that is Northern Irish politics. His career, which seemed over 10 days ago, was about to make another miraculous comeback when his judgement was vindicated by the IRA putting beyond use a substantial quantity of weapons.

Mr Trimble expected this historic event to trigger a surge of support for the principles of the Good Friday Agreement and for his re-election as First Minister. He could be forgiven that mistake: IRA decommissioning was the issue on which the unionist opponents of the Agreement had staked everything. He gambled against them that it would happen – he saw, as John Hume and Tony Blair saw, that the republican movement was genuinely ready for the "ground-breaking move" which finally occurred last week.

It took a long time coming, however, and so Mr Trimble's personal jubilation was not matched by a corresponding warmth among unionists in general. Unionist support for the Good Friday Agreement had been so badly corroded by the IRA's repeated failure to fulfil the obligations signed up to by Gerry Adams three years ago that when the impossible did happen, its effect was muffled.

In any case, it hardly matters why Peter Weir and Pauline Armitage were so obdurate as to refuse to accept the word of the independent commissioners led by General John de Chastelain, although the transcript of their conversation with him only exposes their own stupidity. Mr Weir and Ms Armitage could not accept that the event at which arms were put beyond use should have taken place in secret. General de Chastelain was forced to reiterate, gently, that this was so that the paramilitaries did not feel they were "surrendering". It must be suspected that no form of decommissioning would have satisfied those two. Their votes were clearly beyond persuasion by reason.

The question is what should be done now. The obvious solution, when an elected assembly is deadlocked over the election of a leader, would be fresh elections for the assembly itself. Unfortunately, there are no grounds for thinking that such elections would resolve the deadlock. On the contrary, while the opinion polls confirm the absence of a surge of support for Mr Trimble, the likelihood is that the anti-Agreement unionists would increase their numbers and make it less likely that anyone could satisfy the conditions for election as First Minister. Those conditions require the First Minister to win a majority in the Assembly as a whole, but also separate majorities among the unionist and nationalist members. Even with the procedural device of a Women's Coalition member defining herself as a unionist for the purpose of the vote, Mr Trimble was one vote short, scoring 49.2 per cent in the unionist section.

The solution, therefore, must surely be to change the rules. The existing conditions are simply too likely to produce deadlock, even in a situation like yesterday, when 71 per cent of the Assembly as a whole voted to support Mr Trimble. (By coincidence, 71 per cent was the proportion of the population of Northern Ireland who voted in favour of the Good Friday Agreement in the referendum.)

Even if the cross-community Alliance Party could be persuaded to designate itself as a unionist party for the purposes of obtaining what the First Minister Northern Ireland wants, it would make sense to reduce the thresholds required to elect a leader in future.

This will inevitably be presented as gerrymandering by the nay-sayers of unionism, and it certainly does not look elegant. Ian Paisley will unfortunately be handed a great excuse for further windblown denunciatory declamation. But it is far better than the alternative, which is all that the nay-sayers propose, and which is effectively to give up on the peace settlement altogether.