The Director of the UCL Constitution Unit, Professor Alan Renwick, and Unit associates Dr Conor J. Kelly and Alan Whysall gave oral evidence on 16 June to the Oireachtas’s (that is, the Irish parliament’s) Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.

The session focused on possible reforms to Northern Ireland’s political institutions, which were established through the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The witnesses also included Dr Lisa Claire Whitten and Dr Jack Armstrong of Queen’s University Belfast.

Conor Kelly started by introducing the Unit’s 2025 report Reform of Stormont: Options for Discussion, which provided a technical analysis of possible reforms that have been or might reasonably be proposed to the institutions of devolved government in Northern Ireland. He said that reforms have been proposed for three main reasons: to prevent future collapses of those institutions (they have been suspended for multiple extended periods since 1998); to promote equality between Northern Ireland’s communities; and to improve the quality of governance. He noted that proposals relate to how the Northern Ireland Executive is formed, to many aspects of the functioning of both the Executive and the Northern Ireland Assembly, and to other parts of the institutional structure, such as the Civic Forum. He said that the report exists to facilitate a coherent debate, and that, since the report was published, debate on reform has intensified. He also warned that any permanent changes would require a large measure of cross-community agreement to command legitimacy – which the UK and Irish governments might facilitate.

Alan Renwick cited a previous Constitution Unit report, Perspectives on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement: Examining Diverse Views, 1998–2023. Drawing on this research, he said that people are very concerned about poor governance in Northern Ireland, but that they also want their community to be protected. He suggested that politicians and other prominent figures in Northern Ireland should be very open about the fact that there are genuine trade-offs between these values.

Alan Whysall said that ‘Stormont is in trouble’, citing budgetary problems and drawing on his latest working paper, Improving Government in Northern Ireland: Towards a Programme for Reform. He also warned that any proposal for change ‘will only be made to work by a very, very difficult, careful, long drawn out and no doubt highly imperfect negotiation’. He advocated for a more detailed discussion to create effective proposals for change, not ‘sticking plaster’ solutions, ‘tokenism’, ‘playing to the gallery’ or changes that might have ‘unintended consequences’.

Concluding, Dr Kelly said that the institutions as they exist set a very high threshold for action because power-sharing government requires agreement across people who are ‘in a lot of ways diametrically opposed to one another politically’. He said that it is important that any reforms are not framed as circumventing rights or existing vetoes of any one community, but thought of ‘as a process that can be as inclusive as possible’. He warned that this will be ‘very difficult’, but added that the 1998 Agreement itself proves it is possible.

A video recording of the full session is available to watch, and a transcript will soon be made available.

Key links:

The Constitution Unit.