Lawmakers in Northern Ireland are preparing to elect a nationalist First Minister for the first time on Saturday, according to Reuters.
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JANUARY 31: Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill addresses the media outside the Grand Central Hotel on January 31, 2024 in Belfast, United Kingdom. The province has been without a government for two years since the DUP triggered the collapse of the power-sharing executive in a protest against post-Brexit trade checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, known as the Windsor Framework. After a meeting last night, the DUP agreed to return to Stormont after the UK government signed up to a further deal on post-Brexit trade arrangements.
This will be the first time that a former member of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army will lead in a region where it is actively seeking to end centuries-long British rule. Michelle O'Neill's rise marks the most pronounced marker yet in the ongoing generational shift to more level-headed Irish nationalists who were not directly involved in the region's decades-long conflict.
Her election was made possible by a compromise between the Sinn Fein political party and the Democratic Unionist Party, their bitter rivals. This week the latter party ended a boycott of the power-sharing government that threatened the 1998 Good Friday peace settlement.
"This is a historic moment in time, it's not lost of the wider public," O'Neill said on Tuesday when the DUP's decision to re-enter government made her election inevitable.
"But it depends on what you do with it... Let's get down to business. Let's ... actually deliver for public sector workers, for the wider society out there."
Sinn Fein is the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time in 2022. Originally the party was considered an outcast by the political establishment in Northern Ireland and "southern" Ireland.
O'Neill's rise to power was blocked by the Democratic Unionist Party's refusal to join the government to protest post-Brexit trade rules that it believes undermined Northern Ireland's place in said government.
However, the DUP ended their boycott after striking a deal with the UK government to ease trade friction. The power-sharing system gives equal power to the Deputy First Minister and the First Minister.
But the title of First Minister is said to carry symbolic weight.
"The ground is shifting in a very decisive way," said Chris Donnelly, a political commentator from the mainly Catholic area of west Belfast."
And for nationalists that means the time for Irish reunification would appear to be closer than ever.
"Her very appointment has begun to raise hopes of the end of British rule in Northern Ireland, and a fully united Ireland.
"As a matter of fact in historic terms, it's within touching distance," Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein's leader in the Republic, said on Tuesday.
