Naomi Long and Matthew O’Toole Spar Over Justice Position

A bad-tempered spat occurred between Justice Minister (and Alliance Party leader) Naomi Long and the SDLP’s leader of the opposition Matthew O’Toole on Tuesday of this week. As John Manley writes in ‘The Irish News’…

When Mrs Long was asked by the SDLP representative why she had not sought “explicit in-writing guarantees” about what was deliverable during this mandate, the minister accused the South Belfast MLA of double standards.

“What I find a bit rich is that the member whose party sat in the Executive for many years and never had any written guarantees about anything is now holding others to a different standard of accountability,” she said.

Mrs Long said she was “under no illusion” that her appointment as justice minister was because “nobody else could get the required cross-community support to do the job”…

“So no-one is blocked from doing the job – you need to get cross-community support – and perhaps if you engage more constructively with your unionist colleagues, you might get it,” the minister said.”

We have to remember the Alliance party is going through a bit of a rough patch. At the 2022 Assembly election they secured 13.5% of first preference votes and increased their seat tally by 9 to 17, making them the third largest party in the Assembly. They opted to join the Executive, taking the Agriculture Ministry with Andrew Muir by virtue of the strength of their electoral showing. Naomi Long returned to the Justice Ministry due to the bespoke circumstances of that ministry, which is excluded from d’hondt. Since that time, they only secured a single seat at the last General Election despite making a swing for three of them (gaining one, losing one and failing to capture one). Furthermore, their fortunes have since waned in the eyes of the public with the latest polling from Lucid Talk showing a steep decline in their vote share to 11% as of last month. As things stand, seat losses next year look inevitable. Not only is the UUP under their new leader Jon Burrows hoping to capitalise on disenchantment with the Alliance by soft Unionist voters, but as Slugger pointed out a few months ago, Claire Hanna’s SDLP is taking aim at the Alliance party in a swing towards the centre. Interactions between the SDLP and the Alliance party therefore have to be viewed in the light of their newfound competition and the Alliance feeling under siege from circling competitors.

O’Toole took to ‘X’ to complain and he said…

If you happen to believe in a new Ireland and designate as nationalist accordingly you are prevented from being Justice Minister in NI. That is the indefensible status quo but the current Justice Minister, so wont to call out others, arrogantly dismissed the question earlier.

Now, just to refresh everyone, in order to secure the major Republican objective of devolving policing and justice matters in the first place, Sinn Féin agreed that whoever filled the post would have to achieve cross-community consensus. Unionists however feared a situation where, if it were subject to d’hondt, a Republican such as Gerry Kelly (who was the usual bogeyman deployed as a hypothetical) could be minister of justice. A convicted former IRA member having authority over the police service was more than Unionism could bear, and so the current compromise of excluding Justice from d’hondt was crafted. But the result has been that no Nationalist has ever been Justice minister and the perception is increasing that it is a barrier for the sake of having a barrier.

I would say it is hard to argue with that perception given it is factual, we have had three Justice Ministers, two of whom were from the Alliance party and the other was an independent Unionist.

Naomi Long’s response to O’Toole, that the onus was on Nationalists to ‘engage more constructively with their Unionist colleagues’ therefore comes across as insensitive and tactically inept.

It is insensitive given the multiple occasions in the past few years the DUP has gone out of its way to have their ministers take actions that have come across to nationalists and the middle ground as obnoxious and divisive. Actions which are almost designed to be so in order to titillate their base and thus ward off the threat of the TUV. Whilst Long recognises that her position is owed to the fact nobody else can get cross-community consensus, I find it aggravating for her to gloss over that nationalists are de-facto barred as a result to appease unionist sensitivities.

It is tactically inept in that, as pointed out earlier, the Alliance party’s vote share is softening. Matthew O’Toole is right to be offended, and right to ask for an apology but he is also well within his rights to use the comment as an electoral tool to try and draw centrist voters to his party who might be quite attracted by the SDLP’s pitch for a new Ireland and who might have been put off by Long’s brusque response.

Now, in fairness, Long responded to O’Toole’s complaint directly on X stating the following

“Every party needs cross-community support to be Justice minister, not just nationalists. The SDLP could support and call for meaningful reform of Stormont, dismantling what Mark Durkan Snr rightly called “the ugly scaffolding” of designations. Problem solved.”

Had she said this in the Assembly chamber it wouldn’t have raised nearly as many hackles as her initial comments did. Few are going to argue that the current system is anything but dysfunctional, though the chances of meaningful reform getting enacted at Stormont without buy in from the DUP and Sinn Féin  is pretty close to zero (which I would argue is the fatal flaw in the Alliance party’s perennial pitch to ‘make Northern Ireland work for everyone’, but I digress). But she still said what she said, and seemed to place the blame on nationalists for our own exclusion. That’s going to linger.

As for the Justice Ministry being excluded from d’hondt, I would argue that is an increasingly indefensible anachronism. Of course, something being an indefensible anachronism has never stopped anything here from persisting well past the time it should have been changed.