ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the record of power-sharing in Northern Ireland and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of its specific form of liberal consociationalism and how this has changed over time since it emerged in the wake of the multi-party agreement of 1998. The chapter asserts that despite the setbacks since 1998, the experience of power-sharing in Northern Ireland demonstrates that this form of consociationalism does not need to be a closed or static system of political accommodation. The contention in this chapter is that the practice of power-sharing can evolve and mutate, as a result of formal and informal revisions, towards a more integrative space, as envisioned by the proponents of centripetalism. The chapter argues that it is feasible to engineer a form of power-sharing that retains adequate protections for ethnic minorities within the nation while also developing integrative incentives over time. The chapter suggests that Northern Ireland’s power-sharing experience has demonstrated the potential for political accommodation to evolve over time into something that might be termed accommodation+ − or, in other words, the development of political institutions that fall short of an ethnically blind society – but have moved some way beyond the distinct accommodationist tramlines initially envisaged. The chapter argues that while power-sharing structures in Northern Ireland were rooted in the latter, they aspired to, and have achieved, more than that.
