ABSTRACT
John McGarry’s and Brendan O’Leary’s characteristically lively core contribution to this volume offers a useful development of their earlier writings on Northern Ireland’s recent institutional evolution. It combines analysis with prescription in a manner that reflects the broad trends in the deeply divided literature on consociational government, where advocates focus on the conflict-resolving capacity of this constitutional device, while opponents stress its allegedly divisive and undemocratic character. The present contribution shares McGarry’s and O’Leary’s normative
perspective, in seeing consociational arrangements – especially in challenging circumstances where the primary axis of division is an ethno-national one – as the most obvious, but not necessarily perfect, constitutional formula if civil unrest, internal conflict, and political disintegration are to be avoided. This does not imply going as far as these authors in seeing academic analysis in the area as divided into two starkly defined camps: consociationalists and integrationists. Few specialists in the area would see themselves as falling unambiguously into one or other of these categories, though some might buy in, in an à-la-carte way, to one of these approaches. Many, however, would not wish to be associated with either camp, or, perhaps, even to acknowledge that such camps exist; and others would, as McGarry and O’Leary themselves implicitly admit, endorse consociation precisely as a means towards integration, thus straddling both positions. This paper considers three aspects of McGarry’s and O’Leary’s applica-
tion of consociational theory to Northern Ireland. First, it addresses a clear empirical difficulty in describing the Good Friday Agreement as consociational: the absence in the Northern Irish case of a key ingredient in the classical definition of consociation, group autonomy. It suggests resolving this by reworking the definition of consociation. Second, it explores the political consequences of the electoral system, a feature whose importance has been strongly and correctly emphasized by McGarry and O’Leary. Third, it examines the formula used in selection of the Executive and choice
of First Minister and Deputy First Minister – another important application of the consociational principle in Northern Ireland.
