ABSTRACT
Less than two months after the collapse of the 1974 Sunningdale Executive, its permanent secretary and Northern Ireland’s most influential civil servant of the period, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, penned this personal reflection on the short-lived consociational experiment. The Executive fell in May 1974 after an alliance of anti-Sunningdale unionist politicians resorted to supporting an unconstitutional strike, which quickly brought Northern Ireland to a political and economic standstill. The sheer force of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike toppled Northern Ireland’s first power-sharing administration, but had this not occurred, the Executive would have faced serious difficulties concerning the ratification and implementation of the Sunningdale package. Over thirty years later, at the beginning of Northern Ireland’s third attempt to institutionalize power sharing between unionists, nationalists, and others, Bloomfield’s conclusion serves as a timely reminder that in societies deeply divided by ethno-national conflict, it is not the use of power sharing as a model for regulating political violence that is inherently problematic. For governments, policy makers, and academics alike, the great challenge is to construct institutional frameworks which address the constitutional issues that invariably lie at the kernel of ethno-national divisions, whilst maintaining a political process capable of providing the incentives and motivations to bring together all the major parties to the conflict. A “hard case” such as Northern Ireland – to borrow Lijphart’s phrase – clearly demonstrates this dynamic.2
