ABSTRACT
On May 8, 2007 Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness assumed office as the joint heads of a devolved Northern Ireland administration. This was a remarkable turn of events. Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), had made a career out of undermining other unionist leaders and hampering political initiatives, including frustrating the early attempts to implement the Good Friday Agreement. Martin McGuinness, the chief negotiator of Sinn Féin, was an alleged senior member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). For many, this outcome marked, if not the closure of the Northern Ireland conflict, then its effective stabilization, and for some, notably John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, the consociational scholars most closely associated with the Northern Ireland situation, it marked a pinnacle for the application of consociational theory, albeit in a modified form, to what had been an apparently intractable conflict.1
