There used to be a grim adage in Loyalist areas of Belfast during the marching season– “flags out or burned out”. More than a decade-and-a-half on from the signing of the Good Friday Agreement – and a few weeks after the Twelfth of July “Orangefest”– red, white and blue bunting and Union flags still hang from almost every lamppost on Belfast’s Shankill Road.

Shops sell mugs emblazoned with the Queen’s face and a mural depicts Belfast in its industrial heyday. There’s Samson and Goliath, the iconic yellow cranes at Harland and Wolff. A little further down the street is another mural, this time in darker colours.

Two men bow their heads in honour of slain Loyalist paramilitaries.

The Shankill Road witnessed some of the worst of Northern Ireland’s 30-year-long “Troubles”. Corrugated iron “peace walls”, up to eight metres high, still separate residents from nearby Catholics.

Such violence is a thing of the past but Northern Ireland seems set for a return to political uncertainty. Stormont’s politicians have been at loggerheads for months over proposed welfare reforms. Failure to do a deal soon could even see the assembly in Belfast collapse – a move that could have major ramifications for places like the Shankill Road.

“The political disagreements in Stormont may not reverberate in middle-class parts of this country but these major disputes on the hill (Stormont) are very much multiplied in working-class communities,” says Ian McLaughlin, a long-standing community worker on the lower Shankill Road, an area traditionally affiliated with the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and once a stronghold of Johnny Adair.

The Shankill is among the most deprived wards in the whole of the UK.


A shop selling Loyalist paraphernalia in the Shankill area


A few yards up the street, past a large black memorial to five Protestants killed when the IRA bombed a local bar in 1975, is the office of the Progressive Unionist party (PUP), the political wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

“Welfare reform is a huge issue right across Northern Ireland, it cuts across social boundaries,” says PUP spokesman Winston Irvine.

“We are talking about a £600 million black-hole in the Northern Ireland budget that has huge ramifications for people who are already struggling with huge inequalities. Unemployment here is above average.

“Educational attainment is obscene in some Protestant working-class communities. We have high rates of suicide.”

The Unionist and Nationalist blocs that control Stormont have quarrelled over everything from dealing with the past to parades and political symbols, but the nominally less contentious issue of welfare reform could prove Stormont’s undoing.

Sinn Féin – wary of damaging their left-wing standing in the Irish republic – has refused to countenance a cut in welfare payments.

Last month, Secretary of State Theresa Villiers said that the British Government “will not finance a more generous welfare system in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the UK”.

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)leader and Northern Irish First Minister Peter Robinson has insisted that if no deal is struck he will ask Villiers to repatriate control of welfare policy back to Westminster. Such a move could collapse Northern Ireland’s power-sharing administration.

“The crisis around welfare and the economy has tested even the most stable of states. Here it is tearing us apart,” says Duncan Morrow, professor of politics at the University of Ulster.

And yet Belfast does not feel like a city that could soon be without a government.

Tourists throng the streets. The colourful rainbow flags festooned outside bars and clubs ahead of last weekend’s gay Pride event attest to changing attitudes in the once-puritan Northern Irish capital.

Alex Kane, a Unionist political commentator in Belfast, says: “I walk around this town and people aren’t saying to me ‘the Union is in danger’. Nobody. People are more interested in jobs and health.”

“But there is a general sense of despondency with the assembly.

People don’t hate each other but Sinn Féin and the DUP hate each other.”

THE current impasse is a reflection of the continuing dominance of constitutional politics in Northern Ireland. Clashes over putatively minor issues such as Irish language provision and the routes for Orange Order parades are still common in Stormont.

“The Good Friday Agreement managed the end of the conflict. It didn’t give us a blueprint for normal politics,” says Jonny Byrne, criminology lecturer at the University of Ulster.

Northern Ireland’s past – deeply contested by all sides – is more often the subject of political debate than the present, or the future.

John McCallister, an independent Unionist member of the Stormont assembly, says: “We live in this bubble, a policy-vacuum bubble with no ideas. Our only policy is ‘the Brits ought to send more money’.”

The animosity between Unionism and Nationalism is putting off voters.

Northern Ireland recorded the lowest turnout of any part of the UK in May’s General Election.

That so many are turning away from formal politics is not altogether surprising. Under Stormont’s power-sharing arrangements, Nationalists and Unionists must work together in government. In practice, this means that Northern Ireland has effectively had the same government for more than a decade-and-a-half without a formal opposition.

“There is no major alternative, there is no sign of other parties,” says McCallister.

Northern Irish politics is still dominated by many of same actors prominent in the Troubles era.

Peter Robinson was elected DUP deputy leader in 1980. Five UK prime ministers have held office since Gerry Adams became Sinn Féin president.

Sinn Féin and the DUP continue to draw support almost exclusively from Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Unionist communities, respectively. Publicly both parties frequently clash, which mobilises their voting base but makes the business of running a functioning government difficult.

“We not only need an opposition, we need a government. We need people to admit that they are in government, to stop doing government by peace negotiation,” McCallister added.

The peace process’s drive for consensus also left a political system particularly prone to cronyism. Northern Irish police are investigating claims that a Belfast law firm held £7 million in an offshore bank account for a local unionist politician in a major property sale.

Meanwhile, echoes of the dark days of the Troubles remain. A new loyalist terror group announced its arrival earlier this summer.

Republicans opposed to the peace process continue to attack police. In working-class urban communities so-called “punishment beatings” are all too frequent. Intimidation and forced evictions are common, particularly in loyalist areas of Belfast.

Neil Jarman, director of the Institute for Conflict Research in Belfast, says: “The question nobody is asking is, 20 years after the ceasefires ,why are the UVF and the UDA still there? What is their role?”

Alongside the Union flags, paramilitary standards flutter in the breeze in many loyalist parts of Belfast. Although illegal, the UDA and the UVF have been accused of recruiting new members. On the other side of the sectarian divide, Republican paramilitaries provided a “guard of honour” at a recent funeral in Derry.

Rather than addressing the presence of former combatants in communities, paramilitaries are increasingly being treated as legitimate spokespeople, says Jarman. “We talk of them as civil society organisations, rather than uncivil society organisations.”

Outside forces could yet force a change in Northern Ireland. Last year’s Scottish independence referendum threatened the break-up of Britain, which would have a seismic impact in Belfast. A vote to leave the European Union could be equally dramatic says Duncan Morrow.

“An EU exit would produce a land border [with the Irish Republic]. It would strand Northern Catholics in a state that is asymmetric.

“It would absolutely put into question the legitimacy of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

For now the immediate future of Northern Ireland’s devolved assembly hangs in the balance. Unless a solution is found soon, the government will run out of cash before the end of the summer. The likely alternative is London taking over control of departmental spending and perhaps even fresh elections.

This vista of civil servants replacing elected politicians to run Northern Ireland suggests a country in crisis but for most people the daily reality is very different, says political strategist Quintin Oliver. The seemingly endless government gridlock might be the price for bringing stability to what was once the most restive region in Europe.

“Maybe in historical terms these 15 years are a blink of an eye in creating stability, and it is for the next generation to move into a more secular, less partisan politics.”