BELFAST (Al Jazeera) – The Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein has won the largest number of seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time.
With all votes counted in the early hours of Sunday, Sinn Fein secured 27 of the assembly’s 90 seats. The pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had 25, and the cross-community Alliance Party scored its strongest ever result with 17 seats – firmly establishing itself as a third pillar in the political system in Northern Ireland.
The historic win means Sinn Fein is entitled to the post of first minister in Belfast for the first time since Northern Ireland was founded as a Protestant-majority state in 1921.
“Today ushers in a new era,” Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O’Neill said.
“Irrespective of religious, political or social backgrounds, my commitment is to make politics work,” she said.
O’Neill stressed that it was imperative for Northern Ireland’s politicians to now come together to form an Executive – the devolved government of Northern Ireland – next week.
“There is an urgency to restore an Executive and start putting money back in people’s pockets, to start to fix the health service. The people can’t wait,” she said.
“The people have spoken, and our job is now to turn up. I expect others to turn up also,” she told reporters, stressing her new government must tackle foremost a cost-of-living crisis, ahead of the debate about Irish unity.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who is also leading a campaign to secede from the United Kingdom, was among the first to congratulate Sinn Fein in a Twitter post that hailed a “truly historic result”.
“There’s no doubt there are big fundamental questions being asked of the UK as a political entity right now,” Sturgeon said in an interview.
Once the political wing of the paramilitary IRA, Sinn Fein has won enough seats in the devolved legislature to nominate O’Neill as first minister – a century after Northern Ireland was carved out of the island of Ireland as a Protestant fiefdom under British rule.
Under a mandatory power-sharing system created by the 1998 peace agreement that ended decades of Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland, the jobs of first minister and deputy first minister are split between the biggest unionist party and the largest nationalist one.
Sinn Fein has been in power at Stormont (parliament building) with other parties for 15 years and has promised to make the region work – but it sent a stark message to Britain Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government that a referendum on a united Ireland was now on the agenda.