Revisiting the Petition of Concern:

Speakers:

Professor Stephen Farry, Ulster University

Dr Alex Schwartz, University of Glasgow

Chair: Professor Kieran McEvoy, Queen’s University Belfast

The Petition of Concern is a community veto mechanism. Introduced pursuant to the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, it was designed to protect the collective interests of Northern Ireland's two main communities by allowing Members of the Legislative Assembly to trigger a requirement for Assembly decisions to receive parallel cross-community support.

From the outset, however, the Petition of Concern was controversial.

First, critics argued that it disadvantaged those who do not identify as either Unionist or Nationalist. Second, the mechanism’s frequent use provoked criticism that it was being abused as a simple partisan veto.

The reforms introduced through the New Decade, New Approach agreement and the Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Act 2022 sought to address the second concern by imposing new procedural and substantive restrictions on the use of the Petition of Concern.

Recent events, however, have revived questions about whether the mechanism is working as intended and whether it continues to disadvantage those who do not identify with either of the two main political traditions in the jurisdiction.

This Seminar revisits the debate about the Petition of Concern, in light of the 2022 reforms and subsequent events, to consider whether further reform is required to secure a stable and just form of power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

Biographies

Professor Stephen Farry is a Professor of Strategic Policy in Practice at Ulster University. He was educated at the Queen’s University of Belfast and holds a PhD in International Relations.

He was a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, 2005-06. Professor Farry has served as an elected representative in various levels between 1993 and 2024, including holding office as local government councillor, Mayor, member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and a Member of Parliament. Between 2011 and 2016, he was the Minister for Employment and Learning on the Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive.

He participated in the negotiations that resulted in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (1998) and has been involved in many subsequent negotiations in relation to the Northern Ireland peace and political process. He has also been a consultant for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Dr Alex Schwartz is Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the University of Glasgow. Dr. Schwartz’s research incorporates a variety of approaches (including empirical and computational methods) to address questions in the fields of constitutional law and constitutional design.

His scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals—such as Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and the American Journal of Comparative Law - and he is co-editor of Rights in Divided Societies (Hart, 2012) and the Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Asia.

On matters of constitutional design and power sharing, Dr. Schwartz has provided expert evidence and advice to the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Government of the United Kingdom, and the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law.

Professor Kieran McEvoy is the Queens University Chair of Peace, Security and Justice. He has written extensively on the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process and is a longstanding human rights activist.