And what of the page called Designation? It starts off:

On the first day the Assembly meets after an election, MLAs sign the Register and designate themselves as ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’. This is to facilitate cross-community voting on certain key decisions […] Such decisions must be supported by a certain percentage of MLAs from both sides of the community.

In fact it is designed to facilitate vetoing, as the rest of the paragraph makes plain in describing the Petition of Concern, the mechanism for settler supremacists to block progress. Note the wording about both sides of the community (singular), even in a passage that is literally describing the chaos and division of the Occupation, which necessitates a political system that inscribes two separate communities.

The article goes on to explain that there are two means by which cross-community support can be manufactured: parallel consent and weighted majority, both too depressing to be described here. It tells us that:

These voting arrangements are intended to protect the minority from domination by the majority. 

MLAs who do not wish to designate as ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ are considered to be ‘others’. […] They object to a system of voting which does not take their views into account on sensitive issues.

And in this system, calibrated perfectly to keep the Occupation Administration in a state of stasis, a state in which nothing whatsoever can happen, certainly no politics, the polite apologists for colonisation in the Alliance Party can redesignate at will in order to maintain the system.

This redesignation was required not long after the New Dispensation. The Alliance Party’s media hucksters of celebrated this gross and cynical act as intelligent and necessary political manoeuvring. The preening of the Irish Times begins:

The Alliance Party has confirmed that a number of its Assembly members will re-designate themselves as Unionists in a bid to save the Belfast Agreement. The move has received a broad welcome from [the forces of reaction, viz.] the Taoiseach, the [Imperial Consul] Northern Secretary and the pro-Agreement parties in Northern Ireland.

Now, if we know anything about the World’s Leadingest Liberalest Voice, the English Guardian, we know that they will lavish adjectives upon literally anything. Alliance saves Stormont from Collapse, the paper claimed:

The Alliance Party last night voted to change the designation of its Northern Ireland Assembly members to unionist, dramatically paving the way for David Trimble’s re-election as First Minister of the [part of a] province.

The move came after a frantic round of negotiations called in the wake of a leadership vote on Friday in which dissident unionists narrowly defeated Trimble’s attempts to enter office for a second time.

And this bold stroke to preserve the status quo can be seen in retrospect to have had a dramatic lack of effect:

The party’s deputy leader […] confirmed the decision to designate its members as unionists would only be a short-term remedy, and in the long term there needed to be a ‘fundamental review’ of the assembly’s cross-party majority voting rules.

But let us not worry, they are fluent in the language of the place, perhaps having read the educational website:

It is understood the Alliance pressed for a weighted majority of two-thirds of the assembly to be applied instead of the current voting procedure.

Their leader said that he didn’t think that “anyone in our party could stomach being a unionist or a nationalist for more than 24 hours”. Well, it is almost 24 years since this little trick was used, and the party seems perfectly comfortable in the arrangements that it helped to maintain. 
To conclude, we must note the curious fact that more of this fatuous Party’s voters support Reunification than support the Glorious Union, so as soon as a real campaign gets going we can look forward to the party falling apart. They may be comfortable, but they are contingent. Macdara wonders if they have yet realised this fact. Slow, dull, earnest and only in existence because of the life support of the Colonial Administration: they remind the observer of pandas, kept alive in the artificial environment of the world’s zoos, but at least pandas are cute.