Hay Re-Appointed Assembly Speaker

One of the first decisions of the newly elected Stormont Assembly when it took its seats today has been to appoint the Speaker.

The DUP's William Hay (pictured) has been returned to the post after he was proposed by the Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, and seconded by the First Minister Peter Robinson.

The First and Deputy First Ministers' have also been reaffirmed in their jobs.

According to BBC NI's political editor Mark Devenport a deal had been struck between the DUP and Sinn Fein over the speaker's job.

"The job is going to go to William Hay, but it looks like he won't actually be performing that role for the entire period of this Assembly," he said.

"Instead maybe three years down the track, he is likely to step aside and there's likely to be a rotation, so that Sinn Fein, probably Francie Molloy, can come in and take that job.

That would be the DUP honouring a past promise from Ian Paisley that they would support a nationalist for this job."

Three deputy speakers are also to be appointed with the new Assembly consisting of 38 DUP members, 29 Sinn Fein, 16 Ulster Unionists, 14 SDLP and eight Alliance MLAs.

Stephen Agnew took up the sole position for Green Party, while David McClarty remains an Independent.

The names of the MLAs who will sit in the Executive and what jobs they will do will not be known until next week.

Government departments in Northern Ireland are allocated using the obscure-sounding D'Hondt mechanism.

There are 12 departments in the Northern Ireland Executive, which operates as a coalition, and they need to be shared out among the parties who gained the most seats in the Assembly election.

The D'Hondt mechanism is used to calculate who gets what after the Good Friday Agreement stipulated that the D'Hondt system should be used to share out Stormont ministries between the parties, as it was felt to be suitable for use in a divided society, aimed at ensuring cross-community representation.

It uses a mathematical formula, which involves the principle of "highest average."

This tends to favour larger parties: the idea is that it reflects the strength of a party's total support by taking into account the number of seats it won in the election.

The system differs from the single transferable vote (STV) in that it does not use a quota or formula to allocate seats or posts, rather, these are allocated singularly and one after another.

Also under D'Hondt, the parties nominate committee chairs and committee members of the Assembly.

A party can exclude itself from the Executive committee, and if it withdraws its support for the committee its seats can be re-distributed under D'Hondt.

(JG/BMcC)