ONE YEAR AGO this week, the Stormont Assembly was restored, after the DUP struck its Safeguarding the Union deal with Rishi Sunak’s government. The unionist party had boycotted power-sharing for two years, due to its opposition to the Irish Sea border. And during that period, its critics argued it prevented all sorts of progress by the executive and made Northern Ireland’s problems worse.
After twelve months of restored devolution, some voters in the province will now be asking whether bringing it back achieved anything at all.
The rebooted administration provided lots of photo opportunities for the first and deputy first ministers, Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Fein and Emma Little-Pengelly of the DUP. The women posed together at schools, sports pitches and foreign landmarks. However, when they were asked what they had actually delivered for people in Northern Ireland, they were short on answers.
In the Autumn, the executive published a ‘draft programme for government’, setting out its plans for the next two and a half years. It was a vague document and it has not yet been formally agreed. Meanwhile, Stormont’s finances remain precarious and the executive parties have rejected Westminster’s proposals to raise more of their own revenue. The available options included increasing regional rates, hiking university fees, charging for some prescriptions or introducing water charges. These extra costs are taken for granted across most of the UK, but Northern Ireland’s politicians dismissed them all.
Both unionists and nationalists at the Assembly insisted instead that the province is ‘underfunded’. As part of the deal to restore Stormont, they agreed a new ‘needs based’ model with the Treasury, that increased Northern Ireland’s block grant. Almost immediately, though, politicians like O’Neill and the DUP leader, Gavin Robinson, demanded that the government effectively backdate the cheque, to make up for historic underfunding.
In response to these arguments, Northern Ireland’s secretary of state, Hilary Benn, last week urged local ministers to reform public services rather than constantly ask for more cash. The executive, he said, had, “missed many opportunities to take decisions, or to apply learning from other parts of the UK.”
Northern Ireland suffers from many of the same problems that blight the rest of the country, like low economic productivity and a struggling health service. These difficulties are generally worse, though, due to its sclerotic political system. The parties prefer to make popular announcements rather than implement potentially controversial policies. And they can always blame the results on a lack of generosity from Westminster.
The province’s NHS, which has some of the longest waiting lists and worst outcomes in the UK, is the most glaring example. Northern Ireland’s health ministers commissioned a series of reports, going back to the 1990s, that all recommended centralising acute services in fewer hospitals and focussing more attention on caring for patients in the community. Unfortunately, the parties could never agree which services or hospitals to close, so nothing happened, until a new minister arrived and commissioned another review.
The debate about water charges has also gone on for decades. Unlike the rest of the UK, domestic customers in Northern Ireland do not pay separately for water, which is in theory included in their rates bills. This resulted in a lack of investment in infrastructure and periodic crises with supply and sewerage.
Northern Ireland Water’s chief executive, Sarah Venning, told an Assembly committee before Christmas that the waste-water system was now at ‘breaking point’. The lack of modern facilities has been blamed in part for causing pollution in Lough Neagh, the biggest lake in the UK, which is a major source of drinking water. And a leading economist recently described Stormont’s failure to look at charges seriously as an ‘anti-growth’ and ‘anti-environmental’ agenda.
The DUP, of course, revived power-sharing on the basis that it had removed the Irish Sea border and stopped a ‘pipeline of EU law’ to Northern Ireland. These claims collapsed over the past twelve months, as the Irish Sea border hardened repeatedly. The province was cut off from the UK internal market, on which it overwhelmingly relied, in order to avoid checks and paperwork between Ulster and the Republic.
The government claimed that its UK Internal Market Scheme, or ‘green lane’, would keep goods flowing to Northern Ireland. In the face of new EU product safety regulations (which apply in the province), an impending parcels border and restrictive labelling rules, that assertion was always misleading. In any case, Northern Ireland’s manufacturers must bring in almost all their materials through the more onerous red lane.
The devolved institutions have been powerless or unwilling to address these difficulties. In recent weeks, an attempt to pull the Stormont brake was rejected by the government, while only one new EU law was delayed by ‘democratic safeguards’ included in the Windsor Framework. An official from Invest NI, the body that is supposed to bring investment to the province, last year admitted that barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland were putting off potential investors. The executive parties have failed to produce coherent plans to address these economic challenges.
Sinn Fein is Stormont’s largest party, and it is committed to the idea that Northern Ireland does not work as a part of the UK. It believes that the province should instead be absorbed as quickly as possible into an all-Ireland state. For republicans, it makes sense to refuse to take difficult but unpopular decisions, and constantly assail the government with demands for cash.
The abiding mystery in Northern Ireland politics is why so many unionists, who are supposed to want the Union to work, take a similar approach.
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