“The human mind is incapable of rest, what it needs is change”
-Winston Churchill
There’s definitely a change in the air when it comes to the future of Northern Irish politics. Eighteen years the Executive and the power sharing Assembly has achieved a genuinely deepening peace, and from that peace has sprung a new prosperity.
But it is unavoidably obvious what it has failed at too. Lee Reynolds (a former DUP SpAd) summarised the core problem, adroitly last Thursday on BBCNI’s The View:
Devolution is good for the small and medium sized decisions that aren’t that difficult. It is bad at the difficult decisions that are medium or big. We’re now at the stage where we have long fingered all of these and they’ve all arrived at the same time. [Emphasis added]
Over the last week there has been a slew of stories which highlight just how systemic those problems are. Sam McBride quotes a whistleblower from the civil service who says that benefit fraud is not taken seriously because…
…with the money coming directly from London, there is no appetite to do anything about it — in fact, I feel it is being concealed.
This is one of those medium sized issues that feed into a bigger one according to Reynolds’ scale. It is not just about saving cash for other projects but in itself has significant knock on effects for how we grow the labour market to meet new demands.
This, as Ian Parsley notes in his blog, is important not least because Northern Ireland may need to brace itself for population decline for the first time in its history. As the BBC highlights a new report from Ulster University’s Economic Policy Centre:
The report forecasts a high-growth scenario which would see the creation of 8,000 new jobs a year for the next 10 years. But it also highlights a shortage of 5,440 workers a year which, if not addressed, could hold back economic growth.
It’s not a case of forcing people to work who can’t but using future opportunities to expand the local job market to include those who, for whatever reason, are missing out, especially in areas of the greatest economic deprivation.
So Brian Feeney turned his fire on Sinn Féin’s Infrastructure Minister John O’Dowd stating that he was talking rubbish in providing political excuses over why thousands of houses (with planning permission) cannot be built.
Last November Infrastructure Minister John O’Dowd said he didn’t “recognise” figures from industry bodies citing the huge backlog in house building as a “fiasco”.
Now, you can fight about the number but that doesn’t alter the problem, which is the political failure of O’Dowd and the Stormont executive to deal with the simple fact that in dozens of towns across the north, you can’t build new homes because the occupants couldn’t flush the toilet.
In spite of an intense debate in the Republic over the government’s missed housing targets, in Northern Ireland the scandal is that there don’t seem to be any targets. [And no one is making a fuss? – Ed]. As noted by the FT (£) at the end of last year…
For almost a year, 30 brand new social homes have stood empty in Dungannon amid an escalating housing crisis. No one can move in until they are connected to sewage services — but Northern Ireland’s water utility has no money to build them.
Worse, home construction in Northern Ireland last year sank to a 65-year low. The situation was neatly summed up last year when Richard Ramsey noted that in 2023 saw “the fewest number of housing completions since 1959”:
According to a recent survey by the Construction Employers’ Federation (CEF), almost £1bn worth of investment in housing is currently stalled due to water infrastructure issues.
This equates to 8,450 homes. If the wider social housing sector is included, the total of stalled housing units would be some 19,000, which is huge for a market the size of Northern Ireland, and looks set to get worse.
However, like Health, this does not involve one just department, in involves Gordon Lyons of the DUP at Communities, and Caoimhe Archibald of SF at Finance. So Feeney is right to put the whole Executive into the frame.
And it is not the only space where the current Executive is coming up short. On The View it fell to the only member of the Opposition on the panel, Claire Hanna, to show how little has been done in Health (which needs a driver not just a map) :
…yes there are absolutely failures and flaws in funding but there are also failures in leadership and in imagination. [Emphasis added]
The Executive does have power and a larger budget than they had before and they do, crucially, have some time to get on with it. If we put all this down to the Brits we are disempowering ourselves and disempowering people.
Very clearly reform is needed. We know that less than half of one per cent of the budget has been allocated to transformation. There is money sitting in a transformation fund unspent. [Emphasis added]
It’s a theme picked up by Bertie Ahern in an interview with the Ireland Podcast which dropped earlier today:
It’s no good them saying “Ah we can’t do nothing.” They have to keep [moving forwards] and that takes leadership. Leadership is not waiting to see what the crowd say and then saying “I agree.”
Leadership is about telling the crowd what you think is the right thing to do and trying to carry them with you. That’s the difference between leadership and, just being [laughter] you know, just playing the old game. [Emphasis added]
Hugely in evidence is the old game of putting on the poor mouth. Not least when both the DUP and Sinn Féin prefer to resile to constitutional questions rather than address the big stuff that can only be fixed if they act together.
And it is not as though it has not been noted in London (where our blunt speaking politicians hope to get the money from a severely cash strapped Treasury). Tom Kelly was very direct on The View that voluble protest is not enough to get more cash…
I think any extra money will be conditional which is that there is a proper plan and that plan is seen to be carried through. The view in the Treasury and elsewhere is that Northern Ireland is a bottomless pit in which you pour money and then you are asked to pour more money and nothing happens.
The bigger issue for Northern Ireland is that the departments act as independent silos rather than in synthesis. If you take any of the big infrastructure problems we face, they don’t actually sit in one department. They all have implications and their views have to work together.
This is hard for the parties of the Executive whose MLAs are fearful of making trouble for each other in public as well as in private, and yet the failures pile up. The culture in Stormont tends towards complicity more than disruption.
While I’m not a fan either of Elon Musk or his radical disruption of the US Federal Government, there’s a sense that in his overturning shibboleths and established ways of doing things that have developed over years is very popular with the US public.
Yes, disruption can be dangerous but lack of disruption can also be profoundly destabilising (as we witnessed in the RHI saga). It took a full six months for the departmental head to trace the source of that crisis to a team of junior civil servants.
As a result many citizens (who were actively encouraged by politicians of several parties in rural Northern Ireland to take up a scheme that is still operating in England, Wales and Scotland) and took up the offer in good faith are profoundly out of pocket.
This happens when the democratic system is largely unstressed and there’s little scrutiny of ministers and civil servants until, as in the case of RHI, it was too late to save the institutions from total lockdown for five years out of seven.
The shared needs of citizens are ignored for the comfort of Ministers, their MLA colleagues and civil servants with the resulting denial of service being blamed on weaker partners, and legitimate concerns of Westminster dismissed as arrogant.
In the words of Lee Reynolds from the end of last week’s The View…
This isn’t just a problem with the political system I genuinely believe it is a problem with our bureaucratic system as well. We should want to change these things. We should want to be ambitious for Northern Ireland.
Changing water infrastructure will unlock significant economic potential and prosperity as well as making houses affordable for people, lower private sector rents and get people the social housing they need.
As Parsley notes, the poor mouth story is out of date. Northern Ireland has black spots, but average income (when allowing for housing costs) is £29,000, compared with £28,700 in England, £28,500 in Scotland and just £27,100 in Wales (HoC Library).
This year I would like to highlight the courage, whether of journalists, councillors, MLAs or MPs, not just to get people benefits or grants but to take on our chronic inertia by holding Ministers and Civil Servants to account for the things they’ve promised.
I’m looking for people who’re not afraid to take on the system to acknowledge their often unsung work and bring their stories to light and share the insights they bring to bare on a system that clearly needs shaking up. Please do email any suggestions?
It’s not like these people were plucked from random. People sought power. They went out to the electorate and said we will fix these problems. So you do have to get stuck in.
-Claire Hanna, The View
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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