The Low Priority of Governing: The Consequences Of A Decade of Stormont Instability

My previous post has helped spark an interesting debate elsewhere. What seems to have piqued that interest was my view that since 2016 (the last time there was an actual three year budget) there’s been a loss of seriousness within the two senior parties about doing government particularly in comparison to administrations led by those same parties prior to 2016.

The fiscal black hole both now face didn’t come from nowhere. Although there is a case to argue that austerity in GB has played a contributory role, local causes were just as prominent. In the ten years since Stormont spent half that time up on bricks , firstly through  Sinn Féin’s boycott of the Executive and latterly through a mirrored DUP action over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

If you are not in the building to make budgetary decisions you have no real means to track inflation via the regional rate, nor monitor spending through a period which included the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid era. Westminster handouts may have given the various Finance Ministers a false sense of security whilst the underlying business model was failing.

Then there has been a massive amount of chopping and changing in the Finance portfolio. The last Minister to serve a single term in office was Sammy Wilson, who took over from Nigel Dodds in 2009 and served through the next mandate to 2013. No one since has served more than two years in office, and some of them only a matter of months. That’s extremely unusual.

In the five of the last ten years when the office wasn’t suspended we still managed to cram in four different finance ministers.

By contrast Scotland has had three since May 2016 and Wales just two, with Mark Drakeford serving twice. Between the short office terms and the discontinuity of prolonged office suspensions Sinn Féin has given the budget setting process a dangerously low priority. The last time a multi-year budget was passed and implemented by the Northern Ireland Executive was for the 2011–2015 period under the aforementioned Sammy Wilson of the DUP.

Since that four-year budget expired in March 2015, Northern Ireland has been funded through a long series of single-year budgets, with half of them being set by the Westminster based Secretary of State for Northern Ireland none of whom had the local mandate needed to make any major or strategic changes. Internal tensions within the ruling duopoly has created a political instability that has repeatedly blocked several attempts to return to multi-year planning.

Laying aside the activism from both the DUP and Sinn Fein that has preferred to crash the system rather than work it for the benefit of the public, these two, having been conferred by the changes wrought at St Andrews, with senior control over the whole Northern Ireland Executive. That’s 19 years in charge with the only breaks coming through their various civil actions against their own administration.

In a democracy, all parties get tired and eventually run out of ideas. It’s hardly fanciful to suggest that on top of that these two are also completely out of touch with a Northern Irish society that they themselves have helped to massively change. We are no longer the backward looking backwater we once were. And new industries are filtering in. Over a thousand international companies have investments in Northern Ireland.

There have been real changes among the lowest earners since 2022: the share of workers earning less than the Real Living Wage fell from 26% to 16%. Of those aged 18-39, it went from 34% to 25%, and of those in the most deprived places earning less than the Real Living Wage it fell by 16.3%. Many of these positive changes come on foot of serious work done by earlier administrations who took their jobs more seriously than the current leadership.

Most strikingly is how the unemployment rate has plummeted in places like Ballymurphy where the rate amongst heads of households was 85% when I was at college in 1982, it is now just 3.16%. Peace and stability have created a dividend that both Sinn Fein and the DUP have been reluctant to do much more than keep up with inflation. Between 2010 and 2012, the Executive used money from the “block grant” (funding from London) to freeze rates entirely.

This was a popular political move at the time but it is often cited today as a contributory factor as to why Northern Ireland’s infrastructure is currently underfunded. Sinn Fein Ministers in recent years have repeated the trick, using extra cash from Westminster to temporarily fill yearly deficits rather than looking at how to fill up holes in the Northern Ireland administration’s overall business model. Fear of offending the electorate lurks in every corner.

The media’s focus on cultural conflicts (which for all their dominance of the headlines) which are now a shadow of the very real conflict of our now medium distant past, probably have given both parties an opportunity to escape any sustained scrutiny of their very real decisions on Stormont Hill. That makes for very poor incentives for taking necessary but potentially unpopular decisions that may be needed to right the ship.

Hiding in the darkness of culture wars or waiting for a change in constitutional status to drop in your lap is no longer a viable option for either lead party. Or for the people of a Northern Ireland that is changing at a rate that is clearly leaving its poor benighted political elite far, far behind.

…the Map IS important AND if you continually refine the map through visiting the territories you are trying to map, then it takes on a more significant importance.

-John Kellden