Enterprise And Development

Minister: Sir Reg Empey (UUP)

Budget: £300 million. Staff: 1,000

As he settled into his office on Tuesday Sir Reg Empey said: "We don't have what is termed an enterprise culture anymore. We used to." Chase the Celtic Tiger, that's his agenda.

Shipbuilding, the linen industry, engineering, the invention of Ferguson and Dunlop: part of Northern Ireland's proud industrial history which over the decades was replaced by a public sector economy fed from the British exchequer.

Sir Reg's vision is to replace that with the spirit of enterprise.

That means economic development, creating jobs, and encouraging tourism. He already has a departmental blueprint, Strategy 2010, to develop and modernise the economy. He will work closely with the job-creating bodies, the Industrial Development Board, and the smaller jobs agency LEDU.

The early message from Sir Reg is that he wants to take a leaf from the Republic's book and exploit the North's well-educated workforce by

reawakening its undoubted talent for enterprise, but focused on the "knowledge-based economy".

Finance

Minister: Mark Durkan (SDLP)

Budget: £8.6 billion. Staff: 2,430

Mr Mark Durkan, at 39 the youngest minister, will find his nine other executive colleagues regularly knocking on his door looking for largesse.

He must act as a funding Solomon, ensuring that allocations are wise and fair and that no allegations of political bias could rock the political structure as it beds down.

Work is already advanced on next year's budget. A total of £3.5 billion is ring-fenced for social welfare payments. He has some degree of discretion with the remaining £5.1 billion - including £110 million for his own Department - which will be allocated throughout the Departments, including the First and Deputy First Ministers'.

Mr Durkan must lobby the British Treasury for more funding next year. He will also seek increases in European structural funding. He must manage the Northern Ireland Civil Service, providing funding for the personnel requirements of each department, and proper accommodation for staff.

Keeping unionist, nationalist and republican ministers happy with their financial lot will be a central part of Mr Durkan's overall responsibility. A plum department for him, but also a difficult balancing act to be achieved.

Regional Development

Minister: Peter Robinson (DUP)

Budget: £420 million. Staff: 4,800

This is the sort of department Mr Peter Robinson has craved for most of his political life. He and his wife Iris turned around Castlereagh Borough Council in Belfast. They are properly credited with achieving a local government economic miracle: Castlereagh now offers the lowest rates and some of the best facilities in Northern Ireland.

The infrastructure for Northern Ireland's future economic development is in his hands: transport, road and rail, ports and airports, energy, water and strategic planning.

Very hard decisions have to be made, some of them very quickly. Last year the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Gordon Brown, gave the Assembly a take-it-or-leave if offer: sell Belfast Port and you can use £87 million of the proceeds for vital major roadworks.

The Assembly went for a compromise: sell the port but hold onto some of the lands. Mr Robinson, in concert with the Assembly, must now decide whether to follow Mr Brown's diktat.

In the next 25 years an additional 250,000 houses are to be built in Northern Ireland. Mr Robinson is responsible for deciding where and with ensuring that the necessary services are available.

Education

Minister: Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein)

Budget: £1.6 billion. Staff: 527

"Don't call me minister, call me Martin," the new Minister told his private staff on Tuesday. On Wednesday students from Kilkeel, Co Down, were calling him something entirely different. No compulsory "Irish or camogie" in Protestant schools, they said.

Mr McGuinness will need to be highly selective about the schools he visits: getting unionists to trust him, just a little, will be a struggle.

The big educational issue is the controversial 11-plus selection procedure.

There are about 40 major capital projects with the Department, either for new schools or large extensions. Any suspicion that he is favouring Catholic schools against state or Protestant ones will prompt fury from unionists. If he leans the other way, Catholics and nationalists will complain.

The integrated schools sector will maintain an intense lobby, as will Irish language schools.

Environment

Minister: Sam Foster (UUP)

Budget: £110 million. Staff: 1,600.

Mr Sam Foster, at normal retirement age, takes over a busy and varied department. Planning, pollution control, local government, the question of giant shopping centres killing the corner shops are just some of the areas of responsibility for this 65-year-old Fermanagh man.

One of the first files into his in-tray will be the proposed £40 million Tillysburn shopping centre between Belfast and Hollywood, Co Down. Planning permission was rejected but is being appealed. There are also applications for a major new Belfast city centre complex, and a huge extension to the Sprucefield centre near Lisburn.

With an executive in place plus a 108member Assembly and 10 monitoring committees, Mr Foster must also examine the relevance and the necessity of having 26 district councils in Northern Ireland. Can such a number really be justified?

Higher Education

Minister: Sean Farren (SDLP).

Budget: £605 million. Staff: 1,500.

Mr Sean Farren, a former University of Ulster lecturer in politics and a Dubliner, is one of three southerners in the executive - Brid Rodgers and Bairbre de Brun are the other two.

The high education and training of about 200,000 people aged from 16 to 90 and beyond are in his hands.

In the months ahead he can expect some noisy callers to his door, students protesting against tuition fees of around £1,000 a year. Mr Farren cannot change the system, however, as it is is handed down by Westminster, but he can oversee the building of the £70 million Springvale University campus which straddles the Falls and Shankill in west Belfast.

Mr Farren believes that there is great scope for North-South co-operation in university research. There will also be considerable liaison with the Enterprise, Trade and Investment, and Education departments.

Social Development

Minister: Nigel Dodds (DUP)

Budget: £3.842 billion. Staff: 6,723.

Mr nigel Dodds is a long-serving member of Belfast City Council and accustomed to dealing with big budgets - if not quite £3.8 billion. There are still hundreds of millions left to spend but, as Mr Dodds fully realises, when it comes to finance demand always exceeds supply. In his first week, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive asked for £1 billion, to provide 10,000 new houses every year for the next three years.

His four main areas of responsibility are social security, housing, urban regeneration and the voluntary service sector. In the past decade there has been dramatic urban renewal in Belfast and Derry.

Mr Dodds must maintain that development.

The North has an influential voluntary sector: 5,000 organisations, 33,000 people. There will be sensitivities here: how will Mr Dodds honour his pledge to work for all of the people if he shies from meeting local bodies he believes involve republican activists?

His first visit to a housing scheme in a working-class nationalist area will be watched with almost as much interest as Mr McGuinness's first trip to a school on the Shankill.

Culture, Arts And Leisure

Minister: Michael McGimpsey (UUP)

Budget: £65 million. Staff: 350.

Mr Michael McGimpsey is Minister for the Millennium and Minister for Fun. Bringing the likes of Pavarotti to Stormont , or Elton John to Hillsborough will be a pleasant part of his responsibilities.

But the cultural, arts and leisure groupings are a voracious lot. His first concern will be to ensure that in the scramble for funding he is not sidelined by what would be perceived as the more deserving departments. Mr McGimpsey must fight his corner in the executive.

He believes there will also be a sizeable economic dividend to be won, chiefly through tourism. The arts scene in Northern Ireland is vibrant: there are festivals galore, new theatres being built, films being made, and more people buying paintings and sculpture.

The Arts Council which funds the Belfast Festival at Queen's, the Grand Opera House, the Ormeau Baths arts gallery, the West Belfast Feile and numerous other events will be urging a significant increase in its annual £7 million budget.

Health And Social Services

Minister: Bairbre de Brun. (Sinn Fein)

Budget. £1.8 billion. Staff: 900 (excluding 45,000 doctors, nurses, hospital workers)

The North's health service needs a major overhaul. There is a strong lobby very resistant to change. Rationalisation involving the closure of the smaller hospitals triggers uproar. Ms Bairbre de Brun is due to develop a new strategy for acute hospitals that could have the ironic reaction of uniting nationalists and unionists against her.

Closures will be closely scrutinised. Suggestions of bias against unionists - and there will be plenty - will damage her efforts to gain their confidence. Equally, any undermining of health services in nationalist parts could be electorally damaging to Sinn Fein.

An immediate decision facing her is whether to close the Royal Maternity Hospital in west Belfast and upgrade the Jubilee Maternity Hospital towards the south of the city, or vice versa. Either judgment will trigger fury, and a fudge will suggest timidity.

Social services such as community health care, children's homes, care for the elderly, public health and safety, health promotion and the fire authority also come within her responsibility.

Agriculture

Minister: Brid Rodgers (SDLP).

Budget: £291 million. Staff: 4,000

"Are you a vegetarian?" was the first question Ms Brid Rodgers was asked by her officials on taking office. "No," she replied. Relief all around. Ms Rodgers was not going to plunge the Northern beef industry into an even deeper trough of despair by declaring, as the Welsh Agriculture Minister has done, that she does not consume red meat.

In the original scheme of things, Ms Rodgers should have got Culture but instead she got Agriculture and Rural Development, an industry that is in of crisis. Moreover, the Rev Ian Paisley will be breathing down her neck as chairman of the Assembly's agriculture committee. "Her first test will be to persuade Dr Paisley that she, not he, is the Minister," as one Stormont insider put it.

Thereafter, she must try to breathe new life and hope into the industry. It will be an uphill task. After half an hour of her first briefing by officials, she interrupted them. "Have you any good news?" she inquired.

Farmers cannot sell their beef because of the BSE scare; there is massive overproduction in pigs; the sheep market is a disaster; and farmers owe the banks about £500 million. In the past year, average farm incomes have plunged by 50 per cent.

There will be much travelling between Belfast, London, Brussels, and Dublin. The lobbying from farmers' representatives will be intense. Her responsibility also covers agricultural and veterinary science, rural development, forestry and sea fisheries.

Ms Rodgers will need high energy for the struggle ahead. The Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, has offered his assistance. A tough job but she is already getting into the swing of it.

At a function at Stormont during the week, she was heard to complain to Mr Reg Empey: "What's this French butter doing on the table? Haven't we our own produce?"