The row over "cash for ash" in the North has become a game of political brinkmanship that casts as much light on both the dysfunctionality of its political institutions, and the particular stubbornness of First Minister Arlene Foster, as it does on the extraordinary waste of public money she instigated and then oversaw as responsible minister. Estimates of the Northern taxpayers' ultimate liabilities for the green Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme have risen in recent days from £400 million to as much as £490 million.
With Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness and all other parties in Stormont insisting Foster stand aside pending an independent inquiry's findings – just how independent is also in dispute – Sinn Fein appears ready to bring down the Executive and force an election barely a year since the last. To what end is not clear, as voters are likely to re-elect the same parties in more or less the same configuration, and with little option except to re-form the same coalition.
After much huffing and puffing and venting of sectarian bile, complete political stalemate for six months, and many millions of pounds in wasted campaign and election spending, we would be back to square one: trying to make work institutions supposed to provide local accountability and oversight, local democracy, but in which the only means of ensuring that very accountabilty appears to be the nuclear option of bringing down the Executive and forcing an election.
In part that is because of the “petition of concern” mechanism which allows a group of at least 30 MLAs to block a decision of the Assembly by requiring a show of “cross-community support”. Not a bad idea in building bridges in a divided society, one might think, but, in practice, a veto which the DUP wields to protect itself in a blatantly partisan way (the DUP is the only party sufficiently large to be able to wield the petition alone).
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Institutions, moreover, in which cabinet collective responsibility is notional because ministries are little more than personal fiefdoms, effectively run by the parties that control them, with only cross-cutting issues settled by the Executive. In which, unlike most democratic parliaments, ministers refuse, as Foster tried initially to do, to acknowledge any personal responsibility, blaming civil servants, for blunders on their watch. In which parliamentary committee oversight is blunted by partisan bickering.
The RHI was a scandal waiting to happen – the North’s Executive and Assembly are simply not fit for purpose, a reality the North’s political class must begin to confront as urgently as the proximate cause of the latest cris.
Foster's attempt, moreover, to blame "misogyny" for her trouble is laughable – as several women MLAs have pointed out to her, the North's most notorious misogynists are in her own party. It was after all party colleague Edwin Poots who, on her taking up the party leadership, pronounced her "most important" job remained to be that of "wife, mother, and daughter".