The Northern Ireland Assembly set up under the Belfast Agreement is 25 years old this month. Giving it a single examination grade is difficult since the changes have been momentously positive and burdened with frustration.
While reducing the outcomes from the Assembly and Executive to a single grade or score might be challenging, or even impossible, it is true, too, that that, perhaps is not the most important thing.
Peace has been established and the public still supports the political institutions. What matters most is learning the lessons of the last quarter century and using them to build a better Northern Ireland, starting now.
December 1999 was a time of high hopes, just 18 months after the historic referendum on the agreement. There was excitement about constructive politics, with local ministers making local decisions rather than direct rule from London.
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The reality, however, as we all know, has been a stop-start government with Stormont either suspended or absent for more than 40 per cent of the time since 1999 — including five of the past eight years.
Powersharing between parties who have hugely different views on many social and economic issues has, unsurprisingly, been very difficult to sustain. Whether anticipated or not, the Belfast Agreement arrangements have a built-in veto that means one of the two largest parties can prevent the institutions from operating at any point. With many fraught and disputed matters to navigate over the years — not just limited to culture, legacy or the constitutional question — the threat of collapse has never been far away.
Devolution worked well at times. Probably the most effective period was 2007-2011, beginning with the unlikely partnership between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as first and deputy first minister and continuing when Peter Robinson took over from Paisley in 2008. The key to this success was good leadership. The heads of the DUP and Sinn Féin brought their parties along with them, developed and maintained personal relationships between first minister and deputy first minister and sowed seeds of trust. Equally important was a commitment to maintaining the institutions, and a business-like approach to getting on with the job of improving public services for people across the whole of Northern Ireland.
Has Stormont brought real-world benefits to people in Northern Ireland? The devolution of justice powers in 2010, including cross-community support for policing, was a big step that would have been hard to envisage a decade earlier. In general, however, it is difficult to find big examples of the Assembly or Executive making a significant difference in people’s lives. There has been support for successful sectors of the economy, for example, fintech, cybersecurity, screen productions and tourism. Northern Ireland has the highest access to full-fibre broadband of all UK regions. Some mitigations of UK welfare reforms have offered greater protection to people in NI on the lowest incomes.
Perhaps the biggest success story is that the Northern Ireland parties have been good at getting extra funding from the UK government, but often those successes themselves were only secured as a response to local failures, including various political breakdowns or examples of institutional collapse.
An unstable and fragile government does not make for good administration. Political disputes have frequently eaten up the time and capacity to debate and develop policy on day-to-day issues like health, jobs and education. Parties have struggled to work with common purpose, with the d’Hondt method of allocating departments to ministers from different parties creating a siloed approach that undermines the ultimate aim of a united Executive.
The fragility of the institutions has meant decision-making has rarely gone beyond dealing with immediate issues. Long-term planning has fallen by the wayside, and unfortunately, we are now reaping the rewards of this absence of strategic thinking, including with housing shortages, environmental crises and infrastructure problems.
Most significantly, politicians have avoided unpopular choices. Chief among these issues is the long overdue reform of the health service that was recommended by several independent reports dating back to 2011.
With the Executive back since February, there are some grounds for hope. The institutions are working again — but bare functionality is of course not enough. The First and deputy First Minister have established a good working relationship and are presenting a strong united front. They appear committed to getting on with the job without threatening collapse. Only time will tell whether that remains the case as the inevitable political crises appear.
The Executive has signed off a budget for this year and agreed on a legislative programme. The draft programme for government published in September sets out nine joint priorities, including reducing health waiting lists, more affordable childcare, a competitive and sustainable economy, and ending violence against women and girls. While these may sound like the basics for any government, they represent important progress for the Executive given its recent absences and failures to reach agreement.
The key to making all this work, and creating a Stormont that can best meet the needs of the people of Northern Ireland, is by avoiding the mistakes of the past quarter century.
What we desperately need now is a period of stability, with ministers and MLAs having the time and space to find solutions to a long list of pressing challenges. Northern Ireland has the worst health waiting lists in the UK by some margin, low productivity and skills, high economic inactivity, numerous environmental crises, and waste-water infrastructure that is preventing the development of new housing in many areas. Housing itself often remains divided along community lines, and schooling is heavily segregated too. We need to see ambitious and realistic plans that offer solutions to these and other issues.
Devolution is a work in progress. The Belfast Agreement institutions were hard-won and they remain fragile. Leaders need to step forward with courage on behalf of all the people in Northern Ireland, as they did in 1998. Relationships and trust need to be built and maintained. There must be a full commitment to the continued operation of the institutions, rather than the chaos that stems from threats of collapse. Most importantly, we need a relentless focus from all parties to improve the big issues that affect people’s lives day to day, like the health service, good jobs, schools and the environment.
- Ann Watt is director of Pivotal, the independent think tank focused on Northern Ireland
