Now that our politicians have gone on holiday (not that you would notice the difference) it might be a good time to write an end-of-term report on the senior pupils in the Stormont Academy.
There were some excellent results in the Executive. Sinn Féin and the DUP scored top marks in secrecy and broken promises. The First and Deputy First Ministers excelled at having their photographs taken and they received a special award for absolving themselves from responsibility for anything (apart from having their photographs taken).
Agriculture Minister, Andrew Muir, came bottom of the class. He accepted responsibility for tackling Lough Neagh’s pollution and pointed out that his Executive classmates had helped to cause the problem.
Even worse, he breached the Academy motto, Verba non facta (words, not deeds), by producing a plan to tackle the issue. It can only be a matter of time before Mr Muir is expelled.
A rather cynical view of Stormont’s performance, you might say, but its February promises turned out to be worthless (and if you expected anything else, you must be new here).
On her first day in office, Michelle O’Neill claimed the Executive was “developing and agreeing an immediate set of priorities”. This suggested a Programme for Government (PfG), which she later said would be agreed by the summer.
When the general election was called, she said it would be difficult to publish the PfG because of the rules preventing ministerial announcements during an election campaign.
SF then released a flurry of ministerial announcements, including additional funding for Stormont, a consultation on employment rights and a recommendation that work on the A5 should proceed. (Who needs an election manifesto?)
Now that summer is here, there is still no PfG. The great advantage in not having a plan is that if the Executive has no targets, it cannot fail to meet them. If Stormont has no plan, all public bodies down the line can also avoid having a plan (and most of them do) which is an additional explanation for the collapse of public services here.
The First Minister also claimed, “The days of second-class citizenship are long gone”. Sadly they are not. Today you will find our second-class citizens waiting for up to five years for medical treatment. SF and the DUP tell us the fault lies with London, but the British Tories could not have inflicted so much damage without the compliance of Irish Tories.
You will also find our second-class citizens in foodbanks and among the 50,000 on the housing waiting list. Then there are the 20 per cent of our children living in poverty, as identified by the Audit Office in March.
Stormont does not publish their photographs and it has no targets for poverty reduction. SF calls this an era of change. Tell that to the children.
The only element of Executive planning was Conor Murphy’s announcement of “a task force to oversee an action plan” to expand Ulster University’s Magee campus to 10,000 students.
Such a project would normally begin with an analysis of our current educational system (and a poor one it is), defining what universities are for and examining the relevance of our current provision in terms of student numbers and academic disciplines.
That’s what the Dublin government did and it developed five Technological Universities with campuses in almost every major town and city in the country. The timing and tone of the Magee task force might tempt those of a sceptical disposition to believe that it was more electoral than educational in intent, especially since it related to Colm Eastwood’s Foyle constituency.
The Executive might deny this, but in view of the secrecy surrounding its decision-making, we will never know. A fortnight ago an Executive meeting on Lough Neagh was kept secret and, in a response to a query from this newspaper, they said they would not be revealing when future Executive meetings would be held.
In May, the First and Deputy First Ministers met the Chinese ambassador to the UK, but they have refused to disclose what the meeting was about. Amnesty International said that showed an “unacceptable pattern of secrecy”. Perhaps the ambassador was hoping to learn how to run an administration in total secrecy?
So that’s been another failed term at the Stormont Academy. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of its students could stay on holiday permanently and it would make no difference. The sad thing about that conclusion is that we killed almost 4,000 people to get here.
