People have been queuing up to take a pop at the so-called Programme for Government: quite right too. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence and as such has been roundly criticised as waffle, gobbledegook, a word salad and worse.
Partly this justifiably hostile reception is because of disappointment. The PfG had been widely anticipated by business and commerce, and society in general, to present a compass pointing the direction for the next three years. Unfortunately, in the words of Samuel Johnson, that was the triumph of hope over experience.
Remember the last Programme for Government over a decade ago? What became of it? A big fat zero.
Look, producing a coherent PfG is above Stormont’s pay grade. First, they’re not a government. The Stormont assembly is a glorified county council with the airs and graces of Ruritania. They work at making themselves look ridiculous with a Speaker (seriously?), Principal Deputy Speaker, Deputy Speaker and maybe more, all at public expense. Who knows? Who cares?
The Scottish parliament, which is a government, is content with an Oifigear-Riaghlaidh or Presiding Officer and two deputies, as is the Welsh Senedd. Calling the presiding officer a speaker is just pretentious.
The only aspect of Ruritania missing at Stormont is flunkeys with epaulettes and gold braid. It’s a similar syndrome to passports. The more insignificant the country, the more egregiously coloured and flamboyant its visa stamp.
In line with that type of thinking, maybe that’s why the PfG needs 88 pages to say nothing.
So, after eight weeks’ consultation, you’ll be no further on. Why? Let these points sink in.
Here’s the simplest. You can’t have nine priorities. If you have nine priorities, you have no priority. The nonsense of nine priorities, a contradiction in terms, is best illustrated by Lord Ronald, the Canadian comic writer Stephen Leacock’s character, who “flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions”.
Secondly, they have no money. They’ll get a small uplift in October’s budget but they’re not a government, they’re an an administration administering the block grant London sends to the last remnant of its first settler colony.
That small uplift may enable them to allocate more money to what should be the only priority – health reform – but they won’t because having no priority, they will spread it thinly so that each party’s minister gets some pittance to crow about.
Third, they don’t know how much money they’ll get next year, or the year after, so how can they have a plan? Witness the embarrassment of John O’Dowd last week when he gave off to journalists asking him about when the A5 is going ahead and what’s being done about the Caw roundabout. He got all tetchy because he doesn’t have answers because, all together now, there’s no money for infrastructure.
It’s the same with housing. Perhaps the most singularly stupid ‘priority’ in the PfG is “Provide more social, affordable and sustainable housing”. What? After cutting the housing allocation to scrapings.
Not only is there money now for just 400 houses at best, they can’t build more because there’s no money for sewage infrastructure, which requires a gigantic amount.
Forty years ago Chris Patten identified an urgent need for drainage and sewage work costing millions. Nothing of scale has been done since decades before then. Go figure.
Meanwhile, in the south, the finance minister Jack Chambers has just announced €3 billion – yes billion with a ‘b’ – for infrastructure to please the multinationals who have complained about a lack.
Here, it’s not going to get any better. How do we know? The British prime minister said things are going to get worse.
By contrast, in the south they’re arguing about how to spend the €13 billion windfall in back taxes from Apple. Maybe they could spend some of it here, like just build the A5?
Lying behind all the disappointment of the failed fanfare of the launch of the PfG lead balloon is the fallacy that now that the executive is up and running again, the north can return to ‘normal’.
There is no normal here. People need to start thinking we can do better than this, always on the hind teat, as Heaney wrote.
Despite all the evidence there remains among many people, particularly in the unionist community, a belief that there’s no way the south can be better and more prosperous than the north. They can never take in the fact that partition has wrecked this place, so much so that from being the richest part of Ireland a century ago, it is now the poorest and most deprived.
How did that happen? From a century of being attached to a British government that couldn’t care less about this place, that’s how, and now it’s exacerbated by being shackled to the decomposing corpse of post-imperial Britain.