It has taken 27 years for many to realise that Stormont isn’t working. For decades, politicians, commentators and much of the media, especially in Dublin, have all claimed that Stormont’s mere existence represented success.
That hackneyed phrase, “the peace process,” justified the Executive’s failures and its repeated use has concealed the collapse of the one good thing Britain ever introduced into Ireland - the welfare state.
Stormont politicians talked inanely of “building bridges” and “reaching out” amid a plethora of new starts and fresh beginnings for the Assembly. Each time MLAs bothered to turn up for work again, we were told to be grateful for what was called “success”.
For many of those years, this column engaged in what was often seen as heresy, by pointing out that Stormont was not delivering. That heresy has now become mainstream thinking.
Hilary Benn, the SDLP, Pivotal think tank and many commentators have recently discovered what has been obvious for years – Stormont has failed.
Even the Dublin media is beginning to catch up (well, just a bit) and we are now blessed with a growing panel of experts who specialise in belatedly recognising the obvious.
Although this overdue recognition of reality is welcome, it ignores an important question: why has Stormont failed? The answer is that it has no need to succeed. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) designed it as a sectarian Assembly for what the negotiators saw as a sectarian people.
Thus, election results do not depend on Stormont’s performance. In last year’s general election, SF won the most seats without even producing a manifesto. Elections here are fought on which party can be the biggest.
No matter how Stormont performs, the two biggest sectarian parties will always be in government. So, the Assembly’s failure stems from the GFA (oh dear, more heresy) which institutionalised sectarianism, rather than combatting it.
The competition between the two largest parties is, of course, an agreed scam. Each privately allows the other to play to its own gallery over flags and sectarian symbolism, while publicly defending Stormont’s system which guarantees them permanent power without responsibility.
That power is replicated at every administrative level below Stormont in various public bodies. What is policy in Stormont becomes dogma in society.
Ministers make personal appointments to public sector boards without having to explain why. More than 360 public appointments have been made in the past three years without an overseeing public appointments commissioner in post.
Last March DUP education minister, Paul Givan, appointed party colleague Mervyn Storey as chair of the Education Authority. Mr Storey apparently rejects the scientific explanation for the earth’s origins and evolution. (If he rejects science, how does he think his television works?)
The GFA, we were told, was based on equal opportunities. All it has meant is that nationalists now have the same opportunity to discriminate and abuse power as unionists
The minister had previously seconded senior civil servant Richard Pengelly (husband of the Deputy First Minister) as chief executive of the Education Authority (a body created by SF to exclude independent educationalists from education).
The Authority recently granted Lisneal College £710,000 for a new soccer pitch even though it had not applied for it. Unionism is not acting any differently from how it behaved up to 1972.
Nationalists have now joined in on the act. Like education, policing is also utterly politicised. Politicians have a majority on the Policing Board (no qualifications necessary, but must be able to wave a flag).
A recent independent report into the board referred to “the appointment of the chair and vice-chair being largely down to the patronage of the two largest political parties”. It revealed that there is a research allowance for each political party on the board, but not for independent members. One person consulted for the report described the board as “a mini-Stormont”.
In the context of that culture, a Sinn Féin MLA and member of the board contacted the Chief Constable following an arrest on the Ormeau Road in 2021. The Chief Constable suspended the two officers involved, a decision which was later ruled in the High Court as unlawful. Political policing has not gone away you know.
The GFA, we were told, was based on equal opportunities. All it has meant is that nationalists now have the same opportunity to discriminate and abuse power as unionists.
Fed up with the IRA’s war, the electorate agreed in the GFA to whatever parliamentary arrangements the parties wanted. The parties took that opportunity to advance their own interests rather than serve those who elected them.
The people were deceived, but most have yet to understand that. It may take another 27 years for them to do so.
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