Every summer when parliaments recess, people complain about the lengthy holidays politicians get, when, in reality, most politicians who want to be re-elected do not get much of a break at all any time of the year.
Some of the complaints are warranted though, particularly when the executive of a parliament like Stormont, which has only been back in business since February this year, has still failed to produce a programme for government.
Almost immediately after the Westminster election was over last month, Stormont went into recess until the beginning of September. But while the two-month gap may seem long for some, it is nothing compared to the lengthy break politicians had in the first Northern Ireland parliament in 1921.
When Northern Ireland came into being in the summer that year, the jurisdiction had very limited powers. In its first year of existence, Westminster controlled about 88 per cent of Northern Ireland’s revenue and 60 per cent of its expenditure. Its fiscal functions were very restricted, with Westminster reserving the power to levy income tax and customs and excise.
The parliament also had no opposition. Of the 52 MPs elected to the northern House of Commons in late May 1921, 40 were Ulster Unionists, while the remaining 12 were divided equally between Sinn Féin and Joseph Devlin’s United Irish League. All 12 nationalist MPs boycotted the parliament, leaving it as a talking shop, like the Sinn Féin-monopolised Dáil Éireann in Dublin.
The northern parliament held its first official sitting on June 7 1921 in Belfast’s City Hall, where the state opening by King George V was also held later in the month, on June 22. Such was the makeshift nature of the new entity that a temporary home was found at the Presbyterian Church in Ireland’s Assembly College from September 1921, with a permanent parliament in Stormont not opened until 1932.
The government decided in October not to install electric lighting in the temporary parliament, as it was not an “absolutely necessary” expense.
On the same day the northern government came into existence, the Belfast Gazette was issued for the first time to publish its notices, announcing the specific functions of each department, but there was not much to report. The northern polity had come into existence, but it needed to be equipped with government services.
The transfer of services was stalled due to only one of the Irish jurisdictions being operational under the Government of Ireland Act 1920. The British government insisted both Irish governments needed to be in place for this to happen, something that was acutely embarrassing for the northern government. It had no control over policing or its laws.
Without many reasons to meet, the jibes of it being a “pigmy parliament” were jarring for Ulster unionists. Samuel Watt, permanent secretary to the Ministry of Home Affairs, contended that by delaying the transferring of services, “the whole of the northern government will prove to be a farce, and the northern parliament will be nothing more than a debating society, as it will not have the power to legislate on or discuss any matter arising out of the services to be transferred”.
The northern House of Commons was adjourned for three months from June 24 until September 20 1921. A cabinet meeting beforehand believed “the government would be in a very unsatisfactory position when parliament met on September 20th, without any financial powers, and with no departments for the ministers which had been set up”.
On resuming in September, the Northern Ireland prime minister James Craig and his government were inundated with questions on the delay in the transfer of services, particularly on policing. At one session on September 27, the Minister of Home Affairs, Richard Dawson-Bates, was unable to answer questions satisfactorily relating to issues such as non-compliant county councils (Tyrone and Fermanagh), state grants, road maintenance and motor licenses, due to the northern government still waiting for control over local government for the area.
The transformed situation in Ireland by the truce between the British and Sinn Féin from July 11 1921 led to a change of priority on the Irish question for the British government. According to historian John McColgan, “in the summer of 1921 a new phase emerged in which the task of transferring full powers to the government of Northern Ireland was subordinated to the requirements of the larger Irish policy – the need to reach agreement with the south”.
During the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in London from October to December 1921, while the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was trying to convince Craig that Northern Ireland be subservient to an all-Ireland parliament, he agreed to transfer the withheld services and powers.
Once powers were transferred from November 1921, the legitimacy of the northern jurisdiction was increased from what was seen by many as “a parliament without power”. The parliament could have feasibly recessed from June until November 1921, as there was little tangible it could do in that timeframe.
Services were scheduled to be transferred to the north from November 22 1921 to February 1 1922. Craig was satisfied that finance had successfully been transferred and, most importantly, law- and order, with agricultural services to be transferred by January 1 and education services by February 1.
The transfer of law and order powers gave the northern government control over the Royal Irish Constabulary in the six counties as well as re-mobilising the Ulster Special Constabulary. The judiciary had been transferred to Northern Ireland on October 1, with a formal opening of the new courts taking place three weeks later.
While the excuse for having a lengthy summer recess in the first year of the Northern Ireland parliament was justified, as they had practically nothing to do except talk to each other, what excuse exists for the current summer recess of Stormont, after only recently coming back from a lengthy two-year one?
Given the desperate need for a programme for government to tackle the many pressing problems facing people in the north, Stormont should have been recalled, as it was to condemn the recent racist riots, or not gone into recess at all until the executive’s long-promised governmental commitments were published and debated.