The Executive Office has declined to explain why basic information about First Minister Michelle O’Neill’s meetings with external organisations earlier this year has not been published.
The same information about Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly and junior ministers’ meetings was also absent up until Monday of this week but appeared soon after The Irish News began asking questions.
The failure to publish basic details of Ms O’Neill’s meetings with external organisations between April-June this year follows last month’s highly critical Audit Office report which found it “unlikely” that all the recommendations of the £13m Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) Inquiry will be implemented.
In 2020′s New Decade New Approach deal that saw the institutions restored in the aftermath of the RHI scandal, ministers pledged greater transparency and openness within government.
One of the measures they signed up to was regular publication of ministers and special advisers’ meetings with external organisations.
The quarterly data is supposed to be made available to the public soon after the period in question concludes.
However, some three months after details of other ministers’ meetings during the second quarter of this year were published, corresponding information about their Executive Office colleagues had yet to appear.
The data relating to Ms Little-Pengelly and unspecified junior ministers was subsequently added after its absence was queried by The Irish News but that relating to Ms O’Neill and her advisers was unavailable at the time of going to press.
Opposition leader Matthew O’Toole said he was concerned that Stormont ministers were “slowly sliding back into the old habits that allowed RHI to happen”.
“If there’s a clerical or process reason for the absence of this information then that’s easily explained and addressed but at the minute we can only surmise what’s going on,” he said.
“The executive parties signed up to this basic requirement of transparency and it’s disappointing that they are failing to fulfil it so soon.
“The recent Audit Office report highlighted how record keeping and transparency were actually regressing, so I am concerned that we are slowly sliding back into the old habits that allowed RHI to happen.”
The SDLP MLA said there was a “particular onus on the first and deputy first ministers to make this information available in a timely manner”.
The Executive Office has not provided an explanation for the information’s absence.
