The test of Stormont’s programme for government, expected in draft form on Monday, should be brevity.
This matters more than whether it it presented as a list of specific outcomes or broader targets. Both approaches have been tried before; their common flaw was that the lists were too long.
The 2011-15 programme, the last to make it past the draft stage, contained 12,500 words across 57 pages. No sense of mission emerged from this mess and even successes got lost in the inevitable failures.
As the think-tank Pivotal noted this week, elaborate strategising is too often a displacement activity at Stormont. With less than three years remaining on its mandate, the executive needs to focus on a handful of obvious, urgent themes and get on with the job. None is more obvious than “a relentless focus on improving public services”, as Pivotal described it.
If that seems too broad, remember that strategies to reform services have been sitting on the executive’s desk for years, or even decades. It just refuses to implement them.
With the private sector booming, getting its own house in order is pretty much all our public administration needs to do.
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There has been remarkably little fuss about a proposal by the Northern Health Trust to end emergency general surgery at the Causeway hospital and consolidate it at Antrim. A consultation exercise opened last week but it is considered a foregone conclusion.
In the past year there have been prominent public campaigns against moving maternity services from Causeway to Antrim, and centralising emergency general surgery away from Newry and Enniskillen.
However, the condition of the health service appears to have finally forced acceptance of reality: if change is not delivered by design, it will happen anyway as the system collapses.
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Alliance minister Andrew Muir has “welcomed” a damning report into his Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs.
Ministers often have to do this through gritted teeth but Muir’s welcome may well be genuine. The report by the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) found Stormont has potentially breached the law on maintaining water quality and will miss its target on the issue, which itself is unacceptably vague. It stated this is “visibly illustrated” by the condition of Lough Neagh.
The OEP is an English regulator that has also covered Northern Ireland since 2022. This odd arrangement was a compromise with the DUP, which does not want Northern Ireland to have an independent environmental protection agency, as promised in New Decade, New Approach and supported by most other parties. The OEP has less power than such an agency - it can only examine if government departments are delivering on their commitments.
However, that is useful enough for a minister who wants to give his department a bit of a kick up the behind.
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The PSNI has removed a racist sign in the Co Tyrone village of Moygashel, which read “no illegal immigrants for 1 mile”. This has raised questions about why officers did not remove UVF banners nearby.
Such questions are naive, of course, but the PSNI has come up with an answer: it says it removed the sign because it was “stolen” and is required as “evidence in an investigation into offences including theft and criminal damage”.
The roadwork-type sign was presumably stolen from a contractor and defaced with the racist message. Racism could be an aggravating factor in sentencing for these offences.
Approaching the incident in such a technical way does not quite get the PSNI off the hook. Painting a paramilitary mural on property without the owner’s permission is also criminal damage. Why is that offence never pursued?
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In an update on the PSNI’s race riots operation, assistant chief constable Bobby Singleton has said “paramilitary organisations are not directing or controlling what has happened, but there are people involved who are themselves paramilitaries... if you look at the disorder of the organisation, it would point to them not being involved – there would have been much bigger numbers. But they certainly haven’t taken any steps to stop what has happened”.
This strangulated statement reflects the paradox of paramilitary transition. Stormont is paying illegal organisations to stop doing anything illegal, apart from a spot of illegal internal housekeeping when their members do something illegal. Obviously, this makes it tricky for the police to complain about poor value for money.
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DUP education minister Paul Givan has issued guidance to schools that pupils should not have access to smartphones during the school day.
While this was widely welcomed, Givan did face some criticism for not giving the guidance legal force. The minister said a smartphone ban should fall under the general obligation to protect pupil welfare and he would be surprised if any school ignored it.
The real reason he need not be concerned is harder to admit. Schools have made a mockery of departmental guidance by ignoring it over uniforms. But most schools want to ban smartphones, so they will treat this guidance as holy writ.
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DUP communities minister Gordon Lyons has revealed how much it would cost Stormont to keep giving the winter fuel payment to all pensioners: £44.3 million a year, plus between £5m and £8m to develop a new computer system, plus about a fifth of that every year to run the system.
The computer cost helps explain why it is not practical for Stormont to set its own more generous means test. Although Stormont runs the Social Security Agency, the agency uses the same computer system as the Department of Work and Pensions in Britain. Every divergence from a British benefit requires a separate system here for an essentially fixed cost.
If Stormont wanted to give pensioners £10m from its own budget, the administrative overhead would be close to 100 per cent.
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Sinn Féin is under attack for taking different stances on puberty blockers either side of the border. It has approved a temporary ban in Northern Ireland for children with gender dysphoria but it does not support a ban in the Republic.
The party says it is following the scientific advice in each jurisdiction. That would be fair enough had it not refused to do the same during the pandemic, endlessly wittering on about how “viruses do not respect borders”.
Contagious diseases are affected by borders because borders affect the movement of people. Partition really does have no bearing on puberty, even if it seems to prolong certain people’s adolescence.
