Sinn Féin’s Stormont reshuffle is a chance to correct a mysterious failing.
The party has spent almost a decade developing a comprehensive new economic policy for Northern Ireland.
Since 2020, it has given every impression of planning to put this at the heart of its political platform.
It chose the Department for the Economy when devolution was restored last February – the first time this former DUP fiefdom has had a non-unionist minister.
Yet it feels as if Sinn Féin has taken a low-key approach to the subject ever since.
Adding to the mystery is that much of the policy should be popular and easy to promote, to nationalist voters in particular.
Sinn Féin has continued to develop and argue for it at Stormont: you can see its outline in the executive’s draft programme for government.
However, you would be hard pressed to find anyone beyond Stormont who could describe its most basic features.
Perhaps the best known feature, because trade unions have helped to publicise it, is an employee rights bill that will ban zero-hours contracts, tackle bogus self-employment and improve job security.
Labour has announced similar legislation for Britain, so it possible to see how much more public and media interest this has generated there, compared to the indifference here.
If anything, the legislation is more significant in Northern Ireland because it represents a cultural watershed: a declaration that we are no longer pathetically grateful for any job we can get. Yet this is scarcely discussed.
The heart of Sinn Féin’s policy is an industrial strategy, where Stormont will choose which industries to support.
The programme for government lists these as cyber security, net zero, screen, financial technology, regulatory technology and health and life sciences.
In the 1970s this was called ‘picking winners’, a term repeated with increasing sarcasm as governments picked losers, or undermined winners with the wrong support, or both.
Industrial strategies came back into fashion a decade ago as economists decided the world had changed since the 1970s and winning had become a lot harder. Sinn Féin and the DUP agreed a draft strategy as far back as 2016.
In fact, industrial strategies have been in vogue for so long that economists have started wondering if the pendulum has swung too far and governments should dial down their ambitions.
There is little sign of any of this debate in Northern Ireland.
In other countries and other parts of the UK, people want to know which industries might be chosen because they are employed by them or live in areas dependent upon them. We can barely stir ourselves to that much curiosity.
The next part of Sinn Féin’s policy is reform of Invest NI.
The party has highlighted promises of regional balance – creating more jobs outside Belfast – but it has made little of the rest of its plans.
Coordination with Invest NI’s counterpart in the Republic, the Industrial Development Agency, is an obvious nationalist goal with enormous potential.
Invest NI is still forced to pretend Northern Ireland’s Brexit arrangements are a unique attraction to foreign investors, a contention disproved by US special envoy Joe Kennedy III, who left our shores without a dollar to show for it.
But home-grown firms can learn to navigate ‘dual market access’ and some have found ways to exploit it. Invest NI’s priorities have been shifted towards helping these indigenous successes.
The final part of Sinn Féin’s economic policy is devolution of taxes.
It has been following the exact path already taken by Scotland and Wales, where this has been a prominent issue for 20 years, yet interest in Northern Ireland seems non-existent.
Sinn Féin would presumably deny it has failed to promote its policy but it cannot deny it has failed to capture the public imagination.
It has matching policies in the Republic, so there was no good reason to downplay them at Stormont ahead of November’s Irish general election.
Of course, that election diverted the party’s resources. Economy minister Conor Murphy has been ill and Sinn Féin had a crisis in its press office.
The DUP pulled a last-minute switch when departments were chosen last February, bouncing Sinn Féin into taking finance. That may have thrown plans out of line.
Whatever the problem, new economy minister Caoimhe Archibald – the outgoing finance minister – can relaunch a policy that deserves more attention.
If that does not work, we may have to confront an awkward possibility.
Northern Ireland politics may simply have no space for serious economic debate.