Debate contribution: Executive Budget
Debate contribution by Ms Michelle O'Neill on .
- MLA
- Ms Michelle O'Neill
- Party at the time
- Sinn Féin
- Date
- 19 October 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution (made as a minister)
- Business
- Oral Answers to Questions
- Heading
- Executive Budget
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5795604
Read the official Assembly record
Text
Thank you for that question. You are absolutely right: I think that there is a collective will across the Executive to deliver on public-sector pay. Nurses, other Health and Social Care (HSC) staff, teachers and other public servants keep all our essential services running and should therefore not be left waiting for their pay awards. When they look at their counterparts elsewhere, they see that they get their pay awards in a timely manner. The message that I delivered when I met the Royal College of Nursing last week was that my priority is to ensure that we make public-sector pay awards, that workers get them as quickly as possible and that I do everything that I can to ensure that we secure enough money to do so. Lat week, I listened to the Secretary of State talk about being irresponsible. Do you know what is irresponsible? Continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. The British Government have never funded us according to need. That is a structural weakness in how we are funded here. If the money is never enough, a balance cannot be struck. Therein lies the challenge, but, yet and all, they keep putting some additional funding on the table without fixing the structural weakness. We will therefore never be able to get to that balanced position. I do not want to hear the Secretary of State level a charge against us that we are being irresponsible. The reality is that we are trying to get a balanced Budget. That is impossible with what we have at this time. We must resolve public-sector pay, and what we have right now does not allow us to do so. We will continue to make the case. We had meetings last week, and we have more meetings scheduled throughout this week. We will do everything that we can, including asking the British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to pay attention to the dire straits in which we find ourselves, with an Executive who have been underfunded for decades. We want to get to the point where we have a balanced Budget but only if there is enough money for public-sector pay.
367 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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