Debate contribution: Executive Reform

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 4 March 2024.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

4 March 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Executive Reform

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4254040

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

I am pleased to open the debate on the first Opposition day of the new mandate. Opposition is a natural and healthy part of democratic politics, and we intend to perform that role constructively, as we have thus far. During the negotiations that led to the creation of the institutions, Senator George Mitchell famously pledged to bring his then newly born son back to Belfast one day to listen to and watch a sitting of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Senator Mitchell said that he hoped:

"we would watch and listen as the members debated the ordinary issues of life in a democratic society: education, healthcare, agriculture, tourism."

Senator Mitchell was able to fulfil his wish in 2012 with his then teenage son, but, when he returned last year for the 25th anniversary of the agreement that he helped to broker and that created the Assembly, there was no Northern Ireland Assembly to observe. For five of the past seven years, there has been no devolved Government in Northern Ireland at all. Today's motions from the SDLP on Opposition day are about preventing that from ever happening again, because, if it does and the institutions collapse again, I am not alone in believing that they will simply never re-emerge.

Those of us in politics and the media often focus a lot on the party political impact of one decision or another, asking, "What does that mean for the DUP?", "How might Sinn Féin react to what the DUP does?" and "How will the rest of the parties behave?". Those are legitimate and necessary questions in a democracy, but, when taken to an extreme, a fixation on political stand-offs leads us to the situation where public services and, indeed, the public themselves are of secondary importance. For nearly a decade, party political stand-offs and vetoes have allowed our public services and our public realm to decay and, in some cases, collapse. I scarcely need list the litany of problems that beset our public services, from the worst healthcare waiting lists in western Europe to chronically underfunded childcare to special educational needs at breaking point or beyond. None of these problems were created by Stormont collapse, and none of them will be solved merely by the return of devolved government. However, all of these problems — all of them, along with virtually every other public policy challenge that we face — have been undeniably made worse by the absence of devolved government: the absence of ministerial decisions to decide priorities and allocate budgets accordingly, the absence of a multi-year spending programme to allow health service leaders to recruit doctors and nurses on a long-term basis; and the absence of any funding guarantees until the last minute for large parts of the community and voluntary sector. Although we are all — at least, the vast majority of us — pleased to see devolved government return, we cannot pretend that public trust in the very idea of this Assembly and Executive has not been profoundly damaged. It has. In a recent survey conducted by Queen's University, only a third of voters thought that the Executive would survive until the end of this mandate. That is an extraordinary statistic. Despite the positivity around the restoration of Stormont, only one in three people think that it will last three years. That statistic should shame all of us in this Chamber. That level of cynicism and distrust is exactly why I asked the First Minister and deputy First Minister to pledge to not resign their office before the end of this mandate. That was not a stunt. I was asking a question that most of our citizens want to know the answer to. Our first motion today begins by expressing shame on behalf of this entire institution for its repeated collapses and the profoundly negative consequences that those have had for ordinary citizens, workers and public services. To be clear, that is not about assigning blame, but it is about acknowledging a collective failure of the political class to deliver stable and sustainable government here. To anybody who thinks that we should simply leave the rules unreformed after nearly a decade of chaos and devolution only functioning for a few years out of that time, I simply ask this: are you serious? Can anyone argue with a straight face that we are fine as we are and should just plough on regardless? As the saying goes, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. It is worth unpacking some of that problem. We all know that there are divergent narratives of Irish history, but most of us should be able to agree that, tragically, Northern Ireland has been marked by division between people throughout its existence. There was, of course, division before partition. These institutions were created after nearly 30 years of violent conflict, and that conflict itself came after half a century of one-party rule that excluded one community from virtually all political power. Indeed, at times, that exclusion seemed to be the motivating purpose of the state. That hugely difficult inheritance is why we negotiated a system of power-sharing, of government based on inclusion rather than exclusion. As the party that did so much to shape the Good Friday Agreement, we do not agree with those who think that power-sharing — consociationalism, as it is known among academics — is in itself the root of our problems and our dysfunction. To take such a view is to wilfully ignore history, including the manner in which this jurisdiction was created, as well as ignoring the reality of a post-conflict society. However, it is possible to reform and change the way that power-sharing works in order to provide a basic guarantee that there will be a government in the first place. Our reform motions today are designed to complement and implement one another. The first motion that I am moving acknowledges the harm done by repeated collapses and then pledges two things. Number one, the principle that no single party should ever again be able to collapse the institutions at will. I do not think that that is unreasonable. Secondly, the Programme for Government should contain a specific commitment to reform. Our second motion, which I will address in more detail when I move it later on today, creates a specific vehicle for producing legislative proposals on reform, namely an Ad Hoc Committee required to produce a report on options for removing the single-party veto by September this year. I am sure that there will be opportunities for us to debate that and for me to answer some of the questions around those proposals during the course of the debate. Our motions do not prescribe an exact model of reform of the veto, but a number of options have already been publicly advanced. Here, I acknowledge the work of the Alliance Party on this agenda. It has proposed an opt-out model for parties that qualify for one of the top two roles but do not want to take one. The NI Affairs Committee at Westminster proposed a series of related changes, some of which would undercut, although not completely remove, the current veto.

Many of those ideas, such as a move to super-majority voting as opposed to cross-community voting, were based on SDLP proposals.

No one party can or should own reform. By definition, we need to achieve some degree of consensus in order to make it happen. There are multiple routes to reform, but we need to agree today that the first and most urgent change is the removal of the power to collapse the Government, and not make it conditional on other concessions. The protections in the Good Friday Agreement are supposed to build confidence not reinforce mistrust. The purpose of power-sharing is supposed to be positive partnership not negative veto. It has been said in recent days that the heavy lifting on this work needs to be done by Chris Heaton-Harris, the Secretary of State. We strongly disagree. A Tory Secretary of State who is working out his notice will not do this work for us. We need to do it ourselves.

I am not going to give way at the minute, but I will give way later on in my winding-up speech. I will answer any questions then, but I am not going to give way at this stage. A Tory Secretary of State who is working out his notice will not do the work for us. We need to do it ourselves, starting with these Opposition day motions. Let us remember that the First Minister, the deputy First Minister and the Finance Minister are now engaged in a process of negotiation with the Treasury over the financial settlement. As a constructive Opposition, we have said, "We support the asks you are making". However, let us be real: one of the reasons why the Treasury and the Tory Government have been able to be so cynical in their treatment of these institutions and politicians here has been the repeated cycle of collapse. In order to build credibility, not just with the public but with the UK Government and others to reinforce our ability to negotiate, we need sustainable political institutions not ones that collapse so routinely. As I said, a Tory Secretary of State who is working out his notice will not do this work for us: we need to do it ourselves, starting with these Opposition day motions. Let us protect —.

I will give way in my winding-up speech. I am happy to give way then to anyone who does not get in at this stage. Let us protect the best of the Agreement and reform the veto that is undermining trust in the rest of it. The photo ops and positive vibes of the past month have been welcome, but we have seen this movie before, and rather than wait for the nasty plot turn and not-so-shock ending, let us change the script. Let us never again plunge our public services and our people into the vortex of no Government and no hope. I commend the Opposition motion to the Assembly.

1,698 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:40 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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