Debate contribution: Enhancing Accountability and Trust in Government

Debate contribution by Ms Sinéad McLaughlin on 3 February 2025.

MLA

Ms Sinéad McLaughlin

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

3 February 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Enhancing Accountability and Trust in Government

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4774444

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Principal Deputy Speaker. As many Members have mentioned, it is positive that the Executive have been in place for a year with a sense of relative stability. In Northern Ireland's politics of low expectations, I have no doubt that some people, if asked about how our Government are doing, will shrug their shoulders and say, "At least the Government are sitting". They are accustomed to the bar for politicians here being set at the level of simply taking their seats around the table. It is scarcely a surprise that we have the lowest level of democratic well-being in the UK, with 54% of people expressing low trust in the Executive. That low level of trust is the direct consequence of the political cynicism and poor faith that, all too often, have characterised how the biggest parties have treated the institutions. Today's debate illustrates that fairly well. The fact that no Ministers from the Executive Office are here shows contempt for the Opposition. Indeed, earlier, the Education Minister practically called most Members of the House sectarian because we questioned the decision mechanism for school funding. Our politics has prioritised dramatic stop-start, cyclical collapse over the hard graft of good government.

People out there know that politics have real consequences, including the longest waiting lists anywhere across these islands, with people in all our communities waiting in chronic agony for years; childcare costs that have spiralled to more than £10,000 a year, even with interventions having been made; housing bills that fall far short of the targets that we set; and no clear pathway to tackling poverty in our communities, allowing the gap between the haves and the have-nots to grow. It is shameful. Those are the consequences of the lack of reform, and, if another crisis comes along, we will see those metrics fall still further behind. No one can say what that crisis might be, but we all know that it could come tomorrow, and these institutions are as stable today as they were the day before they last collapsed.

I will concentrate my closing remarks on reform and how we do government. We are 27 years on from the Good Friday Agreement, and it feels like we are still shackled to our past by a politics that belongs in the past. Let us change the approach. The anniversary of the return of these institutions is the right moment to once more press the issue of reform and to demand accountability and leadership on this issue from the two biggest parties in this place. The First Minister and deputy First Minister, despite their warm words on the day that Stormont was restored, were unable to give a commitment not to collapse this place. They should have corrected that today, had they been here. Once they had done that, they should have started the work of putting right the instability of this place through a proactive programme of reform so that we could give the public a guarantee that veto is no longer the name of the game and that government is treated as a serious business in Northern Ireland. Of course, the exact form of that reform is the subject of the process itself. It might be in other parties' interests that the posts of First Minister and deputy First Minister simply pass on to the next biggest party, but this is about the interests of people, not parties. The SDLP has put forward very clear proposals for the common good. It is clear to us that the best way to reform this place is to undo the damage that the St Andrews Agreement did to the original premise of the Good Friday Agreement on the joint election of First Ministers. We should end for good the veto on government by reforming those formal processes, unlocking progress and allowing for this place's evolution. We should reform the manipulated and misused petition of concern and make substantial changes to cross-community voting to end the excessive focus on designation. We should make fundamental changes to improve the way in which this place delivers and, through a new Budget Committee, strengthen oversight and accountability. We should improve the Pledge of Office so that it emphasises collective action. Those changes are in all our interests, and, most importantly, they are in the interests of the people of Northern Ireland. This is an opportunity to go further than that. Each of the agreement's strands is interlocking and independent. Reform of the agreement is relevant to all three strands. To that end, the AERC is a toothless Committee, and to pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. This is an opportunity for the acceleration and deepening of cooperation between all parts of these islands, including the deepened —

— formalisation of North/South structures.

797 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:53 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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