Debate contribution: Tackling the Financial and Societal Impacts of Division

Debate contribution by Ms Paula Bradshaw on 25 March 2025.

MLA

Ms Paula Bradshaw

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

25 March 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Tackling the Financial and Societal Impacts of Division

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4866921

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Deputy Speaker. I thank all the contributors to the debate. We found a lot of common ground, albeit most of the contributors spoke through the filter of their political party. Remarkably, Timothy Gaston agreed with Declan Kearney about this place's not being workable, but we in the Alliance Party believe that it is. We want to see public services delivered for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, culture or socio-economic background. There is an old maxim in communication: it is only once you are fed up with presenting a message that the listeners begin to act on it. This is far from the first time that the Alliance Party has led a debate in the Chamber on the cost of division. Over 10 years ago, Deloitte was already putting the cost of division purely in terms of cost to our budget for public services at around £800 million per year.

It is also worth emphasising that the figure presented here from Ulster University Economic Policy Centre would, accounting for relevant inflation, now equate to something in the region of £1·1 billion every year.

I will pick up on Steve Aiken's point around making Northern Ireland work. He talked about the need for one single education system for all our children, the need for departmental reform and, most notably, the issue of the peace industry and the pandering of some to paramilitarism. I could not agree more with any of that, but we have to look at how we channel the common ground in the Chamber on how we address public service delivery. The cost to our society is borne in three ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, it is borne through the fundamental duplication of services provided to a divided community. We can take teacher training as an obvious example. Secondly, there are the additional costs that come from administering and policing a divided society. Those costs are as much societal as financial. Thirdly, there are the economic opportunities that are lost through, for example, an ongoing insecurity about travelling to certain parts of Northern Ireland for work. Mark Durkan raised that point. I take exception to the contributions from both the DUP Members who were called to speak. They said that the Alliance Party wants to talk down to communities and tell them what will happen to them. I spent 19 years working in the community and voluntary sector, and that is not the approach that I have ever adopted. I know that it is not the approach that any of my Alliance Party colleagues have adopted. In our communities, we are opposed to the carve-up whereby you get one and we get one. We want to create communities and neighbourhoods where there is not the demarcation of paramilitary trappings, where people can raise their children without fear of intimidation and where businesses can thrive without the threat of having to pay protection money to the local boyos. My colleague Michelle Guy raised the issue of lost opportunity when she talked about the duplication of sectors in the education system. We heard from the DUP how a lot of schools are involved in shared schools initiatives. If our schools were properly integrated, there would not be a need for shared initiatives, and we would see our children being brought up together and finding common ground across different characteristics.

Go ahead, please.

Definitely. Thank you. I want to pick up on Declan Kearney's points on racism and sectarianism. We in the Alliance Party certainly see those as two sides of the same coin. He went on to talk about the need for Irish unity and creating an integrated economy. We in the Alliance Party are up for any discussions about how we can have North/South and east-west cooperation, and the Ulster Unionist Party Member for South Antrim raised that. We are up for any way in which we can deliver public services that create the best output for the people whom we serve without duplicating on expenditure.

Yes. Thank you for that. That was a useful intervention. Naturally, the figure presented as being the cost of division could not realistically be saved overnight. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at what we could be spending our money on had we addressed the cost of division when we first raised it for public debate around two decades ago. My colleague Nuala McAllister covered a number of points in relation to the health service and some on policing. We in the Alliance Party frequently call for the reform of how we address the water crisis in Northern Ireland. I want to pick up on some of the comments from Diane Forsythe on our party's position on these sorts of policies. I have never said anything negative about cultural expression from any side of the community, apart from what I have said about paramilitary trappings. In fact, when I worked in the Village area of the Donegall Road, I organised jubilee events and Twelfth of July events etc because that is what that community wanted to have delivered. I find it insulting that the DUP likes to try to tar us as being sectarian and intolerant. We are not. We want to see the celebration of different cultures across this island, be that nationalist, unionist or any ethnicity. We want to see investment in our communities, but in a way that involves those communities and not just the community gatekeepers. We have heard, in the debate, challenges to the costs quoted. That is fair enough, but that is why we make the explicit call in our motion for the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council to include an assessment of the cost of division in its reporting. I acknowledge the Finance Minister's concerns around the independence of the Fiscal Council. He said that it had to get on with the work of looking at the current state of our public finances. That is the whole point of our motion. Our public finances are tied up with delivering public services — in many instances, through duplication — so there has to be a workaround. I appreciate that the Fiscal Council is independent, but we need to face the reality of where our public finances are going. It is endlessly frustrating to see a lack of action across the Departments here in addressing the cost of division. In the Assembly, we are good at demanding things of others but poor at taking our own decisive actions. I keep going back to the fact that the cost of paramilitarism, for example, runs into hundreds of millions of pounds every year, plus much more considering the long-term trauma that it causes to young people and their communities. I am conscious of time, Mr Deputy Speaker. We have to change. It is uncomfortable — it means challenging routine and taking on vested interests — but that is what we are here to do. There is no excuse for further foot-dragging. I appreciated the language used by Colin McGrath — he is not in the Chamber any more — when he talked about our "carve-up politics". We have to move on from that, 27 years on from the Good Friday Agreement. What we have proposed in our motion is the least that we should do to address and tackle division to enable us to reallocate the vast cost associated with it to the greater good of society as a whole. I urge support of the motion.

1,247 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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