Debate contribution: First Minister and deputy First Minister Titles

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 9 March 2026.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

9 March 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

First Minister and deputy First Minister Titles

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5452873

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First, I will pre-empt a comment that will probably be made by others in the course of the debate: the subject of the motion is not the most important thing that we will debate today; in fact, it is the least important thing that we will debate today. That is precisely the point. The question of who holds titles that have one word of difference but not one other substantive difference in role, responsibility or legal power should be the definition of a trivial matter. It is a distinction without a difference or, put another way, six of one and half a dozen of the other. Today in Opposition time, we will debate the challenges of SEN classroom assistant provision and the all-island economy. Separately, we have pressed for interventions from the Finance Minister and the Economy Minister on the huge pressures on family budgets created by the Trump-Israeli actions in Iran. It goes without saying that all those issues, along with the Rates Orders and the Budget Bill, which we will debate tomorrow, all ministerial Question Times and, indeed, the petition on the Knockbreda Road crossing that I have just submitted are infinitely more important than the presence of a single, non-capitalised word at the start of a title for a job that is otherwise entirely equal to the other job. Before I get on to more of the argument for the motion, it is important to say that the motion is not about the performance of specific First and deputy First Ministers; it is about the structure and design of the office and the fact that the bizarre differential in titles in an otherwise entirely joint office reinforces the arbitrary divisions in our politics and distracts from the real and important issues, some of which I just described. On the day after International Women's Day, I acknowledge the fact that, whatever my profound criticisms of the performance of the Executive may be, we have First Ministers who have both sought to use their office to provide positive leadership in different ways. I say that genuinely. That is a reminder of why it was designed to be a joint office in the first place. In March 1998, only weeks before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, two best friends from different traditions, Philip Allen and Damien Trainor, were shot dead in the Railway Bar in Poyntzpass by sectarian killers from the Loyalist Volunteer Force. As a statement of unity of purpose and of collective revulsion, David Trimble and Séamus Mallon went to the village together to express the outrage felt by our entire community. Before it had been formalised in an agreement, Trimble and Mallon visually embodied and performed the powerful, transformative idea of partnership: two people in a joint office embodying a shared purpose in a place that had been defined by division. There was never any question that, when it came to formalising the agreement, the roles would not be equal, but the then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party stipulated — this is in all the written accounts of the negotiations — that there had to be a difference in the two titles. In recent evidence to the Assembly and Executive Review Committee, of which, I should declare, I am a member, former deputy First Minister, agreement negotiator and, of course, former leader of my party Mark Durkan indicated that the stipulation to have different titles may have represented a desire by the main unionist party to retain some form of what was termed "residual primacy" as a means of better selling other difficult compromises to the unionist electorate, and that residual —.

I will give a quick answer: yes. I dealt with that intervention fairly comprehensively. I will come on to some of the reforms that the SDLP proposes in addition to that measure, which is just one of a suite of reforms that we want to drive forward. As a result of the effect of residual primacy, the difference of a single word has become, in many ways, an emblem of the strangeness and dysfunction that have plagued the institutions. On too many occasions, that strange, antiquated relic of supremacy — that shibboleth — has been magnified in our political debate, especially at election times. It must be said that that has been the preserve of unionist parties, in particular the DUP, which has returned to the well of tribalism with predictable regularity, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly. In 2011, Peter Robinson explicitly and repeatedly warned of the risk of having a republican First Minister. After the Assembly election of that year, he gloried in the fact that Northern Ireland continued to have a unionist First Minister. Just a few years before that, his predecessor, Ian Paisley, even while enjoying a famously warm public relationship with Martin McGuinness, pointedly and quite patronisingly referred to his joint officeholder, whose agreement he required for even routine matters, as his "deputy". No wonder there emerged a belief, heard regularly in the media, on doorsteps and in conversations around kitchen tables and in pubs, that the DUP would refuse even to tolerate the idea of a nationalist or republican First Minister. Of course, that is why Michelle O'Neill's election as First Minister two years ago carried with it real symbolism that I have always acknowledged, even though she had substantively held the role before. The spell of "residual primacy" should now have been broken. That sacred cow of hard-line unionism should have been slaughtered. It is time to move our political debate away from symbolism and towards accountability. I agree with the former deputy First Minister — the former joint First Minister — the late Martin McGuinness, who was correct when he said that the titles should be equalised to reflect the equality of the roles. As the person to occupy the First Ministers' office for the longest time, which he did for a decade, he knew what he was talking about. It was not just Martin McGuinness, the longest-serving joint First Minister, who held that view but the shortest-serving one. The current Minister of Finance, John O'Dowd, was deputy First Minister for just over a month in 2011. Back in 2009, John O'Dowd said:

"Joint first minister, I think, more truly reflects the position which both men hold. Martin and Peter are equals in this office."

John O'Dowd also said — I think that I am right in quoting him on this — that the differential in titles was a "slip-up" in the negotiations by my party, the SDLP. Whether John is right about that, we are happy to work now to redress the situation, starting with today's motion. I hope that the Finance Minister's party still feels the same way, because it is time to move our political debate away from symbolism and towards substance. In the time that we have often fixated on that title, our health service has stagnated; our crumbling water infrastructure has got worse; and our environmental crisis, including that at Lough Neagh, has become an emergency. All of those things have stagnated and got worse while the focus at election time, often with the willing complicity of the media, has been a single word in a job title. No wonder the public have lost trust in our politics; no wonder we have a crisis in accountability. Part of what we are trying to do as the official Opposition is to create a culture of accountability in our politics and a culture of partnership — something that, as Robbie Butler said, we endeavoured to create in 1998 — not to continue the stand-off politics that we have at the minute.

The North that I want to live in is one based on partnership and respect, not on a race to see who gets to be top dog; not on years of failing public services and trust and then a race for a title at the end; not on Old Firm politics. I want a culture of accountability, and I want politics based on partnership, not primacy. I genuinely do not know how, after all of this time, anybody could disagree with making the title "Joint". Let me be clear: this is just one small part of a programme of reform that needs to be driven through. We want to reverse the St Andrews veto referred to by Mr Butler; we want to make it easier to elect a Speaker when there is none — that is no comment on the current incumbent, Mr Speaker; and we want to look a range of other things. We think that lots of those issues can be dealt with quickly; in fact, some could be dealt with before the election. We will hear the detail of the amendment. The AERC inquiry should not stop us taking a clear view here and now on things that we can improve. I want an end to Old Firm politics, and I want us to be based on partnership, not primacy. I commend the motion to the Assembly.

1,518 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:03 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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