ANALYSIS:Infrastructurally and culturally, Stormont's new programme for government has much ambition and vision, writes GERRY MORIARTY
THERE WAS some scepticism, but not a lot, when Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness on Thursday launched the Northern Executive’s programme for government for the next four years at Stormont – along with economic and investment strategies.
There was a sense of a quietly achieved turning point in Northern Ireland politics, that here was a Northern Executive with an actual plan and even something of a vision about how to run the place over the coming four years and beyond. Whether they get everything done, well that’s another matter.
Earlier in the week, First Minister Peter Robinson appeared to suffer a bout of the political headstaggers with his threat to resign and call Assembly elections if there was any change to the British symbols of the very dysfunctional Northern Ireland Prison Service, which is facing badly needed reform.
His warning that he was out the door of his office at Stormont Castle if Alliance leader and Minister for Justice David Ford tried to pull a fast one and remove the British insignia from the police service caused surprise and bemusement. Where was the problem?
The DUP and Sinn Féin have mutual vetoes at Stormont on the big matters and, as this was a controversial issue, there was no prospect of Ford pushing through such a unilateral symbolic transformation. Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said Robinson should “calm down” while others accused him of engaging in “stunt” politics.
You sometimes wonder when Robinson acts so strangely and precipitately if there’s something else bothering him, some political or private matter of which we are unaware bubbling away under the surface. But there is no evidence of major shifts in the Robinson tectonic plates. After the convulsions of last year over Irisgate et al, everything now appears relatively cool. Ford’s subsequent rowing back and acknowledgment of the importance of symbols would have further placated him. Still, it was curious.
McGuinness, too, endured a bruising presidential election campaign south of the Border over the previous two months. Would he be politically punch drunk, unable to drum up energy for the political challenges ahead this side of the frontier? No, McGuinness was back behind his desk and burning the midnight oil in the past week putting the final touches to the programme for government.
“I feel more of an Irishman,” he told Eamonn Mallie in an interview on the journalist’s website. “I didn’t buckle under any of it.” He did make comparison though to how he was grilled about his past in the South – ahead of this year’s Assembly elections he and the other main leaders, Robinson, the SDLP’s Margaret Ritchie, the Ulster Unionists’ Tom Elliott and Ford – could have a debate with hardly a mention of the IRA.
Some of the Southern public, pundits and commentators, he believed, had shown that “in terms of the whole process of the art of peacemaking, that they are at least between five and 10 years behind the North”. Don’t mention the war.
So, it’s back to business at Stormont. On Thursday, the programme for government and the economic and investment strategies launched by the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were grand-scale politics by Northern Ireland standards.
There are 76 commitments, ranging from overhauling the education and local authority systems, to combating sectarianism and getting communities to live and learn more often together, to the “promotion” of 25,000 jobs. Now cynics noted a difference between “creating” and “promoting” 25,000 jobs but McGuinness countered that he and Robinson have had past success in attracting investment and that investment should continue.
There were scores more commitments. For instance, Northern Ireland is to become a paradise for specialist glaziers with 50,000 Housing Executive homes to be double- glazed. Both Robinson and McGuinness see the harmonisation or near-harmonisation of corporation tax with the Republic as key to greater investment, so no let-up on that long-running issue.
Tourism will be boosted; there will be support for the Irish language and Ulster Scots; there will be no water charges for at least four years; GAA, soccer and rugby stadiums will be improved; 8,000 social and affordable homes will be built; the old Maze prison site will be developed; brucellosis in cattle will be eradicated by 2014 (hmmm!) – and on the list goes.
Will they achieve all their targets? No. Most of them? That would be a surprise – but at least there is ambition and vision. There is a plan, there are targets, Ministers have work to do, there is money in the kitty and if the global or European economy doesn’t go belly up – and if the dissidents can be prevented from creating too much trouble – Northern Ireland, safely outside the precarious euro, will become socially and economically better.
Northern Ireland also has a gently propelling southerly breeze at its back. It may not have a soccer team in the European Championship finals but there’s a lot happening. And we’ve just had the MTV European Music Awards in Belfast.
We’re coming into the centenary of the Titanic with big events to commemorate the sinking of the unsinkable. There are all those tricky politically and emotionally charged centenaries as well, such as the Ulster Covenant and 1916, which if carefully handled could yield benefit for both North and South.
Let the catch cry be this: Let’s Milk History. It seems only fair after all the damage history did to this place. A new visitor centre at the Giant’s Causeway is to be opened as well as the six-storey Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast’s cathedral quarter. There are some wonderful and occasionally bizarre events planned for Northern Ireland for next summer to coincide with the London Olympics and Paralympics. There will be operas written, rock concerts staged and a Samuel Beckett Happy Days festival in Enniskillen, home of his old school Portora.
A German installation artist will put 200 large flags at the Giant’s Causeway. The Land of the Giants featuring Gulliver and Fionn Mac Cumhaill will be staged under the giant Samson and Goliath cranes in east Belfast. There’s an astrophysicist at Queen’s who says we could be in for better weather. Happy days indeed. Nothing to do with politics per se but these things cheer people up. That matters.
The usual caveats apply and the cynics may yet be proved right, but there are reasons to be hopeful: in Northern Ireland it’s going well, a busy powersharing administration is settling in for the long haul. As Robinson said on Thursday, the first four years of the fully powersharing Executive from 2007 to 2011 was about achieving political stability. That done, the next four years are about delivery. Or, perhaps, as much delivery as possible.
Gerry Moriarty is Northern Editor