Even when Stormont is ‘functioning’, it continues to be dysfunctional. There is barely a difficult political decision that the Executive has the collective guts to take.
This isn’t (just) about the people who make up the Executive, it is the structure which requires consensus – and that means deferral and avoidance of any decision that the DUP and Sinn Fein can’t agree on. In practice, that covers a vast swathe of policy from health to water, from Casement Park to early school leaving. As one joker phrased it, it is like making Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage joint leaders of a coalition government and expecting it to work.
My experience of working within Stormont for a couple of years is of some Executive ministers treating their departments as communal fiefdoms in which decisions are taken not for the common good, but instead to support ‘their people’. Excellent proposals are on occasion rejected because they would benefit ‘the other side’. This, 27 years after the Good Friday Agreement, is not the way it was supposed to be.
It is clear that Stormont is dysfunctional and, I believe, cannot be rescued in a way that enables difficult decisions to be taken, such as rationalising and modernising the health service. Yet many proponents of Irish unity suggest that Stormont should continue beyond Irish unity within a federal system. Simply absurd.
This woolly thinking is just one example of the lack of detailed consideration around Irish unity. Another is more generally the new constitution of the enlarged yet new Irish state. Opinion polling has found that while support in the South for Irish unity is broad, it may also be shallow if those in the Republic are required to make concessions with regard to such matters of the flag, the anthem and perhaps recognition of the British identity of Northern unionists unwilling to lose their membership of the United Kingdom. There needs to be a committee of constitutional legal experts established to consider how these concerns might be resolved.
There is, though, a pre-eminent dispute over the practicalities of unity, which is the size of the subvention and how this might be reduced through unity. Clearly, we should expect both the cost of public services and the quality of their delivery to improve under a united Ireland. Economies of scale should be achieved, while greater centralisation and specialisation of some services – specifically health – should improve patients’ outcomes.
The size of the subvention is strongly disputed – with Professor John Doyle placing it in the low billions (£2.4bn) and Professor John FitzGerald estimating it at the high billions (circa £17bn). The conflicting calculations are predicated on different assumptions, in particular around which national government post-unity would accept liability for state pensions of those who were part of the UK pensions system and now find themselves within a united Ireland as a result of a positive referendum vote. Similarly, who would be liable for the pensions of those who worked for UK state bodies?
Another core question that needs to be answered is how quickly the North would be integrated into the South. Wages, pensions and benefits rates are all higher in RoI than in NI – would there be a ‘big bang’ convergence of these, or a gradual realignment? For context, the handover of Hong Kong to China took 13 years, while East Germany is not yet fully aligned with the West after 35 years.
It would surely be helpful to seek to resolve these matters, with the UK and Irish governments putting forward their own cases on liabilities and timetables.
And then we have the prospect of integration of the two jurisdictions’ state functions. One failing of the Good Friday Agreement was its limited acceptance of cross-border bodies (as a result of David Trimble’s resistance). We should not wait until unification to strengthen cross-border partnerships, achieving greater co-operation on matters such as environmental management, public transport co-ordination and the delivery of health services in border areas. Progress can be made, even in ways that do not imply any constitutional change, but merely pragmatic approaches to cost savings.
None of this is a blueprint for Irish unity, but rather a framework to consider practical matters that need to be resolved in advance of a referendum. Without doing this, all discussion of a border poll is little more than unhelpful and unproductive hot air.
- Paul Gosling is author of ‘A New Ireland – the Five Year Review’ which will be launched by Professor John Doyle of Dublin City University on Thursday 26th June at 7pm at the Rath Mor Centre in Derry.