Northern Ireland power sharing in crisis as welfare bill fails
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Version 0 of 1. Power sharing in Northern Ireland entered a new crisis on Tuesday when a bill to reform the region’s welfare system was shot down by nationalist parties. The failure to push legislation through the Stormont assembly leaves the Northern Ireland executive with a £600m black hole in its budget. Unless political leaders can agree a lasting deal on welfare in the coming weeks, there is the very real prospect of a senior civil servant stepping in to take over departmental spends later in the summer, under tight financial constraints. Such a scenario, where the parties are effectively relieved of spending responsibility, would undoubtedly increase the chances of one of the main partners in the executive – the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and Sinn Féin – walking away and collapsing the institutions. With the first minister Peter Robinson in hospital recovering from a heart attack and unable to take part in the debate, his DUP attempted to introduce a bill that would have led to reforms of the benefits system locally and manage redundancies in the civil service. But Sinn Féin and the SDLP exercised a veto known as the “petition of concern” where bills can be defeated if one side of the sectarian/political divide claims there is insufficient cross-community support for the law. The bill was drawn up at the Treasury’s insistence to implement the welfare reforms of the last Conservative/Liberal Democrat government. If passed, London would have allowed in return the regional government in Belfast to set its own low corporation to attract foreign direct investment. The DUP minister Mervyn Storey accused Sinn Féin and the SDLP of reneging on the cross-party Stormont house agreement made in December when it appeared there was a consensus on tackling welfare. Storey said: “They want, like Pontius Pilate, to wring their hands, to almost cleanse their consciences that somehow they had not signed the dotted line. “It was a five-party agreement. I believe that we have now obtained the balance between what in an ideal world we would like to do and what we can afford to do.” But the Sinn Féin deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, blamed “Tory cuts” for the problem. He said: “The current crisis has come about solely through the actions of the British government; it could only be resolved by the actions of the British government. “They have attacked the most vulnerable in society, slashed the budget for public services and undermined the credibility of these institutions. There is still time for the parties and the British government to deliver a new budget that delivers.” Unionists have predicted that the £600m hole in the finances would cause the local administration to run out of money within the next few months. Before the vote, the Irish Republic’s foreign minister, Charlie Flanagan, appealed for the parties to reach an agreement on welfare changes. Flanagan said failure would have serious implications for political stability. “The government agreed that every possible effort must be made to encourage and support the Northern Ireland executive parties to reach an agreement on welfare reform that is both politically acceptable and financially viable,” Flanagan said. “As well as providing a template for financial stability in Northern Ireland, the Stormont house agreement represents an agreed way forward for addressing the contentious legacy of the past.” |