Bloody Sunday, election, Irish, Ireland, British, Ulster, Unionist, Sinn Féin, SDLP, Ahern, Blair, Irish America
The End of the Peace Dividend
(Editorial, Fortnight Magazine)
The 'emergency' budget by the new Coalition Government in London is evidence of some significant political changes that everyone in Northern Ireland, not least the Assembly parties and our own Coalition Executive, needs to face up to.
One is the obvious impact of the financial cuts imposed by the budget and the promised Comprehensive Spending Review. As outlined elsewhere in this issue, these will inevitably have a more severe impact here than in more prosperous regions of the United Kingdom because of our long-established dependence on the public sector. The Executive needs to prepare itself and the rest of us for the measures which this will necessitate. For too long under Direct Rule and quasi-direct rule under the Labour Government we have become accustomed to being shielded from the full proportional impact of normal financial and fiscal management.
A second is the related shift in political attitudes to Northern Ireland at Westminster. All those who were essential players in the long-drawn-out peace process have now retired or been ousted. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were committed to protecting the deal they had patched together and were ready, even as recently as in the highly attractive financial package to complete the devolution of policing and justice, to make a substantial financial contribution to complete the process. David Cameron and George Osborne, as their sometimes unguarded comments on Northern Ireland have revealed, have no such commitment. They regard Northern Ireland in more or less the same way as the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales and in need of the same traditional Tory measures to deal with an obviously sick economy.
A third is the end of the external peace dividend from the Republic, Europe and America. The Irish Government is no longer is a position to spend any money on 'the North', even if it wanted to. Europeans are now fully engaged in the problems of the Eurozone and the need to shore up the failing economies in Greece and other Club Med countries. They will not be looking favourably on special financial support for a peace process that from their point of view has been successfully completed. Nor is the Obama Administration interested to the same degree as their predecessors in the Clinton and Bush years.
The Executive and all the Assembly Parties need to 'wise up' to these changes and to begin at last to use the admittedly limited freedom of action they have to manage our local economy in a more progressive and less reactive and dependent manner.
August 9, 2010
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This article appeared in the July/August 2010 edition of Fortnight.
