O’Conall Street

Northern Ireland has a unique system of government designed to promote compromise and encourage collective government. Does the SDLP’s vote against the Programme for Government strengthen or weaken this goal? The view on O’Conall Street is that the party most associated with the Good Friday Agreement has behaved perfectly within it’s rights by adopting a position of opposition. The SDLP mandate entitles it to a seat at the Executive but does not bind it to the larger parties will. To say that the northern Executive is a regular government and should operate as such is as flawed as suggesting that all our political leaders need to do to tackle sectarian division is work together.

The checks and balances built into the Agreement and its institutions are complex and require a consultative and inclusive approach to policy making. That is one of the reasons why the Civic Forum was established. I am not aware that it has met since the Executive was formed. It may take us a little longer to make policy here but the structures are in place to give wider society much greater ownership of it. A good debate and a considered responce from the civic forum would have further informed tonight’s debate. The business community had much to welcome in the Programme for Government but others in education, the environmental lobby and the community relations sector were not so encouraged. The SDLP clearly saw the opportunity to articulate these interests and the system is such that they can do so and still remain part of the powersharing institutions. It will be up them to convince their supporters this was the right thing to do.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Business, Current Affairs, Politics, Public Affairs, The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.