“Shouting is Easy, but Governing is Hard”

The saga over Paul Givan’s controversial visit to Israel and the occupied territories reached a crescendo yesterday with a bad-tempered row in the Assembly and it was a sorry sight indeed as the no-confidence vote in the minister failed due to a lack of cross-community consent, even as a majority of MLAs supported the motion.

In today’s Belfast Telegraph Sam McBride writes the following of what went on

“Shouting is easy, but governing is hard… Yesterday, many MLAs were in their happy place. On both sides as they debated Paul Givan’s fitness for office, MLA after MLA gave every impression of righteous anger — and much of that anger was genuine. But in many cases they were far more comfortable in this role than in their main paid job as legislators. They were talking, arguing, insulting each other — and were good at it because they have considerable practice. What they’ve been rather less enthusiastic about is legislating.

Now I am not doing this to minimise what has been happening in the Middle East. Like virtually everyone else I have watched with open-mouthed horror as the region has been consumed by scarcely believable levels of violence since the horrendous atrocity on October 7th. But our local parties and their supporters have, more or less, taken to viewing the entire thing through an orange and green lens and deciding their response based on what side of the conflict they can most identify with. It’s been that way for years. On a personal level, I find the decision of Paul Givan and other Unionists to visit a state accused of genocide (and from my own perspective, clearly guilty of that charge) and to go along with what must have been a carefully curated propaganda exercise as shameful.

However, the fact remains that Paul Givan and those who accompanied him are free to go where they please, accept the hospitality of whom they choose, and say what they like in the aftermath. You can consider it provocative, obnoxious or even morally wrong, but it doesn’t follow that the visit itself was a misuse of office worthy of time in the Assembly.

Givan suffered a no-confidence vote because he visited a school in what is recognised internationally as occupied territory (and East Jerusalem IS occupied territory from the perspective of the UK government) in his official capacity as Minister of Education as he asked the department to highlight his trip (which you can view here), not because he visited in the first place.

That issue seemed lost at times yesterday because what we saw was emblematic of the dysfunction at the heart of our system of government. I am in no way discounting the genuine feelings on display. I feel angry myself at what Givan did as I personally believe he did misuse his office. Furthermore, I believe this fits into a pattern of actions by the minister designed to titillate his base through actions that provoke or irritate other sections of society. And I believe the no-confidence motion was warranted on its own merits as a result of him misusing that office by doing so.

But it would be a lot easier to justify our politicians in a devolved assembly in a region of the island of Ireland on the periphery of the United Kingdom representing a population of around two million people, not even a minnow in global affairs, devoting time to the wider issue if they were willing to devote more attention to actually governing. Sam writes below that

“Of the 10 bills which have become law over almost two years of this Assembly’s life, one was to reverse a mindbogglingly stupid law (making hospital car parking free without building more car parks) they’d passed without proper scrutiny in 2022, one was to create a new MLA pay body expected to give MLAs big salary increases, two were to copy and paste Westminster policies, and three were routine budget bills. Rarely does scrutiny of legislation see the chamber packed.”

And can anyone say Sam is wrong here? Because he raises an extremely valid point. Our MLAs were far more eager to pack the benches at the Assembly to pontificate on the Middle East than they were to deal with the hard graft of governance. Sam highlights later on in his piece that when Naomi Long and then John O’Dowd were taking questions, the chamber was mostly deserted. Holding the Executive to account is one of the tasks we elect our MLAs to fulfil, and Sam is pointing out that many of them just aren’t doing it.

I am not going to deny that I believe our government is innately dysfunctional, nor am I going to deny that I believe the system, and indeed the state, are too flawed to ever work and while the roiling anger over what has happened in the Middle East is more than justified in my opinion, and that the no-confidence motion in Givan HAD to be debated (even if the outcome was pre-determined), I would at least appreciate if our legislators put in as much effort elsewhere to make even modest improvements where they have the power to do so.